Throughout my life, I’ve been a part of many different social networks. My first social network was my family, including cousins, aunts and uncles. My next social networks were church and school. I’ve attended eight schools in my life and was a member of roughly ten churches. I’ve been a fan of bands, movies, hobbies, and special interests. I became a regular poster on several Internet message boards and newsgroups. I met bands and friends of bands. I joined organizations in college. I dated several girls and met their friends. I played recreational sports. I’ve had eight jobs. I’ve attended professional conferences.
With each new school, new church, new job, and new girlfriend, I’ve added another social network to my life. As I move on from each group, I could choose to forget them. But instead, I choose to keep them and incorporate them into my total network. The only problem is keeping track of everyone. I used to use my Outlook contact database to hold my total network, but it wasn’t a useful system. All of my contacts were thrown into one giant bucket and were indistinguishable from one another. A new tool was needed.
In the past year, Internet tools have closely become the ideal social network manager. I gave MySpace a long audition, but determined it was more of a personal publishing platform, rather than a networking tool. I was skeptical of Facebook, due to it’s walled scholastic and corporate gardens. It didn’t reflect a person’s true network, because it didn’t allow for different networks to merge, as they do in real life. But a year ago, that changed. Facebook became open to everyone, and that’s when it really started to become the ideal social network manager.
Of all the tools I’ve used, Facebook is the most useful. Because of its perfect balance between openness and privacy, it closely simulates reality. Those you aren’t close to will appear distant (via limited profiles), but will not be totally absent. If you don’t know someone at all, it’s difficult to even find them. And, of course, when you really do know someone well, you have clear, unfiltered access to them.
But Facebook is not perfect. Many of my friends and acquaintances are not on Facebook, because they aren’t technically savvy or are just too old to be socializing on the Internet. As long as Facebook is unaccessible to some of my social network, it will never be the ideal solution to network management.
So, what would be the ideal social network management tool?
That, my friends, is a fifteen billion dollar question.
