Passive Social Networking vs. Active Social Networking

Social Networking Has Even Scratched the Surface Yet!

MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn and others seem to have the whole market locked up but they haven't even begun to scratch the surface of connected us all together in the ways in which we want to be connected...

These are all Active networks requiring minutes or hours each day managing the relationship - pumping in content and driving value back to the network... the number one blocker is that people generally either lose interest in maintaining the content (as I have done countless times) or they are zealots that skew the profile of participants...

What these social networks are trying to do is help you expose who you are to the world... but if they are driving your behavior and sucking minutes our hours out of your days for content input then aren’t they fundamentally changing your behavior?

I think of my daughter and how addicted she can get to MySpace and that from time to time I have to clamp down on the MySpace time she spends and although the withdrawal symptoms are unbearable (the lamenting, the crying the gnashing of teeth) within a day or so she is a much happier girl for it! The happier one is the real girl, the one that MySpace is supposed to reflect, but unfortunately due to its active participation requirements it corrupts…

Now, on to the title of this entry… the next generation of social networking will go beyond active to passive, it will connect you with others who truly have similar interests because it will be built from what you do rather than what you say you do…

Let me explain… today, we tell social networks who we want others to think we are… we write profiles, we enter datapoints, we post pictures, etc… in essence we craft an image on the system of what we want others in the network to think of us… this is fun but it’s not really useful – every time we interact with someone we have to filter what we know since we’re not sure of the truth.

The next generation of social networking will gather what we do and paint a picture of who we are, connect us with those who do similar things and behave in similar (or polar opposite) ways.

http://www.criteo.com/ is a distributed recommendation engine that helps users to find out what others are happy with because of their actions and not just what they say. They also have a little widget you can drop on your Blog that aggregates all of the linkbacks to your Blog and creates a mind-map list of other Bogs that those the like yours also like – it is driven by behavior!

The future of social networking will go from Active to Passive where we can get a true picture of who we are and who others are indeed rather than the facade that is now created, crafted if you will for better or for worse. We shall see! More to come...