Social Networking - What the providers want.

Having picked up on a few links about the current situation many of us have experienced, I found out a few facts mentioned about both platforms.


In a press release by Mr Yang, it seems Yahoo's original intention for Y360 was to build a user base that made use of recommending links to other pages. I guess this mean't the blog roll. Not so much a blogging platform, but more a sharing of links that was intended to work like del.icio.us and its counterparts. I think its called social bookmarking or something.

When I raised an issue of security at Multiply, the reply I saw posted referred to the fact that the Multiply platform mission was more of a place for folk to link up with family and so called "real" acquaintances. That's the reason set at Multiply defaults to real names people sign up with. They didn't expect people to link up with unknown cyber friends in the way many folk do on other social networking platforms.




It's kind of ironic really that I have far more friends that I know offline at Facebook than I do anywhere else. I guess that's because they have the lions share of the market at the moment. I retain a presence there for that reason alone. I don't care for the functionality of the place really. OK, so playing the widget games is fun for a while, but it's not what I'm really in to.

I guess the point is, we the users have missed the point. Or maybe we call the shots by deciding what we want out of the product. It must be frustrating for the guys that champion these products to see that we, the users, rather spoil their mission statement.