Lessons from iMeme

The opening panel (“Platforms for the Next Net”) risked making us feel old, at least when we were listening to Mark Zuckerberg talk about Facebook. The first MyMeme segment guaranteed it: seventeen-year-old Catherine Cook, co-founder of myYearbook.com, was definitely the youngest person at the conference.

The thing about myYearbook.com is, somebody had to do it. Where are the kids going to go, after all, now that their parents are invading Facebook in droves?

Back when Facebook was restricted to universities and a few select corporations, the founder of LinkedIn described it as “MySpace for grown-ups.” In reality, most people on MySpace these days are not kids. Nevertheless, most social networks seem to be designed for students, not for people in business. This goes for Second Life, as well: the thing that put me off right from the start was having to choose a made-up name for my avatar.

The ubiquitous word “friend” is particularly problematic. Not everyone that I know is a friend. Certainly not everyone I’ve exchanged a couple of e-mails or blog comments with is a friend. Not all of my clients are friends, nor everyone who belongs to the same professional organizations. While notably lacking in terminology appropriate to the thousands of independent consultants out there, LinkedIn at least uses the neutral and appropriate term “connections” and offers several possibilities for ways you might know a person that you want to connect with: colleague, classmate, business partner, friend, or “other.”

Even teens might like a way to differentiate between the people who are really friends and those who have a more distant relationship. Certainly they don’t want to add their parents to their list of friends. “Family” seems like an obvious sort of category, but it rarely appears in either contact management software or social networking sites. (Flickr has managed to include it; perhaps it’s easier to think in terms of family with reference to sharing photos.)

Professionals moving into territory designed for teens, university students, or gamers will always have to rely on workarounds to make these systems fit their needs. It’s like a podcaster dealing with ID3 tags developed for music. “Artist,” “album,” and “track number” don’t quite do it for us, though there’s a general trend toward putting the podcaster’s name under “artist,” the show name under “album,” and the episode number under “track.” Our square corners grate against the round edges of tools that weren’t meant for us.

Despite the essential awkwardness of the fit, many companies and independent professionals put tools like MySpace to good use. More power to them, but between the aesthetics(?) of MySpace and Facebook’s Terms of Service, I’ll stick to the “just the facts, ma’am” approach of LinkedIn, and continue to lobby for the addition of relationships appropriate to independent consultants.

Meanwhile, if everyone over 21 would stay out of myYearbook.com, I’m sure our kids would appreciate it.

Technorati Tags: iMeme, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace