The proliferation of networking sites.

[randomness]

I have a rule that I only join these things when someone I know invites me, and I never invite people who aren't already on the system. (I've had these rules since sixdegrees.com.) For me, that seems to strike a balance between not snubbing my friends and not spamming them.

Other people have different rules, like never joining any of them, or sending invitations to everyone they can think of; I can respect that.

The damn sites are proliferating wildly. The Social Networking Services Meta List has a whole raft of these things.

It just amazes me how many of these things there are.

I don't put any personal info in the things because I can't be bothered--it's not paranoia, just tedium--for one thing, my info is changing too often for me to keep up. In fact, I haven't bothered posting a picture for a while, either.

Every one of these things seems to have its own hook and its own particular lameness. Part of me wishes sixdegrees had figured out a business model so there wouldn't be so damn many of these sites. Then again, there might still be. I also wish there were some way to aggregate these links (is there?) but evidently everyone's playing the proprietary database game.

Any of them come up with a good way to make money yet?

Comments

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

the fact that there are already a few blogging sites that have enough market share that they aren't forced to interoperate

So, I can't actually tell what market share they have. The Meta List people have done some traffic analysis on dating sites, but I don't know if they've done more than that.

you can expect me to start noticing stuff you post now.

Wheee! :)