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Social networking sites are for pseudo networking

• Social networking is the rage across the world. In Pakistan, India and Brazil, Orkut (a google affiliate) is the king, with Facebook and MySpace having almost no market share.
• They're good to stay in touch with people you already know, and perhaps meet like minded ones through communities, but most new contacts you make aren't "real"
• Social networking sites DO NOT replace personal networking, although that's the misconception most people have.
• Leaving a few messages on someones profile is not the same as meeting him face to face.
• Ask yourself: How many friends you made online, would you go out of the way to help?

Social networking sites are overrated

• I used to use Facebook, and quit because I got sick of how superficial it was. I never once saw a profile that accurately reflected the person it belonged to (mine included), and the only non-voyeur purpose the thing seemed to have was remembering the birthdays of people I didn't care enough about to remember their birthdays in the first place.
• Facebook is a lot like World of Warcraft: lots of fun, wildly popular, alarmingly addictive, and (once you've looked at it closely) utterly asinine. I'm sure there are people who benefit from using it, but I bet there are very few people for whom the benefits outweigh the hundreds of hours they burn just surfing random profiles, and the related erosion of self-discipline and time-management skills. Bah.
• Two words: circle jerk.

Social networking can help you find a job

*I got my job using Linkedin

• It's absolutely cliche, yet absolutely true: "it's not what you know, but WHO you know" that matters when you are searching for a job. Thirty years ago, Sociologist Mark Granovetter empirically demonstrated that people who leveraged their social connections when searching for a job had the highest probability of landing the job of their choice ("The Strength of Weak Ties," "Finding a Job). Today, with robust social networking websites like Doostang, Spoke, and LinkedIn, a person now has the resources to visually map connections between himself and virtually anyone in the world. These mapped connections, when used appropriately, can help create tangible connections to people working inside the company/industry of your dreams--and help you obtain references to land the job of your dreams.
• Or it can also prevent you from getting a job. Most young people don't watch what goes up on Myspace, friendster and related sites and a lot of the stuff is really inappropriate. Most people don't recognize this but employeers look at it and even if you change once you decide to get "serious" about life, there's always the google cache, archive.org or waybackmachine. It's a double edged sword.
• I agree with the comment immediately above this about it being a double-edged sword. I am a recruiter, and I always, always ego-surf my candidates on Google by name and by e-mail address. You'd be surprised at how often people talk themselves out a job without ever speaking to me.
• I have a Google result for myself from when I was 17 which I can't seem to get rid of! It isn't profane or dangerous, but I get a lot of comments about it from potential employers, because hey, when you're a cocky teenager, you'll say anything. I think I'm building my own Website in order to knock that one out of the top 10.

Social networking is sleezy

• thefacebook helps me remember birthdays and contact information. It has never ever facilitated any kind of networking, social or otherwise. I have never made new friends or learned about a job position because I was on thefacebook. Yes, it helps with hook ups but if you are a girl why don't you just go to a bar and go home with a guy?
• Sleazy? Only when you're hunting for a date or a hook-up. I know all of the people who are my Facebook or Friendster friends, so I don't feel like I'm putting myself at risk to put up my location (although I leave off my street address and cell phone).
• Networking requires time and effort, which is not the MO of thefacebook, friendster, and god forbid myspace. I've learned to rely on the Stanford Alumni Network for career advice and mentors and I go to parties/events where I get to meet and connect with people face-to-face. You can't pull a quick fix when it comes to networking.

Social networking is huge.

• Every one of us uses TheFacebook or Friendster. Most of us log in every day. What do we do there? First, we look around to see any new messages. Then we check our friends to see who's updated their profile (TheFacebook tells us who has new info). We also click through photos, which also let us see the names of people in them (anyone can tag them).
• This is one way of staying in touch with people--we can read friends' profiles and see their photos, and we can leaves messages on their "wall" for everyone to see.
• I've registered with all the fun social networks and all the professional social networks (ie, linkedin.com). However, as a recent graduate of college, I don't really use them anymore.
• We use facebook to keep up on people's birthdays (it notifies you). People say happy birthday to friends they haven't talked to since grade school.
• There are too many different, fragmented social networks. I know some people on Friendster, some on MySpace, some on Facebook, but not much overlap between them. My friends who use other sites for their social networks send me annoying emails all the time trying to get me to join their network.
• What some people call "networking" would much more accurately be called "stalking." This is the true aim of the vast majority of facebook, myspace, etc. users.
• I am a big believer in the wisdom of the masses. Get lots of smart, interested people in the same place, allow them to talk with each other, and they will come up with some pretty amazing things. As long as the tool doesn't get co-opted, the community generally self regulates (i.e. digg.com).

There's a difference between social networks

• MySpace is becoming a replacement for personal email. It's incredibly ugly and poorly strung together, but since so many 'normal' people are using it (aka non-geeks) one is likely to find old friends who haven't dedicated thier lives to a career involving a monitor and keyboard.
• Friendster lost the battle to MySpace due to personalization (or lack thereof).
• Some of us use TheFacebook to find attractive people. This is much more common on MySpace, though.
• I don't know why, but I don't think most Bay area people don't use Myspace.
• Myspace has lots of 13-yr-old girls pretending to be 16 (the minimum age you have to be to "officially" be on the site).
• On TheFacebook, you know most of your "friends." On Myspace, it's very possible that you've never met a large percentage of your "friends."
• MySpace is known for having lots of pages that advertise 'hooking up' offline for older folks. Uhh...gross.
• Friendster died. Myspace is for little girls, old perverts, and bands trying to make it. Facebook is good for college and for doing background checks on people. Linked in is good for post-college people that are more interested in making professinal connections than anything else.
• Each site has its own flavor, as the above post mentions. Within sites, though, there are a variety of different user types. For example, there are people who use it simply to look up friends and contact each other. Others use it as a game: "How many friends can I get?"
• "Facebook-stalking" is the new "Google-stalking."
• Myspace is for fifteen-year-olds. Some of my friends have sold out to it, but I never will -- it's just so ugly and weird. For bands, it's great, but that's the only thing I use it for. (And to laugh at the profiles of reality TV contestants, of course.)
• I put the uses of social networking into three categories: practical, narcissistic, and voyeuristic.

In the practical sense, Facebook allows me to remember the birthdays of fellow members, find lost or unknown email addresses, reconnect with old friends or learn about cool events. Myspace also helps with these, although its formatting is terrible, and a lot of people inexplicably use Facebook messaging in lieu of traditional email. That, or they mistake comment boards for message boxes.

Of course, these services are also great media for narcissism and voyeurism. The latest party can be memorialized on facebook almost as soon as it's happened, with unlimited photo storage for the time being. Myspace is more of a voyeur's service - you don't need to be a friend to view a profile, in most cases, and it's also a great way to find out who's pregnant, living someplace really random, married, or something more scandalous. It's also a barometer of how terrible many people are at spelling, grammar, and basic design. Please, folks: "ur" and "lol" are not words.

The internet isn't just fostering social networking online

• As online social networking threatens to choke off any chance of actual physical contact between people, real-life networking is picking up steam. E.g., MeetUp, Stirr.

Banner ads are stupid

• We don't click banner ads. They suck.
• I don't even see ads when I visit pages
• I also don't see them because I use Adblock to block them in my browser
• Targeted advertising is the best form of internet advertising (right now).
• I know that's how all these websites make their money, but I don't even see them anymore. I don't block them using a software solution, my eyes totally ignore them.
• Do companies still use banner ads? I block them with Firefox, but even when I can't do that, I completely ignore them. I don't do it conciously, they just don't even regsiter for me when I visit a website. Flash ads, on the other hand, are a good way to make sure that I never visit your site again.

Banner ads are not just stupid, they are counterproductive

• I block banner ads with Firefox and Adblock.
  • I even go so far as to deny access to known ad servers by blocking them in my hosts file. It really speeds up surfing!
  • Every once in a while, a site tries to "force" me to go to an as server first. At that point I usually block them, too. I don't need to bother with any web service that doesn't understand that it's not about "them," it's about me.

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