Why Social Networks Stink

John C. Dvorak's view on social networks. I think he's right. Social networks on the web do stink. Why? Well first of all, there are too many. Try to keep up with them all! And second, what is the real value of those social networks. Ok, there is a fun factor to it. Sharing photo's and thoughts and what ever else with your family and friends is somewhat of a value. Especially when they are far away.
But let's look at the business value of social networks. What value is there for your business. I think until someone figures out to incorporate them in business applications (CRM comes to mind) theres no real value in them. Apart from marketing aspects of course. But with so many social networks markting becomes difficult too. I'm waiting for the big clean up here.

Connectedness: Use Visone to make your first network map

Connectedness: Use Visone to make your first network map

In my work I am a frequent user of Visone. We use it in workshops to to make social networks instantly visible to the participants. Visone is a social networking tool that has a bit of different angle. You can use to visually draw a network and then use the data to do all kinds of analysis. With most other tools you first have to fill a matrix after which you'll be able to visualize it. On the analysis part it is not as powerfull as UCINET - not even close. But it does the basic analysis as e.g. degree (incl. in- en outdegree), closeness, betweenness, etc.

Until recently we used the 1.1 version. It isn't the most stable application, but more usefull than the newer java versions. But now there is a newer version. It does have the same options as version 1.1, e.q. showing the betweenness scores of the actors in a list (csv file format).

But the best thing is, it's free.

Visone is described by Bruce Hoppe in his intresting Blog.

Mashable!

I think it's the site about social networking on the web. Check out Mashable!

Here's what they say about themselfs:

" About Mashable
With in excess of 5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the world's largest blog on social networking.
What does that mean? It means sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, hi5, Piczo, Bebo and YouTube.
If you're launching a new social network, or a tool that plugs into MySpace and the rest, Mashable wants to know!
Mashable is written by Pete Cashmore, a new media expert. It ranks among the Top 100 blogs worldwide."

See this post as an example.

I'm putting up a rss feed on the right.