Social Networking: Why?
October 26, 2007 | By Raymond T. Hightower
Yesterday Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million. Facebook started four years ago in a Harvard dorm room, and now Microsoft values the company at $15 billion. Why all the buzz around social networking?
Common Craft has released a 2-minute video that explains Web-based social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.
Excitement vs. Utility
It’s a cool idea, but it seems to me that the excitement exceeds the utility of the service. One 20-something web designer tells me that I’m too old to “get it”. Maybe so. For communicating, I prefer email and telephones.
Full Disclosure
My formative years in the computer industry were in the days of the command line. The idea of a mouse seemed silly to me. Then in 1984 I spent ten minutes in front of an Apple Macintosh and I was hooked. I can tell you a similar story about my experience with text messaging. I thought text messaging was silly, but now I use it all the time.
Gathering Facts
So I’m gathering my facts. I joined Facebook and LinkedIn. Maybe I’ll “get it” one day.
What do you think about social networking?
I think it’s possible that the reverse it true: that we do not yet fully grasp the potentials of social networking as a platform for reaching all sorts of human aspirations… in other words, that our current level of excitement about social networking is but an infinitesimal fraction of the utility we could potentially derive from it…