Social networking is underhyped.

I met my wife through the internet, but she was a friend of a friend. Ask most couples how they met and a lot will say they were introduced by a friend. How do I say it? Well I was introduced by a friend!

Social Networking allows people to spend less time talking to people and still feel somewhat connected. There's no use in it except staving off the loss of a friend. I cut all my friends when I left high school, I moved country and I live in Canada. I don't miss a single friend from back in England, 99% of them were people who I'd have on a facebook account and completely avoid talking to.

The way to make social networking sites profitable, is to make people use them frequently enough without draining resources. Google makes a lot of money, because the data use by a single user is tiny. The data use by a Facebook user is huge, my wife probably uses 10 megs of bandwidth every time she checks the site. Yet everytime she hits google, she probably uses 10k of bandwidth from a google server to get where she wants to go.

I am observing the opposite: the mainstream public (looking at my non-techie friends) have been fully exposured to it, had enough of it, and is slowly getting tired of it. We're not talking about early adopters anymore: everybody has an online identity and has learned its limitations and implications.

If anything, social networks are getting boring: outside of your real circle of friends you see the same strangers posing to be smarter, better looking and happier than they really are: people aren't that different after all, and your real social network stays where it has always been: in your cell phone's address book.

And that's where I'll be turning to for an advice about finding a doctor or a car mechanic. I don't give a rat's ass about what "people on the internet" have to say. At least half of them voted for Bush. Twice.