This nibble in the morning email is a tad ironic and worth a blog-note:

Thomas Power wants to be your connection on LinkedIn ... If you are not sure whether to accept or decline, please review the opportunities and responsibilities involved in a LinkedIn connection after Thomas's message to you below.

Yes, the Thomas 'ecademy' Power, world famous millionaire biz-guru power networker and yes, actually, I do know Thomas from several involved episodes to do with the evolution of his ecademy over it's past two or maybe even three years (Thomas: Has it been that long!) but what's kind of amusing is (a) a self-professed 'power' networker (or is it a pun?) is exactly the sort of chronic connection hound LinkedIn is supposed to avoid and (b) isn't business power-networking supposed to be what Thomas' own ecademy.com is all about? So is he checking out the competition? Or conceding a match point?

I noticed that you are also using LinkedIn. I'd be happy to recommend you to the people I know. If you feel the same, please accept my invitation to connect networks. I'll only pass requests on to you from people I trust, and I hope you'll do the same for me.

- Thomas

Whatever it is, I notice that Thomas has already knocked up over 440 LinkedIn contact points using only the canned stock faux-introduction instead of expending the extra care to be customizing the robo-note even peripherally, but then you don't get to be a famous power networker with thoughtful personal service, you get there with volume :) Nonetheless, count my blessings, if anyone in my network wants to meet him, we're linked now, so you just pop me a line and I'll hook you up ...

While I'm at it, when orkut comes back up, I'll invite him. What they hey, eh? More the merrier and all.

And therein my friends a lucid clue to the immanent total failure of all the me-too social networking products currently flooding the online service market ...

the failure of the social network sites

And yes, I do think they will fail, it's inevitable. Whether by intentional design or by blind emulations, these new black-book stop-shops all share several dubious characteristics:

• they are not social networks, only flat-taxonomy directories of questionaire replies, and badly designed questionaires at that.
• because they do not interoperate, because they cannot share data or interchange or allow identity migrations, they are essentially anti social, building protectionist walls around people (called 'clubs' or 'communities' but really meaning the opposite)
• they don't work.

So why don't they work? Because they are not social networks.

A social network is a network with a social cause, a social reason for being. Social networks fill a niche need for interaction. Church clubs, business clubs, square-dance clubs, these form natural, anthropologically sound social networks with the intelligent self-organization moving from the local (chapter) out to the regional and then clustering still beyond. They are also self-governing, electing their executives from grassroots, organizing on the need to expand the social network.

Online, USENET is a social network, and it works remarkably, even in the face of spam. USENET too chooses its purposes with intention, elects a self-rule executive and also collects somewhat in cascading local-group clusters (as members discover regional cohorts, or by the design of regional hierarchies). True, USENET is not so self-determining and grassroots as a traditional business club, but perhaps this is why it's not really very wildly successful.

And purpose is a fuzzy and slippery topic. As someone noted in another context, the mascot reason for any group is largely peripheral to the social interaction; trekkies only relatively rarely talk about Star Trek; the theme is mostly a ruse, a spring-board, an excuse for a party, for igniting something else that takes over in a social situation. And that something else is not endless guestbook inter-compliments like a New York socialite convention. That something else is a symbiosis, the realization that we each of us need the others.

Hives, herds and other social beings

That something else is a personal utility that is the pay-off for being in with the club. If all you want is someone to banter with in an online chat or boast a casual encounter with a Thomas Power, then the world abounds with these; mailing lists will do just fine, and, so far as I can tell, mostly the teens and students have the time for this sparing, or, speaking from experience, business people with slack time --- a minority elect have the Tofler idle-time for involved hobbies; the rest of us need to make a living, find a deal, meet someone special, to make a difference, whatever it is, we have a need to pull all such interactions into the context of what we do, and we need to see a gain that fuels our participation.

focussed social networks

So how do we fix social network software? Sure, I have theories. Theories are fun and you can never have too many theories. But I also have a real-world example: Autolinx.

One other problem with the current crop of social network portals is the wish to be all things to all people, to be the universal joints of online communications, and in so doing, they sink to lowest common denominators: Sales people and the lonely date-less both play a probability numbers game collecting contacts wildly, and the impersonal nature of their notching their guns drives the rest away.

Social networks need focus. The square-dance club does not try to attract gardening enthusiasts. They pick their thing, then do it well.

In 1996 I engineered a brief business social network portal. The project, the concept vision of Heather Pirie of Bell Global Solutions and marketed and managed by BGS and Ford Canada, was intended to foster more use of ISDN in the Ontario automotive industry by leading the Ford business partners to discover each other and thereby learn the true value of network communications.

AutoLinx had a pretty simple premise: The directory lists the know who in your corporation (so members could cut direct to the relevent person in your org) and to identify your org, we listed each participating automotive supplier company by the resources they consume and the resources they produce. Autolinx wasn't about connecting personalities for Saturday night pub crawls. Autolinx was all about connecting business roles.

We were also completely upfront about the AutoLinx purpose: It was what we said it was with no secondary subversive business model. We were offering a network for the sole purpose of fostering B2B trade; if you saw increased business value, then the membership was worth renewal. Simple as that. Not a ruse to sell eyeballs to advertisers, just a business club, just like in the bricks and mortar world, we are selling the membership list and use of the digital venue. As a lure and to keep interest up until members discovered the worth, we offered industry news and guest commentary content.

This wasn't the Public Speaking Club with members presenting self-pitches or armchair research to other members. Autolinx was a business club, and with every effort (and a budget) to keep the club interesting. We also had a clear business model: Members pay a tax-deductable (business expense) subscription for a service with clear value (same model as the CAA/AAA automobile clubs), and Bell, of course, would make a little on the side for your use of the ISDN line that enabled your participation. (Autolinx was also a secure private "national intranet" network, completely de-coupled from the Internet, offered initially to Ford's suppliers but also open to the other automotive players; true to their business-innovation roots, Ford was insistant about being inclusive of even their direct competitors.)

keep your eyes on my prize

And it worked because we knew who our audience was and what they needed, and they knew who we were and what we needed. Those listing their business in our directory were intending to be found for those precise roles they play in their enterprise ... and not because they have a poodle on their head or like gay bars and fettucini. This made the game easy to play, with clear rules and guessable keywords: If I need paint, I search the sell side for paint; if I sell glass products, I search on the buying side for "glass" and voila, I have their engineer, their purchasing director and their business manager all together in one little printable package (or downloadable, but there were precious few PDA's back then). True, we hadn't thought of any formal reputation system, but by connecting these businesses in a community of conversation, we simply expected that talk would happen and these things would spontaneously emerge. (in retrospect, an eBay-style list of rated transaction histories would have been brill)

And it's not just this one example. The world and even the online world team with excellent and sustainable social network examples that do not require one master company rule the waves (so they can more effectively monetize your network) --- Social networking can happen with even the simplest of technology, with telephones and email: A friend of mine in a nearby town runs one of the world's largest mailing lists for rug-making (Hookers they call themselves), another once ran a major forum site for a UK soccer team, and both were vibrant, sustainable and essential social network communities, self-organized, constantly in mutual benefit, and focussed --- getting back to one of my first points, that of being isolationist, it's worth a note here to say that the soccer club site community disbanded when the forum software folded whereas, long before FOAF, I have seen many email lists merged and branched seamlessly because there is complete interoperability between their tokens of membership (the email address list).

Contrast all this to the isolated island jack-of-all-swiss-army-knives of ecademy, Ryze and now orkut: I sell internet service interaction design consulting ... who among them do you suppose is buying? Or better still, let's ask this: considering what you sell (whether that's cannibis pet-perks or socio-political revolution), how many keystrokes does it take you to find just one really solid qualified buyer lead and close the deal on each of these networks? (let alone for the moment how an ecademy member might discover and rate an orkut listing)