Social Buzz Kill

Leo Laporte is annoyed by some Buzz glitz, and has gone back to good old blogging. The made me think of the difference between social networks and content creation. In a nutshell, social network and content management can be viewed as separate tools. Most of the tweets, buzzes or LinkedIn updates of any long term value I see are actually links to posts. This means that social networks are transport tools for the actual goods, not unlike public transport. You can use it to move around, but you do not want to limit yourself to one type of transport 1 or one carrier2.

John C. Dvorak, noted that cloud based service (of which all social network services are) are fickle. Other note that it is simply misused3. The case put forward by Efrat is that recruiters don't leverage social network with other HR tools, but simply use it to flush out information, and do not continue the discourse, either on or off the social network of choice.

This is where Facebook has it's greatest success and also it's greatest failing. It does not differentiate between content, distribution and linking. All is done in the same interface. This is very convenient. You can live all your social network life in Facebook, but should you trust it to keep your data, or should this (or any other single network) be you single point of content management and delivery?

The internet was originally build to be a robust network by allowing data packets to route via multiple pathway, making it more resilient by eliminating single points of failure in the network. The HTTP protocol, and especialy the linking mechanism, allowed us to travel from different pages or sites to other with a single click. RSS feeds allowed us to aggregate sources of information and distribute them. Current models of social networks might help us to reach others in an easy fasion, but so far seem to take away the basic advantages of design of the internet.

• 1. ship, train, plane or taxi
• 2. Although they would love to keep you, which is why we have frequent fliers and transit cards.
• 3. Thanks to Efrat Aggasi