Colin Kingsbury wrote an interesting piece about the end of social networking (I’ve borrowed the title to his post as I’m getting much too lazy these days). He writes:
Just to recap, Harry joined Facebook, and attempted to invite his entire list of contacts (all 4600 of them) to join him there. You’d think Facebook would appreciate Harry’s enthusiasm for promoting Facebook, but their response was to disable and ban his account for violating ambiguous terms of service related to alleged spamming and use of his account for “advertising purposes.”
While many of Facebook’s members will applaud the decision to chase this particular money-changer out of the temple (there being no shortage of nuisance recruiters whose spamming is of the egregious kind), it highlights the fact that Facebook can and will ban anyone it chooses for any reason that suits its purposes, and without any practical recourse for the convict.
By contrast, no one can be banned from the web, or email*. If Hotmail doesn’t like you they can ban you, but you can just scoot over to Yahoo and resume emailing people. There’s a little overhead to moving address books around, but otherwise it’s not something you really need to worry about unless you’re selling c1allis or the daughter of a deposed Nigerian general.
Interestingly enough, the very thing that Colin says will be the end of social networking is what will allow great enterprise business networking. I say this because I have every confidence that businesses will want to have secured “social” networks within their domain that is permission based. I have recently referred to these as collaboration and innovation networks, and I think they will be critical to the workforce as we become more decentralized and electronic in all our communication methods.
While if you read the rest of Colin’s post, it’s apparent that he doesn’t actually think social networks are bound for doom. But it’s interesting to see that the concern which exists in the public space is actually a huge plus on the private space.
2 responses to “How Social Networking Will End”
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Absolutly, companies need secure “collaboration and innovation” networks, because we are dealing with IP and other proprietary assets.
And these will be good as they will allow to push basic talent management processes beyond management populations, namely they will help build processes for these decentralized and collaborative population that have little in common with hierarchical management populations