Recent reports of the demise of
Social Networking Applications (SNAs), voted "technology of the year"
by Business 2.0 just two years ago, are increasing. Most recently
C|Net's Molly Wood reported on Five Reasons Social Networking Doesn't Work. While LinkedIn and eCademy are hanging in there, many of the other entrants into the SNA space are really struggling. I reported
last year on what I thought was wrong with the first generation of
social networking applications, and I haven't seen any significant
improvements become mainstream since then.
Wood complains that existing SNAs offer the user little to do, take too
much time, don't provide a customized audience, are socially awkward,
and don't provide much that other features of the Internet don't do as
well or better. It's not clear what problem they're trying to solve,
other than to provide a list of not-very-well qualified contacts for
people online who are looking (mostly for customers, employers or
dates). They remind me a lot of Chamber of Commerce meetings, with
consultants and agents outnumbering 'real' businesspeople, five sellers
for every buyer. I belong to several SNAs but use them rarely, since my
blog provides me with a more robust network than any SNA could ever
hope to do.
The challenge, as with most business and social problems, is getting
attention. Because good stories, useful, researched advice and helpful,
informative conversations command attention, these are the tools of the
trade in face-to-face networking events. Face to face meetings also
provide a huge amount of non-verbal information that allows people to
make considered judgements and to establish trust, which virtual forums
can only accomplish awkwardly, and over time.
The lowly telephone, and Skype, are an improvement. Most of us can
converse iteratively faster and more competently in a voice
conversation than in a message thread, and get past the awkwardness and
misunderstandings faster as a result. I've had some excellent Skype
conversations with people I have never met in person, and some ghastly
ones. I have proposed
a more robust, multimedia, multi-view Simple Virtual Presence (SVP)
tool such as what is illustrated above. There are people more
technologically competent and agile than I am who are achieving such
presence using a combination of tools now, but for most of us this is
still just a dream.
SNAs are therefore inherently not very good for building relationships
or for collaborative work. How are they at finding people for valuable
personal or business relationships? Once again we're back to the too
many sellers, too few buyers problem (it's the same with dating
services, I'm told). Useful SNAs need to be under the control of the
customer, not the vendor. They would be better advised to reinvent
themselves as a kind of very detailed person-to-person 'yellow pages',
to separate users' 'what I have' and 'what I need' personas, and to
focus specifically on the former, in a lot more detail, with
credentials and samples of offerings. In a way, that's what blogs do,
providing a space for one individual to exhibit as much of himself as
possible in as much detail as possible, which is why many recruiters
are now starting to peruse blogs in the search for extraordinary people
or matches for very difficult fits. So a good SNA could offer a
condensed version of this: Who I am, What I offer, Who recommends me,
and Samples of what I do. Then the buyer can browse this 'catalogue'
and, if he thinks I might have what he's looking for (personally or
professionally) he is given contact information (ideally with the
richness of Simple Virtual Presence) to confirm through conversation
that my offer meets his requirements. Simple as that. Forget about the
discussion forums and the form-filling and all the other bells and
whistles that just complicate use and chew up time. Just give me a
yellow pages on steroids.
Once some standards emerge on formats for this information, it could
then be possible for people to post this information anywhere, in the
agreed-upon 'SNA2' format, so that we would no longer have to post my
information to each SNA 'yellow page' directory -- the SNA tools could
go out and harvest it automatically wherever we posted it, so we would
only have to maintain it once (perhaps on our blog-jacket, personal website, or other online space).
So then we would have three easy-to-use SNA tools, working in tandem, all built around the 'customer', the guy looking for something:
- The standard-format 'yellow pages' displaying our personal 'offerings',
- A Simple Virtual Presence tool to qualify those offerings and to enable powerful conversations, and
- Blogs as 'personal filing cabinets' that people could browse if
we were away from our phone/SVP tool, or if they wanted to see some
more of our stuff before attempting to call us and offer us a job, a
contract or a date.
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What would really make SVP cool would be if we could meter
it, so that
the tool could track time we spent on each call and, with the agreement
of the
other party, automatically bill them and pay us for our time at an
agreed-upon rate. Because it's the value you add person-to-person,
helping them in their personal context, once the introductions are over
and they know they've found the person they want to 'hire', that could
finally realize the promise of online commerce.
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