social networking | The NeoSmart Files

Just yesterday, Michelle Slatalla of The New York Times posted an article about her joining Facebook – where her daughter & friends have had accounts for quite a while. Her reason? Probably best put in her own words:

So last week I joined Facebook, the social network for students that opened its doors last fall to anyone with an e-mail address. The decision not only doubled its active membership to 24 million (more than 50 percent of whom are not students), but it also made it possible for parents like me to peek at our children in their online lair.¹

But adults – and more specifically, parents – don’t belong on Facebook. Not because the system isn’t built for people over 30 nor because adults aren’t interested in moving existing relationships online, but only because Facebook and other Web 2.0 social network sites for students (and teens, too) are now what the mall was five years ago.

While Ms Slatalla goes off on a tangent, choosing to discuss the existence of mother-daughter ties online and her own troubled past (or something), there is a bigger picture there: why Facebook is so popular. Web 2.0 is all about taking things for real-life and putting them online.

Photo albums? Flickr. Diaries? Blogs. Home videos? YouTube. Book store? Amazon. Auction? eBay. And so on and so forth. So what does that make Facebook? Why Mall 2.0 of course!

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Emphasis added. ↩

Twitter is all the hype right now, you don’t need us to tell you that. For some odd reason, something as simple and basic as a one-liner blog site has captured the minds of the online world. For two minutes, put aside whatever feelings you may have on the matter. Good or bad, just set them aside for a couple of minutes and look at it from a different point of view.

Let’s take the best-case scenario here. Twitter continues to increase in popularity, and can handle any and all problems that come up with their system. Let’s assume Twitter keeps on booming. What happens next?

As with all other social networks, the goal of Twitter is connections. NeoSmart Technologies connects ideas, Twitter connects people. Now there are a billion people on Twitter: they check out each other’s profiles, and get to one-another. What then? They head off to each person’s blog, Facebook, or even MySpace to get in touch: leave one another messages, check out their friends, share ideas, photos, and videos.

At the end of the day, people are going to be leaving Twitter to go to their friends’ blogs and sites, and hooking up with them there. The point is, Twitter isn’t filling the void. It fills up a small portion of it, but not enough to satisfy. If at the end of the day, people are going to leave it for other sites, they’ll stop going back.

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