Boztopia.com

Reading up on the ins and outs of LiveJournal’s employee purge got me pondering a larger topic–the idea of the continuing evolution of interactions on the Web. As some of the Valleywag commenters note, what makes LJ unique is that it’s not strictly a blogging platform or a social network, but a hybrid of both. You can meet new people and share interests, or you can just keep your own little private corner for yourself and/or a few close friends. I really haven’t seen its particular structure duplicated anywhere else on the Web, and it’s a shame to see it struggling when it was one of (if not the) first systems to really take advantage of this brave new Web.

But even the dominant social networks–MySpace and Facebook–are facing hard times thanks to the loss of their primary revenue system (advertising), and the relentless drive to turn all of that human interaction into a profit engine.

Where is it all heading?

Some say it’s turning into a psuedo-Darwininan battle for survival as “social media experts” and other assorted douche rags breathlessly predict the end of blogging and the (de)volution of social networking into the Twitter model, where every emotion can be expressed in no more than 140 characters.

But I disagree. I think all of these different social networks, blogs, and models can survive and thrive alongside each other, because each one caters to a different need or want of the user. They fail, in fact, when they try to become all things to all people.

Right now I’m on a bunch of social networks–LiveJournal, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Plaxo–plus my own blog. Each of these provides a particular niche service that I use for a particular need. LiveJournal helps me if I want to share private thoughts with my friends, thanks to its adaptable privacy settings. LinkedIn I use for business contacts and networking. Facebook is like a high school reunion where literally everyone is invited, even if they never went to your high school. I’ve seen people connect with me from every phase of my life thus far while using it. Twitter gives me a chance to share quick links, random thoughts, and news bites in an acceptable fashion that won’t clog your RSS feed or friends list. Plaxo…well, I’m not sure why I’m on that one.

And my blog is, pardon the pun, my space. It’s my forum to share my thoughts with the larger world, to expand and expound on the issues of the day in the hope of enlightening, amusing, or entertaining you, dear reader. It’s long past the point where blogging, by itself, can be a successful full-time profession, and I have no expectation of making money at it. The most successful bloggers either run group blogs now, leverage their expertise into paid consultancies or full-time jobs, or write books and publish columns in addition to their blogging. Beyond that top tier, it’s a long hard struggle to get enough people reading you to charge any type of advertising rate you can live on, and the economy is only making things worse.

But–speaking only for myself–I continue to do it because I love it. I love sharing my thoughts with the world and love watching people discuss, argue, and ponder what I’ve said. It goes back to something Kos himself said in “Taking On The System”–even your small niche matters in the long run. If you have only 200 readers, and yet every one of those readers–hell, if even half of them–is motivated to take action based on something you do, it’s worth it.

Social networks make this path to activism even easier. It’s hella simple to form a group on Facebook for almost any purpose, and those numbers can’t be ignored when you’re trying to take the pulse of a particular issue. But beyond the activism itself is the “why,” the context, the need to understand the ins and outs of an issue. Both Facebook and MySpace have the tools for longer, fuller conversations than just simple status updates, but neither platform really lends itself to that, and they shouldn’t try.

In fact, one reason why I oppose this relentless push to “monetize” (Lord, how I hate that mangled misuse of language) social networking is that it will drive real discussion and debate away. Advertisers know that the lowest common denominator sells–sex, sleaze, and snark–and anything more thoughtful or substantive will scare them off. The more social networking becomes a platform to get people clicking on ads, the less relevance it will have, and the faster the early adopters and hipsters will move on to the next new hot thing.

We’re witnessing the demise of the print journalism industry as we speak, but we shouldn’t assume blogging will always be here to stay now. Who knows what it’ll be like in five years? Will Twitter even exist? Will we have micro-blurbs of information beamed directly into our cerebral cortex via implants in our brains? I don’t know. But what I do know is that the need for interaction will always exist, and there should always be multiple platforms for that need to be fulfilled. The platforms we use to interact will change, and our interactions will change with them. Telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and so on — and the Internet is no exception.

MySpace is what it is and shouldn’t try to be more serious. Same with LinkedIn. There should be–and probably always will be–specific meeting places for different tribes, be they professional business networkers or freaks and geeks trying to sell their new album. When people start thinking that their particular network can be all things to all people, that’s how you end up with a perfectly good platform sold off to a bunch of Russian gangsters, because the previous buyers just wouldn’t leave it alone and let it do what it was built to do.

There is such a thing as overthinking a problem. Write your blog, post on your LJ, send your friends status updates on Facebook, and rest easy knowing that in five years, everything will be different and we’ll be grousing about how [insert new technology] isn’t nearly as cool as what we did back in the day.