As with every other media channel, barriers to entry creep lower and lower allowing far too many people to assume they ‘get’ social media – I look out across this wasteland of faceless corporate profiles and think.

We’re doing it wrong.

It’s been said before, advertising on a social network is like leaning into a conversation in a coffee shop and trying to sell something to someone you’ve never met, so many can’t turn a profit.

However I don’t want to talk about social networks from a branding, advertiser return or commercial perspective – if you don’t know how to delight your customers regardless of the tools they use to connect socially then I’m afraid blog posts won’t help you.

I want to talk about social networks from a users/members/profile’s perspective – which is simply this: social networks as we know them are broken.

As with portals, meta-based search and subsequently digg-style aggregators – mainstream innovation goes vertical and decays, and so shall social networks. And here’s why:

The problem with ‘traditional’ networks

I know, how ridiculous is it, calling something only a few years old traditional?

Aside from rights issues, astrotufing and the usual rubbish that pollutes what i’ve heard (quite brilliantly) called ‘unnecessary and inane white noise’, the very mechanic by which facebook et al facilitate our social interaction is diametrically opposed to what we want from it as customers humans.

Ultimately, the construct of a maintained profile is the problem. There’s far too much self-managed meta information, hardly any of it being as transient as we require from our fickle web travel.

Social Networks work by attributes not behaviour

Meta information you write yourself is rarely accurate, (See late-90s SEO). So how on earth can real people, let alone automated algorithms or advertisers give you anything meaningful based on it?

Stumbleupon is the closest to achieving something like this – I have snowboarding as an interest in my facebook profile so therefore see ad after ad for snow gear and holidays; Stumbleupon at least takes into account how rarely I actually read about it and serves content based on my behaviour, not just just my meta attributes.

Social Networks erode social time

Current social networks have a value output which is proportional to the input. Amplifying or dampening yes, but proportional.

I haven’t spent any time on Facebook in the last couple of months so it’s value to me has atrophied and I see it as low-value. The network effect doesn’t translate to personal value. In fact, one could argue that as the network size/ combined value increases , personal value output falls, as more people are exposed to your profile, you are under more pressure to maintain it. This is the silver bullet for social networks.

Until we switch that equation around, there is no sustainable growth and not enough user delight, only cyclical rushes to sample the feature du jour.

Value Output != Effort

Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but we’re privy to a suite of technologies that should make it easier to hook up in real life, not use up that very time gardening our presences on them.

we need Social Facilitation not Social Networks.

Web technologies should be harnessed to glean more from our time-poor lives not suck time on the platform in lieu of activities that it stands for.

But how do we fix it?

Honestly, who knows? Obviously data portability, micro formats, voluntary relationship management and of course, OpenID are all options to create the first truly portable social network attribute set but that’s only half the battle.

Voltron is the answer

Image from ClintJCL - Voltron

I think the concept of the social network should be like Voltron. Except instead of 21 vehicles (or 5 lions for you hardcore fans), we’d have thousands of independant nodes providing focused funtionality – the ability to get more out of your life and transferrable, predictive recommendations that take the meta data management out of our hands; two very different examples of ways to achieve this are the filter and last.fm.

A social network as it stands, with all the walled application sections and user research that it cares to have won’t do it. There are already many protocols to openly distrubute chunks of user satisfaction, I hope to God we can help them win.

Then we’ll have a social web. As in a web that helps us to be social.