I'm afraid that most of the enthusiasts for social networking services are beginning to get fed up. These services, now abbreviated YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service) are proliferating like rabbits and its getting frustrating. First the programmers and entrepreneurs, then the bloggers, then the press and more recently Venture Capitalists have gotten hot and bothered about the potential of all these services.
On the one hand, I'm glad we get to play and experiment with these little social networking environments, but people skip around and spread their energy and attention so widely with no cross-talk between the services. Especially for people like me who want to try lots of these services. I get stretched too thin and my online *friends* seem equally stretched and enthusiasm is dropping like a rock.
My real world friends have given these services little attention. Maybe I'm not in the right age group, but I couldn't recruit more than a couple friends onto Ryze and haven't hardly tried with the others. It's not like the others (LinkedIn, Friendster, Tribe et al.) had so much more to recommend them that I could say, nevermind about Ryze, this new one is IT.
I've given most attention to Ryze (of which I've been a gold member since Mar-03, but have to admit that when I started blogging around the beginning of May, most of my free *online networking* energy has been spent either blogging, perusing other blogs or commenting on other blogs. Once you have a blog, you're committed in a way that being a member of these communities doesn't come close to unless perhaps you are the moderator of a network that is active. [See my Blogging as Social Networking post.]
These YASNS just aren't very good yet. Maybe they never will be. But they seem to need more than profiles, testimonials, photos, explicit friend networks and bulletin boards to go very far. There needs to be more to do on these things. More ways to get to know people and interact with them. To build trust. To provide support.
Most importantly, these communities need to be linked. These gated networks aren't working. It's frustrating to fill in profiles over and over again. It's impossible to get your real friends to monkey around with all these different communities and spend time filling in profiles and inviting friends.
We either need a much better YASNS that kicks butt and stands out as the one worth joining so people aren't fragmented so much in relatively equal and limited islands. Or, we need some decent standards and EASY ways to join multiple YASNS. And forget it if you want me to pay for all these different ones. That's not happening. I'm about ready to drop my gold membership on Ryze because I'm really not getting much use out of it.
What if my friends join different individual YASNS and invest their time in the particular one or ones they join. They want me to get on their YASNS and I want them to get on mine. We either stubbornly stick with our own first choice or switch or join both.
What I'm trying for is to get my actual friends networked together online so I can see and benefit from explicitly identifying and knowing who the friends of my friends are and so on (4 deep is the absolute maximum of interest and 3 deep (which is just the friends of my friends) is a great starting point.
The latest YASNS, Google affiliated no less, is Orkut. Some are praising it. I still think there's social gold in these hills but am not sure were going to find much of it with the current explosion of new services. Too much already.