Social network services

(Wikipedia) such as Friendster, Linkedin, OpenBC are one of the top “web 2.0” hypes. I’m very sceptical about them, because I don’t see the real benefits for me. (I’m referring to the pure “keep contact with your schoolmates” thing, not stuff which does much more such as serious blogging - e.g. livejournal - or planets such as planet.debian)

The typical use case I’ve heard is much like “Imagine you have made a cool product, and want to sell it to some company. Now you can search for people at that company you know (or a friend of yours knows) and call them, this will help you get a feet in the door”, as well as “you can use it for finding a job”.

I think that’s bullshit, and to a large extend because I’d neither be willing to update my information in these services all the time, nor would I be willing to help just everybody here - most likely I’d just delete and ignore the email, and be really annoyed by a call (I’m annoyed by calls anyway)…

It’s not that I despise social networking per se. But I despise quantity instead of quality. I care a lot for my friends, and I’m in several groups grown around some technical issues; when someone is looking for a job I pay attention for suiteable offers around me; if someone needs something else I do try to help. But I’ll only do that for people I’d really call friends.

If you just want a quantitative number, last I checked my ranking was #36 in the global PGP keyring, meaning I have the 36th shortest average distance worldwide to verify a cryptographical key. So what?

Of course I also tried one of the social networing services given above, joined a group for a university I was at. Even before the adminstrator of that group added me, I got an “invitation” by one “linkaholic”. I rejected it, and even considered to report it as “spam” to the operator. I did indeed know that person, but all we had was a flamewar on a mailinglist, and I found him highly unsympatic. So why should I add him to my network? Where are the benefits for me (except that I’ll maybe get an annoying call sometime in the future, when I could have forgotten about him)?

No, in my opinion this social networking hype is built entirely on a hype, basically saying “look how well-connected I am, everybody knows me, and I know everybody”, even when these relationships are only present on the computer, without anything worth being called a “relationship” behind.

The flame-war I mentioned earlier was btw. on the topic of Resume/CV books. Which are even worse than this social networking thing, IMHO.