jd's Journal: Is Social Networking worthwhile?

There are plenty of online social networking sites - LinkedIn is the one I'm most familiar with. They seem to be designed around the notion of the Good Old Boys Club, the gentrified country clubs and the stratified societies of the Victorian era, where who you knew mattered more than what you knew.

But are they really so bad? So far, my experience has given me a resounding "maybe". People collect associations the way others collect baseball cards or antiques - to be looked at and prized, but not necessarily valued (prized and valued are not the same thing), and certainly not to be used. But this defeats the idea of social networking, which attempts to break down the walls and raise awareness. Well, that and make a handsome profit in the deal. Nothing wrong with making money, except when it's at the expense of what you are trying to achieve.

So why the "maybe", if my experience thus far has been largely negative? Because it has also been partially positive, and because I know perfectly well that "country club" attitudes can work for those who work them. The catch is that it has to be the right club and the right attitude. That matters, in such mindsets. It matter a lot.

So, I ask the question: Is there an online social networking site that has the "right" stuff?

I can;t offer you a perfect example, but..

[DisownedSky]

Flickr [flickr.com] seems to have evolved on its own to just that. All Flickr themselves did was attract a huge number of amateur photographers (many of them good enough to go pro) from all over the world with some fairly slick features. The users did the rest. Sharing your best images brings out more truth about you than you might think, and that has appeal.

OF course, people who aren't interested in photography might not care for Flickr....

We are social beings

[jdray]

We are, at heart, social beings. Even the most "anti-social" of us craves some sort of social interaction; it's just often using methods that aren't common. You observe here on Slashdot the high population of otherwise basement-dwelling trolls that would feel lost if they couldn't read and respond to the latest nerd news.

Social networking web sites are trying to profit from our innate desire to connect to other people. Each of them is trying some angle of approach to hook us in and show us ads on a regul

Re:

[jd]

Well, that one's easy enough to solve. I've plenty of coding experience, there's a very reasonably-priced Internet provider that leases space on servers, and I was going to work on a social networking site anyway except I hadn't figured out what sort of content or design people would want.

I'd be happy to work on this with you, get it set up so you can experiment with an actual implementation of your vision on your machine until you are satisfied it's just right, then we can go live with it. Because I was