9.02.2008

Worth? Or Not?

In these days social networking service(SNS) is very important word in Silicon Valley. There are many SNS sites in US especially people have a growing interest in Facebook or Cyworld which is the most famous site like Facebook in Korea. These sites base on the reality in off-line and your profile can be seen anyone who want to see it through these sites. If you update your profile or your picture, it will be known your friends who already have relationship with you through internet as soon as you change your information. It’s a terrible imagine which my information get about between anonymous people in real life. However, in on-line, it’s a little different situation people don’t care about their information be known other people. Many people extremely keep a lookout for being invaded other’s interesting in my life, but they are willing to open their information to anonymous people in on-line.

People think they participate in social networking that make relationship with other who come from other countries or never meet before by joining these sites. Did you really make relationship with other who you don’t know her/him? In these sites, you can reorganize your social graph that shows your human relationship in reality. You have relationship in internet base on the reality that you already know or meet before through off-line and that’s form your social graph in on-line. In my case, my friends in Cyworld are all of my friends who meet off-line, it don’t help to extend my social networking through internet. It’s more efficient way to spread my social graph.
In addition, some people predict SNS will be a good marketplace because many people make lots of small groups that are different from the reality. “Experience” will be a keyword to have social relationship with others. People would gather through their interesting and it will extend your social graph. Furthermore, this social graph will be a target to company which want to sell their products only defined people.

Is there really worth Facebook or Cyworld are received popularity?
I already had made one homepage in Cyworld but I can’t sure that Cyworld is worth to get reputation to change our life. What is the truly “change our life”? I think the really technology have to harmony with human. It means that technology would make the better society in positive aspect. When social networking service really overcome the limitation of making human relationship like on-line relationship has strong link between people, Facebook and Cyworld can gain genuine reputation to extend our social graph.

2 comments:

Julie said...

Hello !

Thank you for your blogpost ! It made me think about something... When you spoke about "harmonizing" virtual social networks and real-life networks, do you mean that the more tools we invent to communicate with each other, the less we actually do communicate?

Do you think that relationships on Facebook and other similar networks are shallow and void of meaning?
What about a use of these networks in the business world or more specifically within a company, to fasten the way information is passed ?

Jacques_pah said...

I have not used Cyworld but I have used Facebook. Most people I know off-line, I add them to my facebook's friend list. I think it really depends on your purpose of using these sites. Facebook has the feature "people you may know" to add people that your friends are befriended with. You might know the person but never get the chance to say "hi". Thus, facebook is the social initiation for some people. Sometimes I created relationship with people not living nearby. When I come visit their town, I have a person to show me around :)