danah boyd (no relation, although I wouldn't mind) cringes from Jonathan Abrams' talk at SXSW on social networks:

"I really wanted to like Jonathan Abrams' talk at SXSW. I was trying to put down my frustrations and listen. But he broke me. Not with the anecdotes, but the horrible misunderstanding of social networks.

He started off the talk saying that he wanted to clarify what people meant by social networks. Midway through, he spoke about how his friend from Ryze was creating a tool for professional networking. He thought that this was great but that it would be cool to make this available for social life too. Thus, he made up the term social networking to discuss what he was doing. And he finds it really strange that everyone else is using that term to talk about their sites and even ::gasp:: offline behavior.

He disregards all predecessors (other than Ryze) because they didn't influence him. He disregards academics, points out that his site is the only one who made it a reality, etc. Erg. I can't even reiterate all of the things that i disagreed with.

There were a few interesting anecdotes. But more than anything, i successfully remembered why i'm a much bigger fan of the people who breathed life into Friendster than i am its creator."

I guess we are getting to the point where the terms start to shift based on the marketplace of money rather than of ideas, and everything becomes blurry and muddy.

I have had a number of comments recently from pals telling me that I am blurring the concepts of social networks and social networking applications. Yes, I am. They are hopelessly blurred for me, even though I could try to keep them neatly compartmentalized, I guess. Although I don't know why I would, since they are converging.

I do, however, want to keep the distinctions that danah alludes to -- remembering the predecessors of today's cool SNA sites -- instead of acting like this all started a few minutes ago.