Linkin, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo etc…

I am "sometimes" asked if I have a profile on MySpace, Facebook, Linkin etc... and I get a couple emails every month from varies people inviting me to be added to their profile as a "friend". So, I thought I would clarify why I rarely answer or take action to any of those requests.

I do have a profile with almost any social network on the internet (I know of 118 different ones) - including all the big ones. The main reason why I signed up is not to use them, but to see what it is all about. It is the same with Second Life, where I have an "avatar", just to figure what that was about.

But, I do not use any social networks as part of my daily work. I already got the biggest profiles of all right here on Baekdal.com. It is extremely flexible, I can do whatever I want with it - and more importantly I am fully in control of my personal information.

So, in short - my "social profile" is located here on my site...

There are 5 reasons why I don't use social networks:

Lack of trust and control. I simply do not trust the social networks and the people within them to protect my digital identity. I know how important it is to protect a digital identity and more so the value of protecting and targeting your personal brand.
There are close friends and then there is somebody that just knows me. The second problem is that while I am perfectly comfortable with telling my close friends and family about all the wacky things that I do, it is not something I want everyone else to be able to see. The current social networks do not differentiate between close friends and anyone else (all of them is called friends). I am not a teenager anymore, I might want to tell my friends if I am looking for a date, but I am sure not going to publish that all over the internet (I am not that desperate :o)).
Crap. Let's face it, 90% of all the things going on in social networks is just crap. Facebook is the worst I have experience so far - my front page is filled with junk.
I am already online. A lot of people use social networks to store and manage contacts, photos, things to remember, things to do or just to be online so people can find you. But I already got this site, and I have a special area (not public and password protected) of this site that is synchronized with certain offline content (contacts, to-do's, ideas etc.). There is really no advantage for me to move all that information to a system that I do not fully control (or trust).
Most of my friends are not "social networkers". They are not people who live on the internet (like me). They are physiotherapist, artists, school "teacher" (in a sense), electricians, marketing professional, authors etc. 98% of them do not know what Facebook is (or rather, they know what it is, but they have never visited the site - and frankly are not likely to ever do so). But, a few of them use Twitter and many of them use Flickr - but like me, Facebook and MySpace seems too much like a site for adults pretending to be teenagers.

The only sites that I do use myself are Flickr, YouTube and I do have a secret Twitter account which I update on rare occasions.

Note: I am seriously considering switching from YouTube to Blip.tv because of the much improved quality and more flexible and usable feature set.

Comments

Ben Sinclair - Jan. 12, 2008

I'm the developer of a site that is possibly the "anti social network," at least from what you've described. It doesn't feature friends lists, or any of the fluff from the sites you mentioned.

Most of our users are professionals, and we make our profiles as clean and sane as possible.

Here's my page if you'd like to check it out: http://bigsight.org/ben_sinclair

Jonathan - Jan. 12, 2008

You appear to have a highly unusual demographic amongst your friends. Research that would indicate that if 98% of your friends "do not know what Facebook is" yet "a few of them use Twitter" then you would have no friends at all.

In short, I think you're exaggerating wildly on this point.

Thomas Baekdal - Jan. 12, 2008

Actually, in this case you are wrong. Of all the people on the net, only about 7% use Social Networking sites. And, since only 19.4% of the world population is online, the total amount of people being "social networkers" is only 1.2% of the entire world population.

Of curse, if we look at things in USA and here in Denmark, the image is slightly different. The internet population is about 73% of the population in each country, but the "social networking" share is about the same. In which case the social networking share is 4.6% of the entire population of each country.

Although there is a lot of talk about social networkers on the net, they are still very much a minority.

Thomas Baekdal - Jan. 12, 2008

BTW: Here is the graph exclusively for Facebook (based on statistics reported directly by Facebook).

Facebook got about 60,000,000 users. There are currently 6,606,970,200 people in the world, of which 1,262,032,700 people are online. This means that Facebook is "only" used by 0.9% of the world population.

Jonathan - Jan. 14, 2008

Social networks are indeed used by comparatively few people on line, but my point was that of those that use Twitter, there would be very few, if any, who do not know what Facebook is.

Thomas Baekdal - Jan. 14, 2008

I do know of any surveys that have tested how many who use Twitter also use Facebook (I am not sure any exists). And I do not think such a comparison makes much sense. What you use is very much the result of what your friends are using.

From my personal experience I see no link between Facebook users and Twitter users - in fact none of my friends that use Twitter also use Facebook.

Steve - Jan. 14, 2008

Early adopters are also influencers. I actually did send you an invite from Linked-In a while back because I enjoy your (quality) site and quite certain the few select "friends" in my network would like to learn about you too. I follow the site so often I mistakenly thought I knew you... ;) You're missing out on "they tell 27 friends... but I understand your point. I think most professionals in our positions use "realms" to segment marketing noise from bona fide colleagues.

Linked-In is the only network I use and I don't publish ANY info there that I wouldn't be comfortable seeing published in a paper (now or ever)...I always presume at some point they'll go evil or get hacked.

I guess I'm not a "social" as most. Never gave FB or MS a second look...most obviously consumer crap from the start.

Thomas Baekdal - Jan. 14, 2008

Hi Steve,

I did actually see your invitation (and I just accepted it), but I do (or did) not use linked-in (as you can see above).

Part of the reason why is that I have more than enough work already and the prospect of getting more work through linked-in seemed at bit overwhelming.

But I received an email today from a person who wanted to point out that the reason why I should use Linked-in is not only to create relations, but also to make it easy for other people to keep their contact information about me up-to-date.

That made think about my involvement with Linked-in. So, from today, I have decided to remove Linked-In from my list of "social networks that is wasting my time", and accept the invitations people have sent me.

This means that my active Social Network Profile currently include: Flickr, Blip.tv, and Linked-In.

BTW: I am not in any way saying that I am turning away from social networks. As I wrote in my trends for 2008, I think one the things that is going to increase is that we will see more social network initiatives targeted at people who are not teenagers. When that happens, my involvement with Social Networks is also likely to increase.

paranoiaparadise - Feb. 29, 2008

I don't want to make any publicity for social networks, but I really love the idea of stumbleUpon. You can get in touch with people that have similar interests and you can surf on pages you would never find elsewhere. I even use stumbleUpon as search engine - well that works only for some kind of searches though...

But still I agree with you, that most social networks are just crap;-)

Thomas Baekdal - Feb. 29, 2008

I also like to read stumpleupon pages, but I cannot see myself using it (nor do I have time for it).

LULU - Apr. 25, 2008

HI... H R U?

MY NAME IS LULU ...... MY LOVE IS GOGO ..... AND I LOVE HIM ...... I LIVE IN KUWAIT ........

I WISH HAPPY TIME FOR U

LULU

Anonymous - May. 2, 2008

Hi Thomas, I dropped on your site while trying to find out some stats on how many Danes use facebook. Very interesting to read why you do not use social networks. I fully agree with it.

What I really cannot understand is why people put thier kids photos on facebook or thier private photos to share with the whole world.

Being in wireless profession and traveling across the world one cannot survive without being online.. Atleast thats what I feel.

So one should be very careful in putting thier private and personal information on such networks you have no idea where it will be used.