Social networks may be imaginary

No argument from me

I bought into Plaxo and haven't seen anything from it by way of leads, productivity increases or in general, anything of benefit! I once passed a referral question through my network for someone else benefit, but nada for me!

Having seen that I resisted Facepluke and Tweeter!

Paris: Cause she knows the real meaning of "social networking", even if it is viral.

@ Frank Thomas

Before you start business-bashing, who do you think paid for (and built) all the servers, routers and fibre the social networks (and the wider internet) depend on?

Social networks *ARE* supposed to make money, thats what they were built for. They were certainly NOT built as a public good for you or anyone else to simply enjoy, whatever fuzzy feeling this delusion may give you.

I only subscribe to...

...the MonkeySphere theory of social networking.

I mean, I know, oh, 20 monkeys--most of the time they're in pirate outfits and named Bob, that's part of the theory explaination don't ask--and if I see any more monkeys, they're pretty much strangers. Yet one of my monkeys may know THAT monkey as one of his 20 monkeys, and so on... You get the idea?

But hey, we're all monkeys in pirate suits and named Bob--it's a matter of which boat we're sailing on, anyways.

@Frank Thomas

I think we have a definition "impedence mismatch".

You're right, social networks aren't supposed to make money, they are merely a representation of connections between people.

Myface and spacebook are not social networks, they're computer applications which seek to make money by injecting adverts into one of the communication paths used by social networks - IT. To that end they, oversell weak social connections (by trying to upgrade aquaintances to "friends") and devalue strong connections by replacing face-to-face communication with a quick dashed-off text chat. They do this because business in general and computers in particular are good at homogenous, repetitive things and rubbish at social nuance.

The communication is further obfuscated with adverts and trivial quizes/passtimes in the hope that frantic activity will divert users from the sheer pointlessness of what they are doing and the large number of advert impressions.

The question is less, "Are social networks making money?" and more, "Is trying to make money out of social networks acceptable to those involved and is it a viable business model?"

I suspect the answer is that people dislike having their social network being used as a money-making opportunity. Therefore, any business model based on doing this is likely to run into problems.

Paris, cos she's one of the few who has successfully turned her "social network" into a money-maker - without the benefit of a "likeness quiz".

Social Networks don't doo anything

Social networks are just a framework for building applications on

Social Networks don't really do anything, but they "could" be used as a platform for some really interesting and useful applications. Just no-one has really invented any yet.

My employer has it's own internal social networking site which I have signed up to, but without any applications, and on it's own it's pretty much worthless. However I can see the potential to create some pretty powerful colaboration tools to sit on top of such a framework.

Zurick Gnomes and Leprechaun Shenanigans

"The alien, because if the Martians did land they'd think we're pretty stupid for spending hours in front of our PCs answering stupid questionnaires on films." ... By pctechxp Posted Tuesday 17th June 2008 19:58 GMT

They'd also Realise the Opportunity for ITs SMART Control.... which would be Uniquely Human.

What do you know of Aliens, pctechxp?

You have an interesting tantalising moniker, pctechxp. Phresh Mountain AIR&dD Territory?

Academic point

It seems like Mr Bonabeau is making a bit of an academic point about what's interesting about social networks. He thinks structure is meaningless but that's not really the case. If you look into the work on network theory and in particular, scale-free networks, you see that network topology is extremely important to the function of a network.

Scale-free networks are those where the frequency distribution of nodes with x arcs is logarithmic. Almost all nodes have very few arcs but a tiny few have huge numbers and those tiny few are extremely important. It turns out that lots of naturally occurring networks self-organise this way - social networks are one, the nervous system of the c.elegans worm is another. The 'hubs' provide shortcuts between otherwise disparate nodes so that you can traverse the network very quickly. The famous Kevin Bacon game relies on a few extremely prolific actors to act as hubs so you can traverse the co-acting network quickly through the hubs. In the social graph, research was done on the spread of HIV in the early 80s - looks like a very few extremely promiscuous individuals allowed the HIV virus to traverse the social graph. Extrapolating this to the field online social networking websites, it would probably be valuable to expend most effort targeting the hub members to spread messages/advertising virally. Sounds obvious but it only works when a network has a scale free topology.

Bonobo (@Pyros)

And as we all know, Bonabeau are the most social of monkeys!

I want a spherical cow.

I had a dodecahedron chicken once.

You should've seen the eggs.

Ta daa!

Nope that's it.

I'll get my hemi-spherical butt out of here.

The Value of Social Networks

Scrabble, or more specifically Scrabulous!

Ummmm Spherical Cows?

Maybe I don't know very many mathematicians, but if I asked any of them I know how much milk a cow will produce, they would be more concerned with current daily yield, or age of the cow. As for social networking, I would ask how many teenagers have committed suicide on a given site :) much more appropriate for determining how effective they are.

Paris because she milked cows once, and everyone has pulled on her udders.