Social Whoring
Linked In always had the atmosphere of a more serious and professional social networking site, unlike MySpace and Facebook where people seem to collect friends like stickers when they were younger. Then I discovered TopLinked, a site dedicated to letting people grow their network massively to people they've never met. The top member has 37 thousand connections. I just don't understand this, what is the point of having so many connections when there is no value in the connections themselves?
NP: Bricolage, Amon Tobin
Posted by marko at Fri Jan 4 17:56:14 2008:
I don't see the point either. But it must be financial. Yesterday I received an invitation from a person who "is planning on developing a new online social network to include a forum, development activities, and social media focusing on Open Moko, GDK, KDE, based GUI design etc" and says:
...
I am connected to over 11,000 contacts by 1st degree, and over 8 Million by third degree within my Linkedin network.
IF WE CONNECT, by extension of my contacts, I can add upwards of 1.4 million 3rd degree contacts in your search results on Linkedin.
...
Posted by Bryan at Fri Jan 4 18:18:23 2008:
...
I am connected to over 11,000 contacts by 1st degree, and over 8 Million by third degree within my Linkedin network.
IF WE CONNECT, by extension of my contacts, I can add upwards of 1.4 million 3rd degree contacts in your search results on Linkedin.
...
Most social networks don't have a cost to having lots of connections and thus devalue the idea completely. If you had 37 thousand friends in real life you'd never be able to do anything besides keep up with those friendships because there's a cost to having friends in the real world; you spend time with them and care about them. Though that's usually the benefit to friends, it's a cost because people have limited amounts of that resource.
It's too bad that LinkedIn is suffering the same fate that most sites are as well. Maybe the next generation of social sites will be different...
Posted by Ross at Fri Jan 4 19:19:29 2008:
It's too bad that LinkedIn is suffering the same fate that most sites are as well. Maybe the next generation of social sites will be different...
Marko: that email is what eventually ended me up at toplinked.com...
Bryan: in a way there is a cost to having 37k friends on a social networking site such as facebook: your "news" page becomes so full of what would be considered noise, that the real news from your real friends are drowned. If you end up having so many contacts that you can't use the site for its purpose, then you appear to have lost.
Posted by iain at Sat Jan 5 13:38:58 2008:
Bryan: in a way there is a cost to having 37k friends on a social networking site such as facebook: your "news" page becomes so full of what would be considered noise, that the real news from your real friends are drowned. If you end up having so many contacts that you can't use the site for its purpose, then you appear to have lost.
Eventually all social network sites will go this way and become worth less than their already worthless husks...
Posted by Dave Clayton at Sat Jan 5 16:15:18 2008:
I've been approached by recruitment agencies in the past who, quite frankly, haven't done much at all - and some of them have tried pretty hard to coerce me into adding them as LinkedIn associates and voting for them at a ranking site. It raises the question of whether I was given a cold shoulder because I didn't add them in LinkedIn - which is fine by me as I don't feel it's right that anyone should be pressured into that sort of thing unless it's openly stated as a condition of the recruitment process. Sure, it may be good for Business Development Managers, who rely on key contacts etc, but it still strikes me as iffy.
Then there's also the feeling that you're somehow obliged to add your work colleagues to your Facebook account, and whether it would be damaging not to add someone who is a friend of a friend of your boss's other half who you happened to bump in to at that networking event the other week...
I would love to write more, but I must add that person I said hello to at the park in Australia last year whilst walking my cousin's friend's parent's dog, just in case they say anything nasty behind my back...
(cue humourously paranoid frantic glancing around)
Posted by Jeff Bailey at Sun Jan 6 08:02:35 2008:
Then there's also the feeling that you're somehow obliged to add your work colleagues to your Facebook account, and whether it would be damaging not to add someone who is a friend of a friend of your boss's other half who you happened to bump in to at that networking event the other week...
I would love to write more, but I must add that person I said hello to at the park in Australia last year whilst walking my cousin's friend's parent's dog, just in case they say anything nasty behind my back...
(cue humourously paranoid frantic glancing around)
