A Social Networking Platform that’s Useful
Posted on July 12, 2007 by Ben Cecka
Unless you live in a closet, you’ve probably heard of MySpace (think Fox). Then, there’s Facebook, Orkut, and many more. In my opinion, once they really push to monetize their platform, they fall apart. The online advertisers get in, work some magic, and the interface turns into a clicking billboard. I love Facebook for its clean look and non-customizable profiles (the absolute bane of MySpace), but when they decided to open up their platform for developers we’re already seeing much more clutter than before.
Now, where was I going with this? Ah, yes. Geni. It’s in beta right now, but showing more promise than any social network I’ve seen. Why? Because even as they begin to monetize it down the road, it still performs a much more important function of putting you into perspective with your genealogy. On top of that, it still carries all the expected profile information that one would see on every other social network application out there today. What’s that? You say you don’t like your family? Well, go have fun on MySpace then.
Technorati Tags: genealogy, geni, social network
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2 Responses to “A Social Networking Platform that’s Useful”
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My family and I are so disconnected… something that brought up how little we communicate would be really depressing to me. However, I do love Facebook. I think the new developer stuff for Facebook have both positive and negative facets. First, people can network in different ways, such as iLike for music, video networking, movie/book sharing, and such things. The clutter is a little bit of a downfall, but I think that it is inevitable to have more and more things as you develop a stronger persona online. In the end, facebook from the beginning had these little apps, they’ve just now classified them as such (think facebook’s long running photo sharing app, note/blogging app, etc.) They just add features. I don’t think it is as nearly controlling or obtrusive as MySpace is. Kind of like networking by genealogy, it networks by social realms in real life… which is also a good thing about it, detracting from social-networking predators.
You make some good points about the focus of the network itself. I’m purposefully looking past the “keeping friends connected” aspect of the other networks out there. I point out Geni because of the fact that it is so fundamentally different than all of the other networks available today. Whether a family is connected or not, I still believe this a really cool tool to put your family history into perspective (and maybe even rekindle). Today, Facebook is nowhere near the crap that we know as MySpace (hence why I still have an account there), but in just a short period of time I’ve noticed some slightly disturbing changes. Thanks for the discussion!