Flutterby™! : Skipping out on social software

Scotch Night was small last night, I knew it was going to be, but even so I decided to hang out with Leo at the Orbit Room Cafe rather than head down to the Churchill Club event titled Blogging and Social Networking: Who Cares?

I have to admit that I care. While there are still some very interesting questions about the meanings of online relationships versus those that happen face-to-face, and whether the nature of online communication encourages an appearance of deeper trust and compatibility that can never occur in the real world, I think my life is richer for being able to find more people who share some of my non-mainstream perspectives of life.

But generally all of the "social networking" software or attempts to commercialize the blog space in a grander sense than "here's a tool" will fail; the more they label themselves "social software", the more they want to control the social flow, rather than enabling it.

Thus Yahoo Groups will beat Tribe's forums, and I even believe that there will be other distributed technologies which will supplant the "friend of a friend" capabilities of Friendster and Orkut. The one place they may have room is in what Manhattanites so quaintly refer to as "hooking up", but my impression is that Match.com, especially with their distributed personals, has that space pretty well sewn up.

So it was no surprise to me to run into the Venture Blog commentary on last night's event: All Social Networking Panels Are The Same:

"Welcome blah blah blah relationship capital blah blah blah social contracts blah blah blah media businesses blah blah blah identify the rabid fans of the iPod blah blah blah utility media blah blah blah this is the future of the web blah blah blah RSS blah blah blah Spam blah blah blah killer app blah blah blah business model blah blah blah advertising model blah blah blah is this a product or a feature blah blah blah a feature doesn't make a business blah blah blah leveraging relationships blah blah blah ...