Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I was reading Deborah Finn’s curmugeonly post about Facebook. I have been having curmudgeonly thoughts about social networks in general. My curmugeonly thoughts fall into three basic categories of sucks: time suck, content suck, privacy suck.

Time suck: Social networks are a time suck. Signing up for new ones, making profiles, adding friends, adding applications, etc. etc. And, yet another login and password. At least the content-focused social networks, like del.icio.us, or flickr, or my personal favorite, our own Social Source Commons, there is some there there. I have reached social network burn-out, and I refuse to join another one, unless there is something truly compelling, and something I could not accomplish in any other way.

Content suck: And why do the for-profit social networks exist, when you really get down to it? Nick Carr, one of my favorite smart dudes, calls it digital sharecropping:

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

It’s a big chunk to digest, but it makes perfect sense. As I said in a post a while back, I know that Facebook is getting far more from my time spent on Facebook than I do. They own my profile, and whatever time I spend adding content. It’s not really mine, and I don’t like that.

Privacy Suck: Not so long ago, there was a little hiccup in Web 2.0 goodiness. A new social networking site, called “Quetchup” spammed (without permission) the contacts of people who signed up for the site. That’s because a lot of the social networking sites allow you to find other people on their site by giving them your gmail username and password, or your email contact list.

There is no question that the social networking space is evolving. But I’m not going to join another social network unless: 1) It is truly compelling on a content level, and provides a way to do things with content that is impossible otherwise, or, 2) It uses OpenID, 3) It has an open social graph, and 4) I have ownership and control of my own profile data.

When all of those happen, I’ll be the first to sign up.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.