Comments on: Social networking fatigue

By: Mike Lambert

Mike Lambert — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:00:53 +0000

I thoroughly recommend “In Search of Stupidity – over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters” by Merrill R Chapman (Apress). It is an excellent account of how companies managed to drive themselves out of business, covering many names from the past…..

By: Matthew

Matthew — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:05:35 +0000

Integration is an interesting question. I too have a LinkedIn and Facebook profile and most certainly don’t want them integrated. They represent work and play aspects of my life that I would like to keep seperate.

A bit of a plug here I’m afraid but, Karen Lawrence Oqvist in her BCS books ‘Virtual Shadows: Privacy in the Information Society’ also suggests that integrating networks is not always such a great idea. Given that these networks contain highly personal information that we may otherwise want complete control of, integration can lead to an increased risk of privacy breaches and much more effective identity theft.

At the moment there is a great deal of concern over integrating data collected by the government on various databases. Many of these concerns still exist when the data is collected by us and put into various different databases.

By: John Royle

John Royle — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:17:02 +0000

I agree that interoperability and integration is key bus as important is good a job they do at making these service available through mobile devices. I use my iPhone for most of my social networking these days and some do a really good job whilst the ones that don’t I find I don’t turn to as much.

By: Steve Burrows

Steve Burrows — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:49:05 +0000

Colin, you’re right that the proliferation is a problem, and I restrict myself to two – LinkedIn and occasionally Facebook for exactly this reason. And you’re right that integration will be a major factor in determining which social networking tools survive – but only because integration will become a key differentiator in user adoption – and “Web 2.0″ is essentially about integration.

I think your analogy with Word and WordPerfect is wrong – Wordperfect was slow on the uptake of the windows GUI, and implemented it in a much less user-friendly than MS Word, meaning that during the early adoption of Windows users found it much easier to achieve their desired document formatting in Word rather than WordPerfect or WordStar for Windows. It was this, rather than integration (which in the early releases of MS Office was very weak) that turned the masses away from WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase and the other previously market-leading packages. So it was not the value to corporate IT departments of integration that changed the world, it was the ease of use perceived by end users that made the difference. The corporate IT departments fell in line with the new world later (as they almost always do!).

Cheers, Steve