No, really, forget riding the horse, getting stoned or hitting the crack pipe, social media sites are longer than a line of coke backstage at a rock concert. What I don’t understand is why?

Read/Write Web points out (where is the author byline???) that in a conversation with del.icio.us brainchild, Joshua Schachter, that del.icio.us will be making a transition into a social network in the future:

when I asked Joshua what kind of new functionality we can expect to see from delicious over the coming 6-12 months? Joshua replied:

“While delicious previously has been very much about just the data, in the future I hope to allow our users themselves to come forward within the system. Additionally, I want to help people connect with others within the system, either to people they already know or discovering new people and communities based on interest.”

Am I reading this right? “Letting the users themselves come forward with the system?” Isn’t that happening now? I mean, if I am interested in the bookmarks you’re sharing, can’t I just subscribe to your del.icio.us RSS feed? How do I know if you are interesting? A blog sure helps, but what if you don’t have a blog? Am I suppose to follow who seeded the link to del.icio.us? Sorry, I doubt I’d find someone that way. Letting users themselves come forward in a system sounds too much like letting people spam their way to the top.

If this becomes the case, beam me out, Scotty. I’ve already seen del.icio.us hit with spam in the past and fortunately it was scrubbed out by them fairly quickly. Sometimes I see del.icio.us popular items that look very artificial to me, similar to front page digg items that seem more about the collection of a group of digg buddies than true collective voting, but who knows.

Is this the same Joshua Schachter recently named as top innovator of the year by MIT Technology Review Magazine looking to copy instead of innovate? I’m going to give Joshua a pass on this one until we actually see if del.icio.us becomes more my.del.icio.space.us, but from what little we know (and it’s all very premature and speculative) this sounds like a bad case of Yahooitis.

Yahooitis (adjective, pronounced: Yahoo-eye-tiss) - loss of focus, concentration on too many different missions, rather than mastering the core mission.

Once upon a time Yahoo really cared about search. To say they don’t care now would be wrong, but it sure seems like a lesser priority to me at times like this. And for those who might think I’m unfairly dragging Yahoo into this, that’s the baggage that comes with being the big company buying the small fish. Get over it, the criticism is justified. They already had MyWeb and have kept that heart beating (barely) as promised, but why they would buy two essentially identical services doesn’t make much sense. Sure, MyWeb didn’t hold a candle to del.icio.us in the cool kid’s club, but being cool hasn’t helped the stock.

Bottom line: why mess with what they are good at? I hope the Read/Write Web author misinterpreted (and that I am too from the quote) Joshua’s intentions with del.icio.us going forward. There are several things that could be done with del.icio.us which aren’t about trying to be the next MySpace. I’m all for innovation, not imitation. I hope innovation is the path being taken. Harder to do than copy, yes, but much more respectable and worthwhile.

One of the commenters, Murali, on the read/write web blog nails it with: “… by adding social networking jazz to it, there is a very real threat of alienating the core del.icio.us user base”

And another thing …

Are there really that many million people out there who want to share everything they do with others online? I like sharing with others, heck there is a lot of that in this very blog, but the social networking sites I’ve seen to date more often than not feel kind of creepy to me. They seem engineered and phony. Like I’m going to a meeting expecting something useful and it ends up being an Amway pitch. I’m not talking about the pages themselves, but the surroundings.

And if I’m that interested in you, then I don’t need to visit a social network to interact, I can do just fine following your blog or if you make it available your link list (powered by del.icio.us most likely). If you happen to be a Second Lifer I can become your friend (if you’ll let me) and we can chat in world once in awhile. If you use services like Stumbleupon, I might even find out about you there. If Skype is more your thing we can rap that way. I don’t see what these social networking sites actually do for me and you being able to be, well, social to each other. It seems more about personal promotion, which I don’t have a problem with anybody doing, I just am not that interested in spending much time at sites where that type of activity is the norm and not the exception.

I’ve written here before wondering about social media sites like MySpace and had enlightening responses from people like B:

yea dude ur an idiot myspace is like the greatest thing ever invented i can talk to my freind, meet new people and find out about things like concerts, parties, and a bunch of other things….

Thanks to folks like B, I now know why I only have one “freind” on MySpace — the band Kick Axe — which I sought out and wanted to be a friend of mine. Ok, scratch that, I have two friends on MySpace. Weird Al Yankovich is also my friend on MySpace, which I also sought out. Am I moving on up on MySpace? More friends than you? Neener, neener. At this rate, by the year 2010, I’ll have a dozen MySpace friends.

Seriously, I understand if you are a band or artist of some kind trying to be promotional that having a MySpace page could be useful, but I don’t understand regular people just hanging out needing to having MySpace pages? Why not have your own website or homepage or blog (maybe that’s getting too involved?)? Why are they sending their friends through advertising and clickthru hell to get to a 2006 version of GeoCities? I mean, I wouldn’t want — and don’t want — my friends to go through that.

Then again, maybe I just haven’t spent enough time getting under the covers with MySpace to truly appreciate the inner beauty. It’s the ugly duck on the outside but maybe it’s a really attractive animal on the inside.

Like Craigslist, del.icio.us works for its simple and plain focus and mission: bookmark sharing. If Schachter and Yahoo think by adding more they will broaden the del.icio.us userbase and market, they should first explore others who have tried similar moves in the past — including Yahoo. It hasn’t been a hugely successful path historically. Also, consider their competition, some of which are destined for the Techcrunch deadpool.

The biggest problem for all these social websites is time. You, I, we only have so much time to spend at any one website. Those that try to fight and claw and scrape their way into our space, probably won’t be clones of MySpace. They will offer something MySpace doesn’t have and would be difficult or nearly impossible for MySpace to add to compete. MySpace doesn’t do bookmarks, at least to my admittedly limited knowledge, so del.icio.us has an edge there. Vice versa.

As a Yahoo investor I remain increasingly concerned about the company. Let’s hope Q4 they somehow manage to get back to the 2005 juice that made me a believer in Yahoo again. I liked the path they seemed to be on back then, but they’ve thrown away most of that momentum in 2006. They’ve done a few good things this year, don’t get me wrong, but most of it has been for not, starting the year off with some really jackass comments from the CEO and financial officer. Q4 and 2007 need to change. Use the search, Luke, tie it all into the search. They’ve done good things with developers, but that’s about where my Yahoo compliments end in 2006.

Enough of me, what would you like to see added — or not added — to del.icio.us? In the past some Yahooligans have listened and seemed to take interest, so it’s worth tossing around in the comments area if you care about and use the service.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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