Socializing for the Sake of Networking

I'm a member of a number of social networking sites, including LinkedIn, Spoke, Ryze, and ZeroDegrees. I've looked at Orkut and ItsNotWhatYouKnow. Everyone has their own opinion of the usefulness of these services.

I've long thought that the killer app on the Internet would be the place that was your "Number 3". The place where you went that wasn't related to your “Number One” and “Number Two” interests, like family and work, or God and family, which happen to be “my” number one and number two.

So I went to work in the mid-90's building community-based portals. I built “orafans.com” for Oracle software users, dollfans.com for avid doll collectors, and rushfans.com for people to duke it out regarding liberalism and conservatism. As I soon found out, our diverse society has so much diversity that building and managing a family of niche sites would be impossible to maintain, along with the hope of generating profits from those sites.

Some of the social software sites I've been a part of attempt to do what I tried to do 10 years ago: Try to come up with all of the little clusters of characteristics you can, and try to get people to link up with other people in those clusters.

The problem is that our entire social fabric is actually too complex to be represented in the two-dimensional aspect of cluster "membership" or cluster "non-membership". I like to buy and sell things on Ebay from time to time, but that doesn't mean I should join an Ebay group. I’m interested in politics, but I’m not a groupie or a mindless political drone, and certainly don’t want to sign up for a particular candidate cluster so that I can be bombarded with campaign spam and spew.

The fact that I have sent or received, or worse yet, been cc:ed on an email from someone does not mean we should be connected socially in any way. Social software may imply that we should be connected, not infer that a social connection actually exists. I personally have shied away from using my address books as a primary source of my social network connections, instead, opting for contacting individuals, one at a time, using the context of our “relationship”, rather than some implied bond based on email software.

I have focused my efforts on building relationships with people in my LinkedIn network. I like that it is MY network, the scope of which I have built, one connection at a time. If I want to expand my network in St. Louis, I find someone in St. Louis and develop a RELATIONSHIP with them, explaining to them what my need happens to be in St. Louis. Those in the trusted path of that connection request also find out that I have a need in St. Louis, as I get to explain in my connection request WHY I want to be reach out to a particular connection in St. Louis. I’m not sure I could get what I need by just clicking on a “click to be connected to people in St. Louis” link.

So, I’ve been socializing for the sake of the networking, rather than networking for the sake of the socializing, and the end result is that I have more friends and closer connections than I could have had without the LinkedIn service. And that, to me, is worth something.