Large-scale social networks are in vogue today. Orkut, Facebook, MySpace and plethora of others have taken the world by storm. Everybody seems to have an account on every network. Though Pakistanis seem to use such networks to find friendships with the girls, who normally are themselves boys, trying to cajole girls or boys, but most of the people, use it to interact for knowledge, business, job search, trade, news and views sharing etc.
Group interaction has got a new semantic due to social network. From table, to telephone, to email, this new media has made things more interactive, agile and interesting and beneficial too. Social networking sites have done wonders in the communication and group discussions. Groups in such sites are a run-time effect. The groups’ beauty is that they are dynamic and unexpected and hence are implemented as generic entity. Social networks don’t really anticipate what the groups will do, in advance. They don’t impose any restrictions inherently, but only moral obligations are there.
Social networks are a unique blend of groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, and each cadre of group is fanatically committed. People often enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people. These bonds often transcends the intellectual aspects of the humans.
But as these social networks are virtual and cannot replace the physical touch, one tends to get bored with them. They sometime don’t do it anymore for you. You wish to be someplace else rather. You wish you would be at home sleeping or watching TV, or with friends watching cinema or have a chitchat. Sometimes you are plain done with the SNs.
Social networks allow a new kind of ubiquity. You could be present at many places at the same time. This offers new vistas of collaboration and communication. These kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who’s in a room can be online together at the same time, can lead to new patterns. Patterns which are still under-exploited and under-explored.
But there is a very stern work of caution. You can certainly make groups in the social network with a great ease, but it doesn’t mean that you would get the success for sure, with ease. If you go into groups present at Facebook or Orkut and you analyze the subscriptions to the groups, it is, unsurprisingly, a law of luck. There’s a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category. So it’s not like a cake recipe. There’s nothing you can do to make it come out right every time. But its worth a try.
