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Some days ago a big weekly-paper-newspaper here in Germany called “DIE ZEIT — ZEIT MAGAZIN” wrote one headline which forced me to read the article: “BYE-BYE, FACEBOOK — DIE ERSTEN AUSSTEIGER HABEN DIE AERA DER SOZIALEN NETZWERKE HINTER SICH” (eng: BYE-BYE, FACEBOOK — THE FIRST DROPOUTS HAVE LEFT THE ERA OF SOCIAL NETWORKS BEHIND”. One thought which immediately came to my mind was that I already wrote about my dropout from some social-networks over half a year ago in a post called Why I left many Social-Networks.

Now the topic is up again. I question some things:

• Do we need social-networks and if how many?
• Do we use social-networks they are supposed to be used?
• How is a social-network intended to be used?
• Are people not organized in a social-network happier?
• Why do we not use just email to communicate (if it needs to be electronical)?
• Why do they help some people in some situations?

That are many questions and I am not going to answer them because I think everybody needs to answer them for him or her self. I just try to describe my thoughts:

I think we need social-networks. But many of them are not very useful to me. They need to much time to maintain and they are often overloaded with mysterious apps which send annoying status-updates to all friends who do not care what you job may be (found out by some kind of crapy quiz!). I think they are great to stay in contact with friends far away. Or to get status updates about friends overseas. I do not have a chance to see these people but I would like to know something about them, take part in their lives and see what they are doing. But I do not want to know useless stuff.

I think a social-network should be in some ways other than the most are now. I think they should solve problems and not to create problems!

Some ideas are:

• No gadgets / useless apps inside a social-network
• Messages send in the network should just show up as a new email just like it was sent to me directly (not over a network). This way the communication focus is set to the email which is much less time consuming because everybody registered in a social-network also needs a email account just to register so he can use it for the messaging (which email is intended to be fore)!
• Just data about the friends, links to other web activities, one / two pictures (photo sharing sites are enough out there)
• The ability to subscrib to status messages via RSS and that way you do not need to find the last message you read and than read, instead you can just read the new items. Alternative: a unread count for status updates but one that does not need that you click at each message to mark it as read!

That are some thoughts about social-networks and how they could be improved! I still sink about leaving some of the networks I am currently registered to (Facebook, MySpace, Deviantart, Flickr, Twitter to name a few). But I think I will stay there but I think I will change my settings and ‘about informations’ that everybody who searches me there will see that I am not really active and that everybody who wants to tell me something should send me an email instead of a message inside the network. But some others I will use active cause I think they do something right: especially Twitter and Flickr.

I would like to hear thoughts if you have read this article! Please let me know what you think about social-networks and maybe the way you think they should change / be.