sxsw - so much goodness - so much tiredness!

For the last few days, I've been attending SXSW. Having spent a while in Dallas and CA, I haven't been to the festival in a few years and well... it's different. Here's a photo from 2003 - the last time I/my company was involved with SXSW. We had a booth, we all attended the conference, and we handed out the web awards. Now they have famous people handing out the awards, the conference is packed, and booths are mostly big companies (not a boutique interactive firm to be found). Yay Austin. Yay SXSW. The parties were excellent, and having a houseful of guests and seeing people from all over the country that we all know and love has been so much fun. As one person said, "it's like a big class reunion," and he's right, it absolutely has that feel. I was talking with some Five Runs folks at their packed event and we all agreed - the social part of social networking is really our favorite.

Posts on actual insight from the conference... coming soon.

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.

Never ending friending?

A while back, I had an awkward little Linked In situation. Someone asked me to help one of his friends get a job, and I really didn't know the person asking me that well, and one degree of separation further just really seemed way too much. I told him that I couldn't very well recommend someone I didn't know and hadn't worked with, so that was that. There's a very good chance I annoyed my contact, but hey - what can you do? When it comes to making recommendations, it's your reputation on the line as well.

So this brings me to the idea of online "friends" and "contacts." When someone asks me to friend them, I've always used the rule of thumb that I wouldn't friend anyone that I wouldn't want to have coffee or lunch with. This works in that I'm able to friend people like recruiters or other people that are good contacts to have, but that I might not really know very well.

It also keeps me from friending people that I might have regular contact with, but I generally either don't like or respect. I've found it's more trouble to have people like that in your friend list than to just not have them. You never know when someone is going to ask you to either introduce you to the person, or ask you what you think of their work, or something else equally as sticky. Why bring that on yourself?

Nevertheless, my rule didn't protect me from the sticky situation above. What's a social networker to do?

I've been thinking about it, and I really don't think there's an answer. Being social will bring a certain amount of socially awkward situations, so we just do the best we can. Either online or in the real world, sticky situations will exist.

A recent article in the New Yorker, "Social Studies" in the Sept 17, 2007 issue, touches on this topic. It says that most kids who are coming into college at NYU are already members of Facebook, and already have a pre-existing network of friends. While this is good in some ways (security, less anxiety), it limits the people you'll making connections with in the real world, and it totally removes the serendipitous aspect of making those lifelong college friends.

It also gives kids a real dose of the new kind of social awkwardness - that is - translating offline friendships into real world ones.

This post is getting long, so I'll pick up on this topic tomorrow. Happy Wednesday.