Another Texas VC

How many social networks are you a member of? Last summer I was a member of around 20. With so many profiles, I couldn’t keep track and decided to pare them down. I dropped more than half, kissing friendster (I was one of the first users), myspace, doostang, ning, meetup, and a few others goodbye. Surprisingly I still had six memberships when I was done.

I couldn’t get my memberships down because I use them for different purposes. Picking facebook over myspace and friendster was easy, but picking between linkedin and facebook is like picking between apples and coke. They are fundamentally different services. I use facebook to keep up with my friends from school. I use linkedin for my colleagues at work. I broadcast with my twitter account, and exchange knowledge with my twine account.

Although my social networks have aspirations of becoming my one stop on the internet, they never will. Facebook (general friends) will never be able to replace my steam account (gaming). The things that make facebook attractive for general interaction are the exact reasons why I can’t use it for smack talk. Likewise I will never post my political stuff on twitter because it’s too open, but it’s ideal for my favorite tech articles and memes. Long story short, I am complicated, and my social networks reflect that.

Maybe that’s why the influence of social networks varies so widely. Tim Schigel from ShareThis (one of our portfolio companies) says that articles posted to a twitter stream are read 18 times. Linkedin posts are read 8 times, while email and facebook are read much less. The more open a network is, the more influential its posts are. The drawback is that the links people post are probably a lot less focused. Moving forward, it’s not the social network that is important, but you and your relationships. Tim really nails it on the head when he points out that the power of influence is landing right in your hands. In a world where people are constantly complaining about the distance of our relationships, I find that idea very reassuring.