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Because you need to have a life to get social networking sites.

2007-06-06 10:52:40

I don't mean to be harsh, and I'm not looking to get modded a troll, but most

people who enjoy using social sites over the long-term (in my opinion) have a

lot of friends they actually care to keep in contact with. I'm a big Facebook

user. It helps me keep up with my two sisters away at college as well as a lot

of old friends of mine from high school and from college that I actually care

to keep up with.

This is very different from internet-based relationships. (And that's where

"have a life" may be harsh.) If you're into EVE Online or whatever, that's

great. But your relationship with those people is, fundamentally, based in a

digital medium. Sometimes MMO players get together in real life, sometimes

really tight messageboard communities do the same thing. But that's the

exception rather than the norm. The norm is for users brought together by a

common interest to have little interest in maintaining relationships with those

people in the absence of the common interest.

I played Planetside for a while. Not really an MMORPG, but certainly an MMO

back in its day. I had an outfit (Guild, if you will) and several people that I

considered friends in my Planetside world. Not only were they in my outfit, but

we worked well together, laughed at each others jokes, and generally enjoyed

playing together. That was the extent of it, however. I'm not saying I would

not have cared to know how their day was outside of Planetside, or how their

relationship was going. I may have cared, but that would have been a different

kind of relationship. It would have been, for lack of a less-harsh term, caring

about their real life and not just the game life.

American culture is more mobile than ever. It's normal go to high school in one

city, go to college in another city, and get a job in a third city. And even if

you don't move around that much, some of your friends certainly will. It's

precisely these 18 - 25 year olds who use these sites. They are trying to find

a kind of stability in their ever-changing world. If your entire circle of

friends is cycled at least every 4 years, you may want to find a way to combat

that social churn and get a more stable set of friends. A sense of permenance

and community.

As far as the original question about portability goes, I don't think it's that

much of an issue. I chose Facebook precisely because it's not MySpace. I have

no desire to be a part of the MySpace community, or any other community. If I

do want to join another community, then I think re-entering my data would be a

minimal issue. Some data portability would be nice, but hardly required. And in

any case, functional data portability (e.g. not just my personal stats, but my

friends) is really difficult without creating semi-official digital selves or

using a lot of personally-identifiable data. Either of these options result in

serious privacy concerns, so I'll trade a little re-keying for a new social

cite to keep my data relatively anonymous.