Social Websites Archives

I gotta think the Cringely is a bit off in his article about the death of social networking. I think what he means to say, is the death of 95% of social websites as natural selection weeds out sites that don’t drive traffic. The big ones will turn a profit as the advertising model takes hold and revenue is generated.

I can’t tell you how many times a friend as come up to me and said, “I finally got a Facebook [MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn] accout. The whole thing is pretty dumb. What’s all the hype about?”

Next think I know, they’re throwing sheep at me every day, sending me super hero challenges every 10 minutes, and tweeting about their lunch break soup. I hope they realized they just answered their own question.

In Bob Cringely’s recent blog posting, “Social Networking is Just Another CB Radio,” he describes why he believes social websites are destined to crash and burn. His basic argument: there’s no business model, or at least not a very good one. If you have loads of traffic, you have a business model - advertising or acquisition. If you don’t have loads of traffic, your site will fail. Most social sites don’t have loads of traffic, because all the surf time is sucked up by the giants such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, so they fail.

Thought it was interesting to see the number of followers and followings the presidential candidates had. I’m loosely following the candidates’ use of the internet in their campaigns. In general, Obama does seem to have a much stronger online presence than any other candidate, twitter stats aside.

I couldn’t find what appeared to be the official twitter sites of McCain or Huckabee. If you find them, please let me know!

Twitter Profile	Candidate	Followers	Following	Updates
	Obama	13,467	12,796	74
	Clinton	1,565	0	56
	Ron Paul	1016	0	85
	John McCain	N/A	N/A	N/A
	Mike Huckabee	N/A	N/A	N/A

(All data current as of March 3, 2008)

Interesting article in the Guardian. Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site.

Via Josh Lee’s twitter feed I was introduced to dopplr.com, a social networking site that allows to track your friends as the hop around the country. I travel quite often for work (and pleasure, when I can) so this seemed very appropriate for me. I entered my current travel schedule into my new account, and out popped this map.

Senior Analyst at Forrester Research Jeremiah Owyang created a flurry of activity in the Twittersphere with this blog posting. Twitter is fast becoming a important method for communicating, connecting, and finding people, news, and information. Call it social networking with an attention deficit disorder. And if you want to follow me, you can do so at http://twitter.com/jefflin. Happy tweeting!

With all the social networking sites out there it’s nice to see some sort of effort to move towards standardization. Google’s OpenSocial is a set of standard APIs for social websites. The list of sites implementing it is impressive, including Orkut, LinkedIn, and MySpace.