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open networks / social networking and its discontents VII
David Weinberger on why he hates Friendster. The most interesting bit, for me, is this one:
"Look, I want to say to the Friendsters of the world, we already invented a social network for friends and strangers. It's called the Internet. Why are you privatizing it? Why do we need a proprietary sub-network to do what the Internet has already done in an open way?"
Excellent questions, although one answer might be that the proprietary sub-networks have a gentler learning curve—these proprietary networks are appealing (I think) to people who aren't particularly web-savvy. Just follow the link in your invitation and fill in the blanks and within three minutes you can be enjoying some of the pleasures of connectivity. It's a closed, limited network, yeah, one that walls out most of the bewildering wilds of the Web, but if the success of AOL has taught us anything, it's that what some people want out of the Web is a managed (or manageable) experience.
This does beg the question of whether the more-managed (closed) parts of the Web might be hurting the less-managed (open) parts. The Web is not a finite resource like geography: each managed "area" does not take the "place" of an unmanaged "area." But attention is a finite resource, maybe the key one in talking about the Web, and when a service like AOL steers its users around and around in its own little content ghetto it siphons that resource away from the rest of the Web. Some of the better social networking websites (Flickr, Orkut, Tribe) are less guilty of this, since they allow you to include a link to your webpage in your profile, appends a little arrow that points "out"...
Related: Caterina's continued enthusiasm for social networks. Labels: internet, networks, rants |
Sunday, April 04, 2004
9:36 AM
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