“ A site that visibly promotes how many ’friends’ you have turns friends into commodities, creating an economy where you are motivated to make as many friends as you can. That’s not a good idea because the utility of these sites suffer as social networks become too densely populated. Throw in the social implications of ’un-friending’ someone and you result in a cycle where the only way to solve the problem is to stop using the service and instead jump on to the ’latest’ social network where you can start with a clean slate. This is how we went from Friendster to Tribe to Orkut to MySpace to Facebook (with a few more or less along the way).
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I think this is very perceptive—it’s something I’ve been concerned by and thinking about for a long time. The more I’ve pondered it, the more I’ve started to feel that the social applications that have had the most utility and long-term staying power for me have been the ones that implement social features in the most lightweight way. For example, del.icio.us has remained one of my favorite social sites while I’ve burned out on others—largely, I think, because it implements social features in such a self-effacing way (it uses a “unilateral” connection model, doesn’t send new follower notifications, doesn’t publicly reveal people’s friends and followers, and doesn’t actually display a friend or follower count). The social aspect of del.icio.us is a feature, not actually the entire point of the site, and as a result it hasn’t been subject to the burnout I’ve experienced with a lot of social sites. It has also managed to maintain (at least within my network) an admirable signal-to-noise ratio—at least partly, I think, because its users are focused on personal utility and not on the sort of “look at me,” Scoble-style “webcockery” that often comes to dominate sites that are more emphatically social media.
This is something I’ve been keeping very much in mind as I think about several projects with social components I’ve been working on.