Srcasm

The conversation of why social networks work has come up time and time again in all of the circles of people that I talk to.  My tech friends try to explain why Twitter, Plurk or Brightkite are the best networks in town.  My old college buddies explain that Facebook or Myspace are by far the greatest tool to catch up with friends.  And finally, my business associates swear by LinkedIn to help connect them to the people that they need to reach. While we don’t always agree on everything — One thing is certain, everyone seems to love the social networks.  But why?

Could it be that we are just social creatures by nature?  Even the gamers (who sit in their bedrooms and wear their gigantic headphones all day) want to socialize; albeit in the online world.  Maybe it’s that we love to connect with old friends and hear what they have to say, where they’ve been and what they’ve been up to.  I believe is a much simpler reason.  Ego.

Ego seems to drive most of what we do in our daily lives.  Whether we like to admit it, ego is why most women doll up in the morning before running out to CVS or school.  It’s why guys want a big, fancy, expensive car to drive around town.  I believe it’s even why we all flock to social networks.   We, as a general public, enjoy being in the spotlight and online social networks have made it simpler than ever to get our 15 seconds of fame.

As far as why I believe this is the single most important reason why social networks are working, I give you my theory/self-example.  I could go ahead and email, text or IM a bunch of my friends to let them know that my birthday is coming up and we’re going out to the bar.  I don’t because I want others to know that we’re going out.  I may not even be inviting other people to come to my private event but I want them to know it’s happening.  As far as networking sites like Twitter are concerned, I send links to information there instead of emailing it to the people who are interested so that I can show everyone (that follows me) that I got that information before someone else.  In addition, I continuously try to grow my network on LinkedIn not only because I like to have a large network of contacts but also because the higher the number of connections, the more popular I look to others.   All of these things benefit no one else except for me and my overly inflated ego.  We all do it.

Now, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with it.  Just simply pointing out an observation that I’ve made over the past couple of years.  What do you think?  Why do your social networks continue to grow?  Why do you share information on Twitter instead of IM?

Today it seems like there is a never-ending supply of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), contact relationship sites (Plaxo and Salesforce), email address books (Gmail and Yahoo) but what about when I need to reach Alex from my cell phone and I forgot to put his number in? What if I never even had Alex’s number? What if he’s available via IM right now and doesn’t want phone calls? These are all great questions and I think I have an idea or a solution…

Aggregated address book system

On the top level, it’s simply a way of pulling in contacts from all over the globe. Bring your friends from Facebook (with their IM name, email and phone numbers), your business contacts from LinkedIn (with their title, company, email and website) and your main homeboys from Gmail (with their emails, phone numbers and whatever else you’d like to include) and pull them all together into one simple, online and offline-capable address book. Add the ability access this service via SMS or WAP site and you have yourself an always-on address book system

To sweeten the deal, add the ability to not only have presence detection (such as if the person is on Gtalk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger or simple available via text message) but also allow masked-communication with users. This could use a service like Jajah to connect the two parties.

On top of these amazing features (which are already out there, they just need to be mashed together), offer both natural language search (i.e. call Joe Schmoe at home) as well as opt-in and opt-out communication methods. For example, say I am “friends” with Joe on Twitter. Twitter knows that Joe’s phone number is 555-1337 (this would take some work with Twitter to allow this in their API with an opt-in option) but I don’t know that Joe’s number is that. I text 232665 (ADBOOK) or visit m.addbook.com from my mobile and type in “call Joe Schmoe’s mobile”. Within seconds, Joe Schmoe is notified that I’d like to get in touch with him. He can simply reply to a text message with Y or N as to whether he’d like to talk and voila, with a Y response, Joe and I are connected (neither of us know the other’s phone number).

See how helpful that could be? Now get out there, and someone, set this up as I have a lot of contacts I’d like to reach.