The (anti) social net

ing technologies, in which the technically possible trumped the socially responsible—Google Buzz and Facebook's privacy settings. In both instances, the focus on what is possible (when you get enough computational power that can make connections) outstripped what was intelligent to do from a human-relations standpoint. Google opened people's profiles to reveal your contacts and whom you chat with to the rest of your network. All this proved, once again, that email contacts/=friends. In my contacts list are electricians , doctors, car mechanics , travel agents, florists, and restaurants. I have never had the urge to share my activities (" updates "), links, or personal photos with them. The labyrinthine privacy settings that Facebook implemented to enable people to retain some control over who can access them and their content was famously published by the New York Times [1]. Facebook's default response was everything is public. To retain your privacy you had to reset the permissions , but for many, the horse had already bolted the stable. These are the kinds of mistakes that happen when you focus on the network and not the social in social network-ing—and when you go for what is technically easy not for It is time we stopped talking about social networks and started talking about people, groups, and relationships. This is probably the fourth time this week I have said this: Social is more than the social network. It is perhaps the 500th time I have said it in the past two years. Maybe the 1,000th time if you count the past five years. This is not news to anyone who takes a deep research interest in social networks. Rooted in insights from sociologists like Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Georg Simmel, the field as we know it emerged in the 1930s with the work of Jacob Moreno, who invented the " sociogram " —a connection diagram showing people's connections to each other. The term " social network " was coined in the 1950s by John Barnes, a British anthropologist, inspired by the work of Elizabeth Bott and her kinship studies. These early social network researchers were primarily and fundamentally concerned with people and the social management of relationships and connections. Tacitly or explicitly there was concern for how methods could be triangulated with other data sources to foster an understanding of how people interact—these pioneers were not satisfied with the elegance of the model …