Social Networking Deliver Irritability

In Dysfunctional relationships Jerry Michalski talks about relationship-building and -mining softwares, why they make him irritable and how to improve the situation:

• Helping groups meet and collaborate is a great cause, but why do we have to use so many different, incompatible services? (complexity)
• Making relationships explicit, available to any virtual passerby, creates subtle complications (explicitness)
• I can’t really figure out what to do with the service (usability)

Social networks are not like clockwork mechanisms or income statements. They are full of human beings, with relationships, expectations, and prejudices, and therefore require a gentle hand from management. They do not teach enough of those skills in business schools, and they teach even fewer of them in engineering schools.

Here are three things that would improve the situation markedly:

• openness and integration among all these tools, so services interact smoothly and triple-, quadruple-, or even quintuple-entry of data vanishes.
• more training on how to manage social systems appropriately, so productive relationships can be enhanced, not disrupted; and
• more emphasis on rethinking and improving the basic tools we use to express ourselves, so we cease thinking in 7-bit ASCII email, HTML, and PowerPoint, and start communicating better and building lasting resources together.