Social Networking Wars
July 10, 2007 3:57 PM   Subscribe

 
Sorry, that should be mobuzz
posted by chuckdarwin at 4:12 PM on July 10, 2007


The woman giving the Google demo sounds so full of life, she might be better served with a profile on this social network.
posted by bicyclefish at 4:23 PM on July 10, 2007


It's not "Google's Socialstream".. it's an academic research project that google is partially funding.
posted by empath at 4:29 PM on July 10, 2007


Mosh? Isn't that what we did in the '90s?
posted by klangklangston at 4:32 PM on July 10, 2007


Okay, so I just looked at orkut, which is google's current social networking site, and it, uh sucks. A lot.

What makes google awesome is the ability to search nearly everything. What makes them suck is their inability to realize that searching is not the best way to get every kind of information. Browsing, sorting, and such are also important too.
posted by Deathalicious at 4:34 PM on July 10, 2007 [1 favorite]




Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master's program at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

You can do graduate research about this stuff?

From the archetypes:

The Dater

He seeks to establish new contacts online, with the goal of starting a personal relationship with one of these new connections. He actively searches, publishes, and reads information in order to find a compatible connection. Some of the connections he makes online are carried over to the real world.


This must be a euphemism for what I commonly refer to as "The Stalker."
posted by inconsequentialist at 7:30 PM on July 10, 2007 [1 favorite]


If that belonged to Google they would have just jumped the shark.
posted by furtive at 7:59 PM on July 10, 2007


Yeah, socialstream is never, ever going to be a success. I'm bookmarking this post so that I can come back in two years and gloat. (Why are these grads investing so much energy in an application that's transparently never going to catch on? People want to inhabit spaces that reflect their personalities, not minimalist white boxes, which is why myspace is successful despite the million things it does wrong.)
posted by Tlogmer at 8:40 PM on July 10, 2007


You can do graduate research about this stuff?

There have been at least two master's thesiseses that I can recall about Metafilter itself.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:22 PM on July 10, 2007


I'd sign up.
posted by muckster at 10:06 PM on July 10, 2007


People want to inhabit spaces that reflect their personalities, not minimalist white boxes, which is why myspace is successful despite the million things it does wrong.)

So why is Facebook so popular, then?

Anyway, if this does catch on, it's going to occupy a different niche than the existing social network sites--the demo video didn't touch on this much, but it looks like the major innovation here is being able to integrate content from multiple sites, tie it to people's identities and organize it in a neatly browseable fashion.
posted by arto at 10:27 PM on July 10, 2007


Facebook is a million times better than myspace. I can't believe how much cooler Facebook is compared to myspace, and it's been months now since I've been using both—I still think about this almost every time I go there.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:05 PM on July 10, 2007


!

I never would've taken you for a FaceSpace kind of person, EB. Huh.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:31 PM on July 10, 2007


I never would've taken you for a FaceSpace kind of person, EB. Huh.

Oh, one day I thought "what the hell". Even at my advanced age, there's people I know on both places. But on both places the number of my friends is less than ten. I'm only friends with people I know in real life or that I know from here. But people I know from real life that don't have any other Internet presence have found me (and I've found them) on MySpace.

It's interesting to see how much it's a (relatively) youth phenomena. If I look at people that went to my high school on MySpace and people that went to St. John's College on Facebook, in both cases it's really the mid-twenties and younger crowd, with these long tails up to my age. I'm either the oldest johnnie on Facebook, or close. There's like ten people above 38 or something.

I don't check either one every day. I mostly logon to MySpace to get rid of stupid spammy friend requests. I have one close friend who's very active on MySpace and it's really bothers me because it underscored that he's never left his mid-twenties, even though he's in his mid-thirties.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 12:28 AM on July 11, 2007


EB, I'm 38 and I have a presence on both sites... then again, I'm a musician.
posted by chuckdarwin at 1:38 AM on July 11, 2007


Why Myspace is full of people having fun, as explained to Jakob Nielsen by Joel Spolsky via Joey de Villa. Or something.
posted by kandinski at 8:41 AM on July 11, 2007


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