The New Networking Crock

Don't worry, if you haven't been invited once or twice already, you will be. You'll be invited to join one of the so-called social and business networks that are cropping up on the Web. The names are already becoming very familiar: Friendster, LinkedIn, Mixermixer, Ryze, and others. They use the Web as a nexus for mapping degrees of separation between you and anyone else in the known universe that is connected to other members.

These systems are designed to make our lives better and more efficient through connections. You've been wanting to have dinner with George Lucas, haven't you? After all, you have this great script for Star Wars: Episode Minus 1.

But who are we kidding? George Lucas is not showing up at your house anytime soon. This is plain, old-fashioned, hopeless Silicon Valley utopianism at work. Grab your wallet and hold on for dear life!

I'm sure these companies will become magnets for venture capital this coming year, and perhaps the public will want stock in them. I'm also sure that all of these companies will have business plans showing how they can make money with value-added services and by selling upgrades, T-shirts, hats, lapel buttons, RIM BlackBerry pagers, Web publishing, and advertising. I can also see the home brew version that always comes with this kind of service: the standalone, noncommercial, shrink-wrapped, personal networking tool. Your church can now network all its members in one easy step! And let's not forget the domino effect when the services fill up with people, get clogged, become too costly to manage, and—unless Microsoft stupidly buys these services for its mailing lists—go broke one after the other. It's all too predictable.

The entire flawed concept is a rehash of the touchy-feely community notions that emerged during the dot-com debacle. Everything had to be a community. Community means sales—big money! How? Nobody knows, but it does somehow. This new idea, sad to say, is largely based on the once-popular Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon notion, whereby you can show that there are never more than six people who know each other between you and Kevin Bacon. For example, your spouse (1) has a sister (2) whose best friend's (3) husband (4) used to date a make-up artist (5) whose best friend (6) was Kevin Bacon's hairstylist. So what genius decided to turn this folly into a business?

One obvious imperfection is that the links are too often weak and sketchy. Otherwise, all the connected people would be hanging out together. In other words, you won't get Kevin Bacon over for dinner, either. Having links also implies that the linked people actually like each other, which excludes dubious acquaintances like prison bunk mates and codefendants.

Utopian concepts mostly destroyed the dot-com era. The amount of New Age idealism in Silicon Valley is disconcerting, especially when smart people dream up what are more properly called drinking clubs or lonely hearts societies. And I suppose going to a local Friendster mixer with high hopes of meeting your yuppie soul mate amidst a sea of drips, poseurs, and phonies is better than sitting alone at home watching reruns of SpongeBob SquarePants. Maybe.

In fact, the social-networking systems will survive and the business networking systems will fail as the latter get bigger and more diluted. Let's face it: They'll attract the bottom feeders looking for a free lunch.

Then there is the issue of privacy. Do I want to be a CEO in a computerized networking system looking for a new CFO? What if someone is spying on the system? Can you imagine the leverage you'd have if you knew who was talking to whom? Even at lower levels, this is valuable information. I read the privacy statements of these systems, and I see no reason why these companies can't do this kind of monitoring. How would you know? Because they say they won't? How many dot-com promises were broken the last time around?

This kind of abuse is less likely and less important on the social networks. Who cares who is talking to whom? People are only concerned about the next party, meeting up for casual sex, finding a job as a Web page designer, or getting a new apartment.

You can expect to hear a lot of noise about these systems in the next year as the PR buzz machine cranks up and phony-baloney success stories are revealed to key media parrots. My advice: Be wary.