Russell Shaw has an interesting post online today that dovetails with something I've been thinking about a bit recently.

Would VoIP have saved Friendster? Hell, no
Posted by Russell Shaw

Some of us were consuming the ol' liquid barley the other night, talking about everything from Podcasting to politics.

I then raised the subject of Friendster. They were the social Web before MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, you name it.

But that was three years ago. And as the New York Times' Gary Rivlin brilliant piece emphasizes, Friendster is little more than a minor player as bolder thinkers overtook them. Now, according to ComScore MediaMetrix, their visitor accounts are at or near the bottom of pretty much every other social site with a pulse.

In the end, I agree right down the line with all Russell and the others have to say on this. The problem with social networks has been they have no sustainable vision. A vision that says "You have friends. You need more." has very little value really.

Social networks in the real workd are about common interests. The directory in my cell phone is people I call an interact with about a specific shared interest, whether business or personal. The YASNs (Yet Another Social Network) have typically been about commoditizing friendships, linkages and connections to game the system and gain as many contacts as possible. The result, in many cases, has been elimination of value.

I recently wrote about this in the context of LinkedIn here. LinkedIn represents a variation to the trend because it is focused on business connections. As such, I do find value in it, and I've used it for a number of years. Others, like Robert Scoble, don't find it useful, but for two good reasons. Many people already have an established network for friends and colleagues whom they trust and protect. And a social network has to be "worked" to derive any value. The return on effort (RoE) for any social network will vary from person to person.

I have long felt that the issue isn't really the social networks, but rather how we foster a community of interest. That's what we're trying to do here in the Realtime Unified Communications Commnunity. That's why we augment the blog with a Digital Library, Podcasts and Discussion Forums. A community extends to a network of people who have different and varying degrees of interest in any subject. And in the online world, a broad topic, like unified communications, will have several subtopic areas, like VoIP, security, video, mobility and so on. That's why our forums are structured to support the more granular interest areas.

Social networking is, to me, less about the raw numbers of links I have, and more about the people interested in talking about the different areas. My real social network isn't LinkedIn, or Friendster or Orkut and the like. It's my Outlook contacts, by cell phone directory, and my various contacts listed in Skpe, AIM, MSN, SightSpeed, etc. It's the people I interact with.

VoIP wouldn't have saved Friendster. It's a technology, and as such is neutral. It won't "save" any failing technology. What's important is to identify the community and then embrace the tools that foster that group's sharing of information

I believe what we will see is an integration of unified communications tools in different degrees with the communities we see forming online. And yes, MySpace represents a community, but in a very different way. MySpace is a huge metropolis. Nested inside are hundreds of communities. Hundreds. The communications tools add value only when we effective integrate them into the whole.

Here are some examples from the sidebar of my personal blog:

Call them widgets. Call them click-to-call. Call them whatever you like. What they are is social networking elements that allow readers, friends, family, colleagues, and yes total strangers, to follow, call, or interact with me in ways I've chosedn to make available. They're tools I use in my social network.

I made an quiet observation on my personal blog several weeks ago that the problem with social networks is that my space is much larger than MySpace. It can't be contained within any single framework. That's the danger social networks encounter. The social network is the means, not the end. The community and supporting the community is the end game because the Internet is about connecting people.

Just some rambling thougts as I try to figure out where I think unified communications technologies will succeed. I don't have answers, but success will come from empowering people and communties of interest, not it commoditizing and devaluing personal connections.


Technorati Tags: social networks, YASN, unified communications