08.10.05
Social networking needs a better solution…
I have been watching social networking space for a while, from enterprise vendors like VisiblePath to consumer players like linkedin and friendster. There are several outstanding issues to the current solutions:
- Privacy issue is a big concern for me. In all cases, I am required to expose my relationships on the open Internet for unknown people to search and discover. In addition, there is limited capability for me to segment and add entitlement on who can view/interact with my network. I wish their solution is a desktop solution rather than a hosting version and have more way to protect my network than what is available today.
- There is just no relationship trust visibility. A lot of these systems seems to provide a magic formula based on the automatically tracking of number of e-mail exchanges to determine whether you are likely to reach that person. That is just BS. What if I just exchange argument and hate messages to each other? What makes the system so smart to know how I really feel about this person just by looking at a few variables? Unless there is a text scanner to provide sophisticated text and emotion analysis. But then, all privacy protection is lost.
I will probably explore more on this, there got to be a better solution to create a more secure and dynamic human relationship network. I think web is about open access, while human relationship is more about trust and entitlement. Unless there is a trust boundary and access protection, business social networking would continue to struggle.
