Friendster, one of the buzz sites on the web last summer, has taken a lot of flack of late. Analysts have (quite rightly) noted that the form of ‘social networking’ it represents is neither all that new, nor all that natural. For much of its existence, the internet has been a space which allowed social networking, whether that was through email listservs, usenet newsgroups, or more recently blogs and other websites. That’s nothing new. Similarly, the desire to make explicit the web of personal connections we each carry can be fun, but after a while such formalisation seems to remove something of the informality and spontaneity of friend-of-a-friend meetings.
In many ways, Friendster felt like an interesting experiment which fitted well with the net population’s love of a fad, but not a major contribution to the development of social software or the internet’s role in society. Recent work with sites such as Orkut have attempted to develop and refine the same general model as Friendster, but they continue to have that same feel of ‘fad’.
But every now and again fads can turn out to have unexpectedly useful implications. Margin Revolution flagged up the existence of Nuride which is exploiting similar ideas to the ‘social networking’ sites to connect people together to car-pool.
It remains to be seen whether Nuride’s business model is sustainable (they intend to pay people to share their cars) but regardless of that, this sort of practical application is precisely what the social networking scene needs. It’s a service which could have been provided offline, but that makes so much more sense online. The internet should allow it to scale and achieve a proliferation that would be very difficult to achieve any other way, and when combined with some sort of reputation system (think ebay’s user feedback, but more nuanced) there could potentially be some allowance for a sense of security.
I for one will be eager to see if this works.