There's a very good article entitled "Five reasons social networking doesn't work" on CNET. For those of you lacking the terminology, "social networking" is yet another buzzword which makes no sense. It basically is any website that promotes social interaction (umm, hello, the Internet?) ... Friendster, Face Book, Livejournal, and Delicious are all sites that are considered "social networking" sites. (I do believe Tabulas is also considered a social networking site)

As ironic as it sounds, I'm not a huge believer in the social networking phenomenom. That's not to say I don't believe in the power of the Internet in connecting people and distributing information efficiently ... those are both fundamental tenets for me. What I don't believe in is creating websites that specifically exist for the purpose of emphasizing your cliques or connections between people. This is what's ludicrous to me.

If you think about it, we're still rather at a very crude phase of the Internet. Visions and goals are not in sync with the realities of developing the technology, so many websites have ugly "hacks" around it. To me, the very concept of having to go to a site and specifically list your friends is anathema. I'm going to take a wild guess, but I seriously doubt anybody goes around in real life categorizing their friends and specifically listing who is connected to whom. Specifically listing your friends is an issue for control freaks - in real life, we don't need to explicitly state our friends.

So how does this apply to the web and "social networking?" I've always taken the stance that social networking needs to be handled "behind the scenes" by computers. This is getting a bit far beyond my skills, but sites should be able to figure out who is friends with whom by the metainformation generated by the user. For example, the fact that I constantly reference Terrence and Yush in my posts is a sure indication that I consider them a "friend." I'm sure most of you who read this journal are aware of who my friends are, and I've never had to explictly make a list of them. This is the way social networking sites should work.

In fact, I seriously doubt the necessity of even having sites that exist solely for the purpose of creating social networks. As the Internet matures and standards like FOAF catch on, computers can begin to figure out who is linked to whom and create a Friendster that isn't bound to a single company ... the Internet itself will serve as one massive social community!

I've always developed Tabulas as a tool for individuals - there's a few community features (which I've always wanted to expand), but the reason why Tabulas will succeed in the future is because it simply does offer reasons why people use the site. Look at the (superlame) slogan I use: "Tabulas: Chronicle your Life." Tabulas is about letting people efficiently document and share stuff about their lives ... and meanwhile I use all the metainformation generated by Tabulas to create "true" social networks.

Remember the moods metadata I generated? Remember the interesting referrals data that showed who the "true" supernodes of the Tabulas community were? Sure, they are both incredibly crude implementations of what I think social networking should be, but you get the idea.