Reluctantly Connected

This is going to sound odd from someone who blogs under this URL but...

I just recently joined Facebook. Like a couple of weeks ago recently. And I don't actively belong to MySpace either.

Why? Because, I'm sort of afraid of social networking sites.

(Gasp! The horror! The emperor has no clothes!)

Yes, well, keep that "no clothes" part top of mind.

Here's why. A long time ago, I joined Friendster, and was subsequently bombarded by people who wanted to be my friend. My good friend. My *special* friend. This seemed to be the ONLY thing going on on Friendster. Logging in to Friendster felt like being in a college bar at 2am. Yuck. Not only that, Friendster folks sent me lots of emails, so I didn't even have to log in to get pelted by propositions. Again, yuck.

From what I hear about MySpace (where I also don't hang out) it's the same way. I am forever hearing about my friends getting in trouble or getting mad because of something they saw or getting hooked up via MySpace. That's fine. I'm all about people being happy together. However, this one application does not define the boundaries of social networking. Nor does it even approach the true possibilities.

So when we talk about the power of Web 2.0, does this "hookup" factor predisposition folks to think of these applications as less... well... formal? Applicable? Businesslike? Is this a factor when we pitch ideas within our companies and to our clients? Are they just thinking -

Yah this girl must be pretty wild - she's all about the social networking.

I think it used to be like that. But I think we're slowly overcoming the stigma, as we have more use cases and success stories of true business applications. We all know what industry pushes technical boundaries on the web... Perhaps this is just the way we have to (ahem) get it going.

This whole train of thought also brings up the concern - how do we keep our professional networking, professional? More on that soon.