Social Network Exhaustion (or Facebook Bankruptcy Redux)

Social Network Exhaustion (or Facebook Bankruptcy Redux):

Clearly I'm physical spent right now,

Hard lesson to learn: when you're exhausted, and/or frustrated, and/or just plain old worn out, it's a rotten time to post stuff to your blog. it is also a time when you're generally not thinking all that clearly -- and not a great time to have to remind yourself it's not a great time to be doing something. These times tend to 20-20 hindsight moments....

Facebook is a great way for me to promote what I'm doing. No sooner do I come to this realization then I pop over to Robert Scoble's blog, where he is thrilled that he no longer has to compete with me for Facebook users attention when he's promoting HIMSELF. (no link for scoble since he started the link-cold war of 2007). Great. Now if I don't spend 30 minutes a day--and that's what I think it will take--to keep my Facebook garden groomed, I'm going to derelict in my duties as the Internet's 4th biggest self-promoter (behind Scoble, Kevin Rose, and Guy Kawaz.... the funny dude who worked at Apple for 15 minutes).

Hey! my name's not guy!

You know what? don't minimize the advantage of using facebook for self-promotion. I expect if we're honest, that's a big part of what most of us are doing in some way or another.

I have three reasons I'm on facebook. In relative order of priority:

1) It's a way of building and maintaining a personal and professional network -- yes, for self-promotion, and for hopefully helping me find interesting opportunities (both personal and professional)

2) it's a way of keeping friends and contacts abreast of what's going on in my life -- without doing so in an interruptive way, without doing a huge amount of work doing it. I can keep Facebook up, and if people are interested or are trying to find or contact me, or need to look something up, they can. And if not -- I'm not in their face forcing my stuff on them, so there are no hard feelings either way.

3) It's fun. Let's face it, it's a place you can have some fun, relax, and enjoy yourself, and nobody dies...

As long as those things remain true, and the time it costs me to do it stays in my comfort zone, I'm in. When it stops, I'll move on. end of story.

So, if I'm getting this right, Facebook is a multilevel marketing platform where you agree to pay attention to people's gestures in the hopes that those people will pay-attention to your gestures in the future. It's a gesture bank.

{ praying: It's not a bubble... It's not a bubble.... There's no place like home, there's no place like home... }

yup. to some degree. But if that's ALL it is, then it's a bubble, and when some new thing comes along, people will go do that instead -- whatever it is.

There probably is a bubble effect -- after all, FAcebook right now is "hot", just like Twitter was hot (until Leo moved to that other site and took a bunch of users over with him; I'm somewhat amused that the Twitter fad is kicking in for the SECOND time, not the first...). The question will really be: when the fad is over, what's left?

Think about it -- in one case, Orkut got really hot for a while. Now? If you aren't in brazil, it doesn't exist. How many of us still have Orkut accounts we haven't logged into in a couple of years? Then again, the same can be said about Linkedin. But once the fad faded, there was still a solid and viable community and it's doing it's thing pretty well (and is, from reports, profitable.... you can be a fad and dead or you can be yesterday's news, boring and alive and profitable. Which would you choose?)

Is Facebook a more efficient, rejection-free, surrogate for the real world? Is that what we want?

Nope. It's a tool that is trying to help you manage the real world. It's almost like a shared, collaborative rolodex, only it's not just addresses and phone numbers and emails, but all sorts of data about "you" and "me", and ways to distribute and search it.

Are we going to hire someone to manage our social networks like we hire gardeners to tend to our gardens? If you asked people 200, 100, 50 and 25 years ago about the concept of hiring a gardener to mow your lawn would they think you were crazy and wasteful?

Maybe we should all go back to mowing our own lawns?

Guess what, Jason? people have been hiring gardeners for centuries. What's changed is who in the economic spectrum has the ability to do the hiring.

At one point, only priests and monks owned books and knew how to read and write. Then Gutenberg invented Moveable Type (the printing press version, not the blogging tool!) and books moved from the rarest of resource to something rich people owned, to the middle class, and to the entire population.

It used to be that only royalty and the really rich had gardeners -- who do you think kept up all of those gardens in the castles of Europe? Today, the gardener is a staple of much of the middle class. And yes, some of us went back to mowing our own lawns, too -- or in my case, I ripped it out because lawns are terribly water wasteful, but I do all my own stunts gardening.

And Jason, you shouldn't talk about hiring someone to make snide comments about people hiring folks to manage their social networks; of COURSE folks will, just like people have personal assistants to manage their time and executive assistants to manage their work and personal trainers to yell at them for not working out often enough. I remember a few months ago when I got a phone call asking if I could join you for a podcast on fatblogging -- not from you, from your assistant. So you've already answered that question, you just haven't delegated it yet...

(and that's not a swipe at Jason, merely pointing something out he hasn't recognized yet... Frankly, I'd love having a job where my time is worth enough that it's warranted to hire someone to offload tasks to)

Scott Rafer says I'm being elitist by not providing comments.

Okay, I hereby declare there to be a new addition to Godwin's Law, the Rafer Rant. And as soon as the word "elitist" appears in a discussion, any useful discussion with that person is over...