Land of the diff(1) fish

I was looking at my email today and noticed that I had received several messages for LinkedIn that I had forgotten about. I don’t use LinkedIn, but my boss and several other people at the company I work for do. I don’t really get the point of LinkedIn and apparently I’m not the only one who doesn’t get it. I talked about this on irc and really came to the conclusion that this isn’t a problem that LinkedIn has. It’s a problem that all social networks have. What they are trying to get at is emulation of the same sort of networking that we do naturally in every day. They try to represent the relationships we form at work, at school, and at home. I find the way that social networks go about this to be unnatural however. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if in return something useful was gained. In the case of Twitter, for example, by forming these relationships, I gain information about the hour to hour existence of my friends and family. I’m not really sure what I get from other places like Facebook or LinkedIn. Pio pointed out to me that ” a lot of people use them as a crutch because they don’t know how to use real internet services”. They allow them to have a single place to post pictures, video, etc. I think a better idea would be for someone to build a site that pull all of these services (Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc) together and provide a single interface for all of them. Maybe someone out there is already doing this and I’m just too lazy to google for it.

Charlene Li talks about this better than I have.