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social networking

Is collaboration social?

A blog post and a tweet by Ido Amin caught my attention.

Merging ancestry tree websites like Geni with Facebook would be considered normal in most world cultures

From a pure IT perspective, this would be true. Merging two, or more, data sources for better consistency and accuracy seems to make sense. That is, until the human factor and terminology kicks in. Does a Facebook family mean the same thing as Geni family? Do you store and use the same types of information on both services? Do you want to share that information across sites? Will Facebooks track record with privacy be consistent with that of Geni?

Genealogy is complex and sensitive. Geni does a good job, at least in my view, to manage this, primarily by providing the final say on data to the person who is represented by this data. This is not to say that there aren't issues with data management, but the Geni approach of "better safe then sorry" is very different from the "better ask forgiveness then permission" approach of facebook.

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 misused 3. 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.

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