Social networking lifting off
ANYBODY WHO READS newspapers on a regular basis will have heard of MySpace – www.myspace.com. The social networking website has made the headlines for a number of reasons, including new music stars being discovered or the use of the service by sexual predators to prey on the young people who frequent the site.
MySpace is just one of a multitude of social networking sites that have sprung up on the Internet over the past few years. And while it’s now getting much attention among the hip and the happening, MySpace is already yesterday’s news.
While MySpace made its mark in the US high school market, the current darling among the younger generation is Facebook – www.facebook.com. Facebook gained recognition by targeting the US college market and only recently opened its doors to the rest of the world.
The idea behind social networking is that instead of you maintaining a list of the people you know and how you know them, you use the services on the site to keep an eye on your friends and acquaintances. Each one has a different focus. MySpace was meant to provide a place for new music to be discovered but turned into the online equivalent of the local mall, a place for kids to hang out.
Facebook is an amalgam of a system to keep track of friends and a way to create and maintain loose networks of like-minded people. LinkedIn is strictly business-focused, and then there are other services such a Ryze (www.ryze.com, one of the earliest players in this space) and Orkut (www.orkut.com, similar in scope to Facebook).
Arthur Goldstuck, MD of research house World Wide Worx, says that in SA the use of such services is very much in its infancy, with the early adopters choosing not to use MySpace but following the US trend of a move to Facebook as the platform of choice.
Those early adopters are the vanguard of technology users in SA and are typically still at school. Goldstuck says there are other social networks, mainly for the older technology-savvy community, but those are currently focused on the local blogging scene and don’t use one of the formalised services.
One concern that many people have with these services is the potential for them to sap productive time, because staff spend working time browsing other people’s profiles or updating their own. When you factor in that most of SA’s Internet users have access at work, the potential for time-wasting is substantial.
However, as Goldstuck says, some of the social networks – such as LinkedIn – have specific work applications, making it possible to find scarce resources, either for recruitment purposes or to collaborate on specific projects.
“In the research field it’s difficult to make contact with other organisations working in developing countries. However, through Linked-In we’ve been able to create contacts with similar organisations as far away as the Philippines,” says Goldstuck.
He adds that because LinkedIn is focused on the capabilities of its members, it does have a fair amount of recruiters seeking scarce skills. But due to the system used by all networks that requires members to approve anyone looking to access them, it’s possible to weed them out.
Though the less work-orientated services do have potential to distract employees from their work – with some companies having blocked access to those services – it’s possible that many people use the networks of friends they build up to monitor their extended list of contacts, some of which they may need to tap into for a work query.
One of the interesting spin-offs of these services is a backlash from the younger market to older members of society starting to use social networking services. As Goldstuck says: “The kids think they own the environment and are horrified when their parents sign up as well. But that’s just a natural trend as more people see the usefulness of the tools available.”
Just as the Internet has been through a number of phases with different technologies set to change the world, technologically savvy users will find the best service for themselves and encourage friends to join. Then just as the unwashed masses take over, the early adopters will find a new and interesting service to popularise.
Currently it’s Facebook. However, in a year to 18 months the momentum might have shifted, driven by the ever-moving tide of popular opinion and new and interesting technologies.
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