07.29.07
“Friend” Overload?
In Overloaded With Gimme Gimme, I responded to a discussion currently going on about how valuable social networking sites are. Let me expand upon a few ideas here.
In the real world, people get up in the morning, rush out the door, spend an hour on the road, and are working for the next ten hours, before spending another hour on the road to get back home. In many cases, they also juggle family schedules, having to have someone home with dinner in time to feed the kids and pets. There is precious little time for juggling lists of “friends” and requests for help with some issue that does not touch their lives yet. This is because most Americans work in the physical world and have to spend their work time doing productive things (productive as in “makes more money for the company”), rather than playing with the latest social networking site.
Only the guy in the corner office of the tenth floor has time to practice his putting while he’s on the clock. The rest of us have a huge hole in our days where (no matter how much we’d like it to be different) we have to be productive.
Maybe I don’t get it because I don’t trawl Facebook and LinkedIn trying to gather employees or clients or interviewees. If I was doing Robert Scoble’s type of work, it might be advantageous to spend much of my day collecting “contacts”. There might even be some advantage for a job like the one Jason Calcanis has, although even he questions whether it is worthwhile in the light of the time it takes to manage contacts on such sites. James Robertson says it has to do with your popularity, with highly popular people having the largest number of extraneous “friendship requests”.
One thing is sure: I have enough to deal with just trying to maintain contact with people I already know without the added pressure of people wanting to add you because of what you can do for them.
