3 Problems with Social Networks

Here at WWD, we’re bullish on social networks. It would be hard to be otherwise; we use everything from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn on a daily basis. And it’s clear that the current web boom will continue to be fueled by social networks for some time to come; the Google-backed OpenSocial is just the latest evidence of continued interest.

But all is not strawberries and cream on the social network front. Spend enough time in this arena and you’ll inevitably find a few unscratched itches and intractable problems. Here are three areas that we think are showing the limits of social networks as we know them today.

Identity Management –  There are a couple of issues here. It’s growing increasingly tiresome to set up new accounts for every new social network that comes along. And now that OpenSocial promises to link together the various social networks through common widgets, reconciling identities (is Paul Q. Spooner the same person as Paul Quincy Spooner?) is going to become a thorny problem as well. In theory OpenID was going to solve these issues for us, but in practice, it doesn’t seem to be getting used very much.

Diminishing Returns –  The more services there are, the harder it is to get value out of each one. Some of this is because communities get fragmented among multiple social networks (do you need to maintain ten accounts on ten different services to find all your friends?), some of this is because we have limited time and screen real estate and attention. Most people seem to pick just one or a few social networks to call home, which limits their number of available contacts. Solutions? Watch for some sort of OpenSocial-based federation, combined with a market shakeout that eliminates some less-popular services entirely.

Too Many “Friends” – If ten friends are good, are a hundred better? A thousand? Five thousand? A very few people who blog for a living may be able to interact with huge networks, but most of us quickly discover that our ability to find interesting people exceeds our ability to relate to them in any meaningful way. Increasingly, people are being forced to maintain separate private identities for their real friends, declare social network bankruptcy, or otherwise pull back from contact lists that threaten to overwhelm them.

Have you found your own dark side of social networks? What issues are causing you pain in this new web 2.0 world? 

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