Why Social Networking isn’t the Answer

When Facebook started to become the social networking site no one could ignore, I was one of the millions that signed up for the free service of meeting, mingling, sharing information and photos with friends and family through the new medium.

I decided, in those first few months after I got a facebook, to keep my myspace page. However, after a year of only going on the site whenever I got one of those annoying e-mails “Frank the Tank has requested your friendship,” I decided that myspace was best left for high schoolers and became solely a facebook user.

My friends who still have their myspace admit they, too, don’t check it as often as they once did. Facebook is their social networking site of choice. When it comes to their myspace pages, they are only activity-based users, only signing in if they believe their myspace page has experienced some sort of activity.

Since first signing up for Facebook over two years ago, I have since signed up for LinkedIn, a social networking site for business professionals. However, despite my vast career ambitions, I’m only logged in when I sense activity with my connections or to update something on my profile.

With the advent of the Wall Street Journal’s new “Journal Community” and The New York Times’ social networking features, called “TimesPeople,” newspapers and magazines are trying to get in on the social networking craze.

I have to admit I signed up for “TimesPeople.” It intrigued me at first. However, after using it a few times I discovered it falls short. I really don’t care what articles some stranger recommends. I just want to read! Also, having no one I know on the social networking site makes it a little boring. My friends share interesting articles through facebook, and they’re not going to add another intermediatary site in order to get their opinions across.

Since the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are leaders in their fields, it can be expected that more and more print publications will follow down a similar path. Having more and more social networking sites dedicated to the same thing: reading and acquiring the news, will lead these publications to ultimately work against each other, much in the same way myspace works against facebook.

Each user is going to have their favorite social networking site and check, update, and correspond with friends on that site most frequently. In their world, all the other social networking sites will follow idly by.

Print publications are entering the social networking world too late. We all have our friends, our profiles and overall our internet habits set up elsewhere on the internet that to switch the majority of our time networking elsewhere on the web would be counterproductive.