PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

If you’re anything like me, full to bursting with tasks, projects, deadlines, sidelines, errands, meetings, presentations, or to quote Jennifer Saunders of AbFab as she sulked before a judge, “trying to get from A to B, do a little shopping,” you’ll understand how delighted I was to discover, via my colleague Mike O’Toole, that even Nicholas Carr, prognosticator on giant social workplace and IT trends, had issued a white flag on Web 2.0, to wit:

“I just don’t have time to use all of these amazing apps, and I’m guessing you might not too. I’m a fairly typical web citizen. I’m 28, married, make a reasonable wage, own a house and I have a few close friends. You’d think I’d be a web app company’s dream, but I’m not. How come? I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either.”

Within seconds came this reply from my colleague Scott, whom I found blogging in the middle of lunch:

“FYI, the quote was actually from Ryan Carson, quoted in Nicholas Carr’s blog. Carson did say that he’s too busy for a lot of those purely “social” networks, but he went on to say:

I believe there is a huge market for more web apps that are aimed at users like me. We’ve got specific problems that need to be solved and we’re willing to pay good money for solutions. There are a few really good apps that are heading in this direction:

Basecamp - Helps me organize my life
LinkedIn - Connects me with people for business networking
You Tube - Takes the pain out of online video
Flickr - Enables me to share my life with my mom who lives thousands of miles away
Recent launch buildv1.com also looks interesting.”
To which Scott added, “Don’t celebrate just yet, Ebeneezer.”

Appropriately smarting and flailing around for my walker, I was saved by an acquaintance who works in the biz and took my side more firmly by adding: “And who are these 54% of 35-year-old-and-ups who maintain MySpace pages? There can’t be that many pedophiles out there, are there?”

All joking aside, Richard Siklos had some bracing comments on the same points in yesterday’s New York Times, where he covered Big Media’s crush on social networking sites and user-generated content: “I wouldn’t want to join any social networking Web site that would want me as a member. You might say I am into antisocial networks.”
Indeed, MySpace was sued last week by several families who accused it of negligence and recklessness, after predators were introduced to their daughters on the site. As Siklos goes on to say, “If you are part of the social networking wave, you will have all of the ‘friends’ you can handle. The invite is the new handshake. Get ready for a lot of opportunities to join all kinds of networks – and, one hopes, some appropriately Webby new way to politely say, ‘No, thank you.’”

I realize that I’m not 25 and searching for my mate online any longer, and I love listening to a podcast as much as the next knowledge worker, but some form of social bowing-out to most social media may have to do for me. To be honest, I still haven’t sent out this year’s holiday cards yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 4:34 am and is filed under Interactive, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.