Is Minnhock.com the 'Next Big Thing'? It could be...
Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2004 9:26 pm
Why millions are jumping on this online bandwagon ...<br><br>I wasn't going to post # 1,000 until the Spuds won the state championship!<br><br>But waiting for the Spuds to win the State title is like waiting for the asteroid to hit the earth in 30,000 years to obliterate life as we know it on this late, great fine forum of a planet that we live on.<br><br>(I know, jr... you love it.)<br><br>It used to be if you wanted to win more friends (in cyberspace, mind you)... influence more people or make more money, you bought one of those self-improvement tomes and tried to pump up your personality.<br><br>These days, all you have to do is go online and join a "social networking" site such as the chat room that was so intriguing on this website. The pumping will be done for you.<br><br>If you haven’t yet heard of social networking, stay tuned because it’s the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Next Big Thing</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->. New Economy magazine Business 2.0 named it "technology of the year" for 2003, and venture capitalists have started throwing money at social networking startups with a zeal not seen since the first generation of dot-coms came down the pike.<br><br>Don’t be surprised if a year from now your everyday conversation is peppered with references to Friendster, Spoke, Ryze, LinkedIn, Minnhock.com, Tribe.net, Below 0 ZeroDegrees — or to other sites not yet launched.<br><br>The phenomenon is new and it’s <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>hot</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, but it has a very old <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>soul</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. In fact, the process that drives social networking is found at the heart of all societies and civilizations: the human need to make common cause, to cooperate with others of the species to achieve a whole variety of goals and meet a whole variety of needs — physical, emotional, social, economic, political or even hockey related.<br><br>Degrees of Separation<br><br>In our own comparatively gentle times, schmoozing has become the preferred networking method and the rolodex its indispensable tool (just ask Joe Lulic). The drill by now is familiar: You need help accomplishing something ¬— finding a date, completing a deal — so you call someone in your primary circle of friends and acquaintances, not necessarily because you think they’ll be able to help directly but because they might know someone who can (then you've got BIAFP and Angus Young in the mix).<br><br>You make a call, and another, and another, working your way toward the outer limits of your social reach. Generally, if you keep at it — and persistence is as much a key to success as style — you find who or what you’re looking for (az in Slapshooter 'hiz-self' ... so to speak).<br><br>Social networking sites speed and expand the process through digital technology and the Internet, allowing users to create searchable databases of friends, enemies (such as Grunt24 and goldy313 - depending on what mood he is in) and business contacts {aka packerboy}. Still, the underlying principle is the same: Who you know now is key to who you’re going to know in the future and to what you’re going to achieve, whether in love or business.<br><br>On sites devoted to purely social matters (such as the typical hockey talk on minnhock.com), enrollees are required to provide personal profiles, photos (optional ... like the 12 cast of characters so brialliantly provided by our own bluesbuddy) and real names (imagine that!) and encouraged to bring friends along. Of course the friends bring friends who bring friends (below 0 Zero for example) and before long an impressive and interconnected social universe has been created, thus Mitch Hawker's Message Board.<br><br>A friendship functions within the network the way it does offline, as a bridge into new relationships — the source of an introduction to a potential date or of a character reference if the ice already has been broken (whether thru Tom Reid's or McGovern's). Members also are free to conduct blind searches of the whole network based on common interests.<br><br>The functionality of some of the business-oriented sites is even more impressive. Lee, for example, analyzes a participating company’s e-mail archives, contact lists, address books and calendars to create a detailed map of all the organization’s internal relationships as well as those emanating out to other companies.<br><br>A sales manager might not have a contact at potential customer firm, but by consulting the relationship map discovers that someone else in the company does. The route is pursued, and the sale is made. Shazam! We have a world-wide hockey site, making bullions and bullions {Carl Sagan ... God rest his soul) of gold.<br><br>Welcome to the new world of the uber-schmooze. Get hip to it, and your personal and business lives may never be the same.<br><br>Another Internet Bubble?<br><br>Millions already have. Silicon Valley-based Friendster, a focus of much marketplace buzz, has enlisted 4 million members since its founding early in 2003 and by year’s end was the recipient of $14 million in venture capital beneficence. At about the same time, its Palo Alto neighbor Spoke Software, a 2002 startup, scored more than $9 million in venture funding. Imagine what Minnhock.com could produce if they enlisted the suave techniques of Slapshooter and his cronies (or <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>clones</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, as Lee likes to put it)<br><br>All the fervor has skeptics talking of a social networking bubble and its inevitable collapse. While such speculation is premature, issues do have to be resolved — functionality and privacy concerns among them — before the sector can be judged a safe bet.<br><br>Perhaps the strongest arguments for social networking’s success has nothing to do with the bottom-line success of the companies behind the sites. Rather it’s one of those unintended consequences that’s no less welcome and needed for being unexpected.<br><br>By bringing a real-world relationship model online — one where individuals are identified and held accountable — social networking has the potential to make the Internet a healthier, more civil place (just ask northdakotahockeystinks).<br><br>Not yet 10 years into its public history, the Internet’s record as a social venue is a mixed bag, with technology’s boon — e-mail, instant messaging, the online community of chat rooms and message boards — offset by bad tendencies and behaviors.<br><br>Identity Crisis<br><br>The most lurid feature of Internet life, that an estimated 6 percent of Web users meet the clinical criteria for addiction (just look at Bluesbuddy for example), is not necessarily the most disturbing. These compulsive souls will conjure their particular obsessions (like living through their son's hockey careers ... or worse ... living through an unfulfilled career that could never be atoned or atttained for)— for porn, gambling, stock trading, auctions, hockey website opinions — through whatever medium. The Internet has not made them addicts, though its convenience has appeal.<br><br>More troubling, because of their numbers if nothing else, are the non-obsessives who get caught in traps that (like jr and angus young and bud abbot), while certainly of their own making, are constructions unique to the Web.<br><br>Internet dating, as it has existed prior to social networking, is for many practitioners a kind of digital meat market. Think "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," only you don’t have to get up, get dressed and endure a smoky saloon ... you could look precisely like those slobs on page 14 of the "Against the Grain" thread ... and actually obtain a 'date' on this site ... simply because you are now labeled a 'celebrity' and considered to be in the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Minnhock Hall of Fame</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->.<br><br>And let’s be honest about chat rooms, putatively the cyber equivalent of the office water cooler. Yes, they are convenient places to trade information and establish relationships, but that’s not the whole story. Just ask Petey 1321f.<br><br>Around a water cooler we deal face to face with people who, if we don’t personally know them, at least are identifiable. This means that bad or boorish behavior has consequences. Not so online, where chat room visitors hide behind pseudonyms (like those jokers who pretend to be Mitch), secure in the knowledge that the worst penalty they’ll pay for the worst sort of behavior is banishment from the board.<br><br>By making identities known and relationships transparent, social networking has the potential to set a salubrious precedent. And if a few gutsy entrepreneurs make some money in the process, so much the better.<br><br><!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :hat --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/im ... s/pimp.gif ALT=":hat"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> "How's that for my 1,000th post?" <p></p><i></i>
