There are a lot of social networking sites these days to take care of a huge range of networking needs. LinkedIn for professionals, Pownce for groups with material to share, and Last.fm for music or statistics fans. But, all of these web services suffer a bit of an identity crisis. Who do you connect to? In Last.fm you could choose to connect to your friends or to random people who seem to have the same musical taste as you (or both, of course). When approaching Twitter you have to think about whom you want to receive updates from. Is Twitter going to be for your group of friends? Or is it just anybody you’re interested in? The great thing is that it’s flexible enough to support all these needs. The bad thing is you’re constrained by your contacts — nobody I know in real life uses Twitter and despite my efforts I can’t get anyone to register.
So I’ll focus on the two big ones that I actually know people on. Facebook and MySpace. I’ve had Facebook for a long time since — my second year of college. As best my memory serves me, my school, the University of Virginia, was included in the third wave of schools that could register in April of 2004. First it was just Harvard, then Boston area schools, then Ivy League plus UVA and Berkley. I don’t know about non-University students, but people who signed up while in college can get a relative idea as to when they registered by looking at their profile URL. “profile.php?id=1501220″ means that UVA was the 15th school in the database and I was the 1220th person to register. This is all just to say that I’ve been using a long time and am somewhat of a Facebook (or The Facebook) traditionalist.
When Facebook started it was a way for college students to link to each other, create a profile with contact information, list (and connect through) their interests, connect through classes, leave messages on a virtual wall, and “poke” each other. Some Facebook friends were people you hung out with every day, some were classmates or people you met at an event. I remember that May when I’d walk into a computer lab to do some work and at least 10 of the screens were people checking their Facebook profiles. This was before that was even that much to do on Facebook! Before Facebook, not even MySpace was that popular on my campus. In fact, for most people I went to school with, Facebook was the first social network because it was the first that addressed their immediate circumstance of my peers — connecting with all the new people you’ve met.
Despite all the features that have been added and all the people that have been added to Facebook, I still use it for the same thing I used it for back the: staying connected and sharing information with my friends. This is something that a lot of people do not understand. Take a look at the right-hand column on the front page of Virtual Fools. You’ll never see the Facebook icon there with my other social networking sites. If you’re somebody I want to connect with I will know how to get to your Facebook profile other ways. Likewise, I will offer my connection to you if I’ve met you and spent time with you. Don’t take this as an insult, it’s just a division I’ve made to keep my life organized.
I’ve even “defriended” people who I just don’t need to keep in contact with any more. Robert Scoble, the ever-present blogger, has hit the 5,000 friend wall in Facebook. On a recent This Week in Tech, Scoble claimed that his massive amount of friends on Facebook and Twitter are all a part of the reciprocal nature of social networking. Alex Albrecht of Diggnation and the Totally Rad Show complained about the difficulty to navigate friend requests on Facebook because there’s no way to mass confirm or deny groups — a problem for Internet celebrities, not so much the average Joe. In the same episode, Kevin Rose says he switched backed to MySpace for his extrapersonal contacts. I agree with this division.
“Facebook for friends, MySpace for fans,” I say. This makes a lot of sense because MySpace has traditionally had more than just personal contacts. Until recently, MySpace was the one place where you could befriend a band or an organization or product. In doing so, you’re not really declaring that you’re friends with Hawthorne Heights, but rather that you’re a fan of theirs. The same can be true for actual people you’ve befriended on MySpace. It’s not to say that you’re not actually friends with these people, but a way to associate yourself with them that doesn’t involve needing to stay in close contact or exchanging personal information. It’s just to say, “I want to be associated with you because I think you’re worth connecting with.” “I’m a fan of you.” (Or “I will allow you to be a fan of me.”) And there’s nothing wrong with being a fan of your friends either!
Obviously this scheme doesn’t work for everybody. A lot of people have been using MySpace as their primary social network and can’t make the switch. Same goes for Facebook. But I would just like to recommend this division to simplify your life. And if we can all agree on it, nobody’s feelings get hurt. Now this whole “fan” thing has been complicated by the recent Facebook announcement of its new “fans” feature, but really it just highlights the thing that MySpace was doing that Facebook wasn’t.
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