More Reflections On ‘Social Networking’ and a Shameless Plug

A cou­ple of posts back I went on one of my semi-annual rants about “social net­work­ing” and the fact that the New Media Douchebag con­tin­gent that most pro­motes “social” tech­nol­ogy is the group that least gets it. The group of friends that I men­tioned in that pre­vi­ous post is a great exam­ple of peo­ple using “social net­work­ing” (in their case MySpace) to enhance, rather than replace actual rela­tion­ships. For us, MySpace is basi­cally noth­ing more than a com­mu­nity mes­sage board, where we can post point­less lit­tle mes­sages or coor­di­nate a happy hour. The real rela­tion­ships are based in the real world.

There is another group of friends that I have that are uti­liz­ing “social net­work­ing” (again in the form of MySpace). This group is orthog­o­nal to the first group I men­tioned, but they illus­trate the other way that ser­vices like MySpace and Facebook can actu­ally act to bring peo­ple closer rather than act as a way for mar­keters to gather vast audi­ences. This group is com­prised of peo­ple whom I have know, who I still con­sider friends, but who have drifted out of my life for one rea­son or another. MySpace is giv­ing us a fairly sim­ple way to recon­nect to those peo­ple who we may not have been able to oth­er­wise. The irony is, nei­ther group would be able to tell you if a “Scoble” was a blog­ger, or a skin rash.

Shameless Plug Time

One of the friends who has recently recon­nected with me via the intar­tubes is try­ing to get a cater­ing ser­vice off of the ground. So, I’m going to pro­vide a lit­tle link love. If you’re in the Reno area please take a look at Catering Chrissy’s. The web­site is a lit­tle raw at the moment, but it should be get­ting fleshed out shortly.