KEY POINTS:
I've had five emails from people in the last couple of weeks inviting me to join a new social network called Naymz.
On receipt of the third email I went and checked out the website, which claims to be "empowering reputable professionals". It seemed a lot like Linkedin.com, which I've found to be a useful directory of professionals, particularly in the IT industry.
I've pretty much limited myself to LinkedIn, Flickr and Facebook when it comes to social networking websites. A new player would have to come up with something pretty good to get me to sign up for yet another account. Would Naymz do that?
While LinkedIn lets you write testimonials for other members adding to their credibility, it's not a dominant feature of the overall service. Naymz on the other hand elevates the testimonial element, asking you to write references for other people in your Naymz network. You can even write negative stuff about people.
For instance, the question I was asked when attempting to write a reference for a colleague was:
"Does Chris demonstrate honesty and integrity?" Yes, no or I don't know where the options for a response.
Apparently nobody sees my answer to that question but it contributes to a "Repscore" for Chris and a low repscore obviously means his referees have a low opinion of him.
I was halfway through writing Chris a reference when I thought "stuff it". Is anyone ever really going to offer Chris a job, agree to take a call from him or do business with him based on his Naymz repscore? I doubt it. Plus, the website seems a bit more labour-intensive than LinkedIn.
It also has a unique and slightly creepy feature that allows you to see who has been visiting your profile. As a premium member you can find out the IP address of the visitor and where they are in the world.
I'm sure that's very useful information for some, but imagine if that was a standard feature of Facebook? Would you really spend time looking at the profiles of other Facebook members if you knew they could see how often you'd visited at what time and where in the world you were when you visited? Probably not. So no Naymz for me, it all seems a little too fine-grained for my liking.
This started me thinking about social networks in general. New ones are coming thick and fast, but do you really want to be constantly rebuilding a new profile and network each time a new, better-featured website comes online?
I don't, so I'll stick to those three and the occasional visit to Triggerstreet.com which is a fantastic community for writers who want to get feedback to their scripts, plays and short stories from other writers.
I wouldn't go as far as this guy writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, who has diagnosed himself as suffering from
social media fatigue. But you have to draw the line somewhere and three is a good number.
Here's an idea for the Web 2.0 community: don't keep inventing new social-networking websites, make the existing ones more useful. Adding chat function to Facebook is a good start.
