_____ is not a social network.

I got in a small debate on Twitter when I said I didn’t like LinkedIn, specifically because I thought marketing itself as a social network was disingenuous. 

We could get into a deeper debate on that, and I did, repeatedly. I think LinkedIn has some social features, but it’s laser focus on finding jobs, headhunting, and finding clients removes the social aspect from it - it’s social networking the way speeddating is building a relationship.

However, this led me to a bigger point - we use the words ‘social network’ to describe everything.

There are the things that fit what I consider the ‘social network’ definition: myspace, friendster, facebook, orkut, ning sites, etc. I’d even argue that message boards are essentially social networks.

There are things that incorporate social networking elements, like Tumblr. I’m unsure if I really see the platform as a social network, but I can’t argue that it isn’t heavily community focused and oriented, both in behaviour and features.

And then we get to the service that I’d argue least resembles a social network: Twitter.

If Twitter is a social network, so are telephones.

Twitter is a communications platform. They’ve been making slow moves back toward what could be considered one cohesive network (mostly by alienating and discouraging developers) but I’m not sure why it’s a ‘social network’ just because people can use it to socialize. By that logic, instant messaging is a social network.

Taking it up a level, this is a conversation about how everything online gets bucketed together, simply because it is online. When I commented that I didn’t think LinkedIn was a social network under any usefully narrow definition, Jennifer Johnston suggested that I was essentially saying “a newspaper is only a newspaper if it looks like the Toronto Star”, which is a fair interpretation of the couple of statements I had made.

From my point of view, I was saying that not everything printed on paper is a novel. Sometimes it’s a resume, sometimes a grocery list, and sometimes a newspaper.

Just because it happens in a browser window, and just because there is a list of contacts, doesn’t make it a social network. And I think the tidal wave of ‘social media’ hype often overlooks the fact that it’s the same pieces in play as before: people, talking. There’s just a new system of behaviours that emerges when you introduce new means of connection, and new technologies.

As someone who spends a lot of time personally and professionally, on understanding the different systems of behaviour that develop in and around different online tools, platforms and communities, names matter.

Because lumping everything together insists on reductionist thinking about the sociology of emerging tech.

The Harry Potter Principle.

JK Rowling isn’t successful just because she tapped into a need for wonder that drives most children to explore literature.  Her most intelligent move was to create a property that matured with the audience.  The first Harry Potter book was, for all intents and purposes, a young adult novel.  The book was short, accessible in terms of language and subject matter, and filled with relatable moments for children of the appropriate age.

By the end of the series (I will admit I only read until book 5) each book was a tome of several hundred pages, deadling with adult concepts, and serious issues of morality and mortality.

Rowling let her product mature at a rate that kept her existing audience engaged.  If she’d written seven 150 page young adult novels, she would have needed to find a new audience, and new evangelists, by midway through the series.  Instead, a generation of kids grew up with Harry Potter as a series, and grew up with Harry Potter as a character.  When you’ve been interacting with the same product for seven or more years, you evangelize it constantly.  It becomes part of you.

Facebook has to take this into account, and it’s likely related to (according to eMarketer) some teens losing interest in Facebook.

I’m not going to indulge in ‘the sky is falling’ paranoia, because when it comes to numbers Facebook still has reach and engagement that the rest of the social networking space would kill for.  At the same time, it’s worth noting that technologies and social networks need to mature with the people involved.  

As such, facebook is faced with a complex and inenviable task - how do you mature with the generation of university students that launched the site into success, while still attracting an upcoming generation of teens and tweens whose older siblings, and at times parents, have already claimed the site as their own?

It’s the Harry Potter Principle: to succeed in maintaining a connection with an audience over time, you need to mature with them.  To continue growing that audience, you also need accessibility across multiple maturity levels (which can relate to age, or to knowledge of the material).

Why I’m against a ‘Status Standard’.

Steve Rubel had an interesting post a couple of days back that made several interesting points about the values of having a standardized method of updated Status messages across many social networks.

I’m against this as a matter of principle, although I’ve definitely been guilty of importing Twitter updates to Tumblr, etc.  I’m against it because I think it ignores the difference between networks.

If you’re automating the posting of your content to multiple, very different, social networks, you’re applying old media to new, and calling it innovative.  Giving people the same content on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr is a great indication that you don’t understand the communities, social contracts, and accepted behaviours of each of these communities.  Twitter is conversational.  Facebook is (IMHO) an info clearing house that often caters to radical transparency / not-creepy voyeurism.  Tumblr is a publishing platform with some social network elements that help to build a reactive community around content.

If my Tweets immediate became Facebook status updates, my FB account would be cluttered, have no topic, and be mostly directed at a small group of friends who aren’t necessarily interested in my Facebook account.  When my Tweets appeared on Tumblr, my blog was an endless stream of one-sentence content - readable, and arguably interesting, but anyone interested in my one-sentence content was probably already a Twitter user.

The idea that the same content fits all of these different channels is also a statement that some of them are irrelevant.

If you aren’t tailoring to each specific platform, to each specific audience, you aren’t generating content to be enjoyed or shared - you’re generating content and throwing it at as many walls as possible to see what sticks.

That’s old media thinking.  That time has passed.

Entirely Unplanned Obsolescence.

I’m not a fan of LinkedIn.  I’m on there, of course. I keep my account fairly updated.  I respect the profitability and valuation.  I just happen to think it has a timeline built in that the founders may have not considered.

LinkedIn is social networking for people who are afraid of social networking.  To be more accurate, it’s social networking for people who are convinced it’s possible, and beneficial, to create a hard separation between who a person is as a business entity, and who a person is as a social entity.

This was possible, a decade ago.  It’s arguably possible now, for people who aren’t truly connected, or people who are intensely careful.  It won’t be true in 5 years.  And, I think, those five years will make LinkedIn irrelevant.

Facebook is about people and lives.  The social graph they offer, even if it is become ever murkier, incorporates all aspects of a person.  As a tool for getting to know people, or providing background information, this is useful.  You can see who someone is in a wider arena then their resume - and let’s be honest, LinkedIn is a place where people, even in a social conversational context, attempt to animate their resume as a character.

Comparatively, LinkedIn isn’t about people or lives.  It’s about qualifications and professional experience, which even as a hiring tool, seems hollow to me.  I’m not sure what LinkedIn adds to the process that isn’t better achieved by interacting with the same person in a network that is actively social.

I don’t see a future in a non-social social network.  LinkedIn is a place where one can seem connected while hiding from the central reality of social media - that your life, all of it, is something you will need to own and take responsibility for.  A record will likely exist.  A record that you do not control.

As a professional tool, you’ll learn more from a resume and a few phone calls than you will from perusing the LinkedIn account of a potential hire or collaborator.  However, looking at someone’s twitter account, facebook, and website, would be give information about the human being that, if you look at it with the correct perspective, helps you find out it this is a person you could work with.

LinkedIn is going to be obsolete in 5 years.  [Edit: I’ve reconsidered the following sentence.] It could be useful as a Facebook application right now.

That said, there will always be money is creating a version of something gamechanging that doesn’t intimidate the older generation in the workforce.  And yes, that is how I think of LinkedIn: the social network that won’t make my father uncomfortable.