What happened to the good ole days of just contacting friends and keeping up with each others personal and work lives? Who invented these ridiculous applications. What purpose do they serve? Are they trying to spread the word about farms and farming? I mean is that the real intention. Is that what the pointless pillow fight application is trying to do as well.. spread the word about the demise of the down pillow. Facebook did themselves a disservice by allowing these applications to run on their site and basically distract from it's core customers (college students and young professionals). Now it's becoming passe' and outdated and young people are now seeking out the new cool and exclusive site to share their thoughts without fear of being turned into a pillow throwing farmer or being chastised by grandma for getting drunk or taking slightly distasteful photos... that's what young should be allowed to do without fear of repercussions lasting through the rest of their lives...
Social networking should really be split into three main categories: Family interaction, outreach... professional networking sites and personal/school and socially oriented sites.
I like the mechanism that Facebook initially employed to limit access: having a .edu email address. The same could be applied to professional websites to narrow the focus of the activities and ensure some level of enjoyment in performing web-enabled social interactions - with having a semblance of security. Lendors are even performing social network voyeurism to determine credit worthiness? This has basically devolved into a way to peek into your private life - why bother even applying for the credit.. just send a link to your Facebook account and make it easy on them... thoughts
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I know part of the reason I stopped using MySpace was because it was so busy, and slow, and buggy. The Facebook apps... or some of them, at least... definitely introduce some of that element.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the difference is that with Facebook, you can hide Farmville etc with a click of a button. That example flexibility... something that Facebook always seems to be working to improve... is what keeps me on Facebook.
Anyway, there already ARE professional networking sites... what do you think LinkedIn is for? There's also Brazen Careerist, which tries to combine the two... though whether it will be successful is something still left to be seen.