I came across this article by Jeff Atwood today that really eloquently captured / mirrored my current feelings about the social networking craze that’s sweeping the tubes these days.
I occasionally get requests to join private social networking sites, like LinkedIn or Facebook. I always politely decline. I understand the appeal of private social networking, and I mean no disrespect to the people who send invites. But it’s just not for me.
I feel very strongly that we already have the world’s best public social networking tool right in front of us: it’s called the internet. Public services on the web, such as blogs, twitter, flickr, and so forth, are what we should invest our time in. And because it’s public, we can leverage the immense power of internet search to tie it all– and each other– together.
In comparison, adding content to a private, walled garden on the internet smacks of the old-world America Online ideology:
While at Sony in 1994, I was sent to Virginia to learn how to build a Sony “app” on AOL (the #3 online service, behind Compuserve & Prodigy at the time) using AOL’s proprietary “rainman” platform. Fast forward to Facebook 2007 and see similarities: If you want access to their big base of users, develop something in their proprietary language for their people who live in their walled garden.
Read more at the link provided above. I did reluctantly dip my feet into Facebook recently, but there is a certain thing that’s always been bugging me about it. I used to think that it was the feeling that it was nothing more than a slightly more respectable clone of MySpace, but now I realize (although that is still part of it) that I think it has more to do with the closed in nature of the system.