Obama’s social network and Edwards’ campaign office in Second Life have spawned another round of discussions about the value of online social networks. Second Life is more than just a social network, but a lot of the concerns about Second Life apply to a general discussion of social networks.

I’ve been writing about social networks for a few years now and you can see some my posts about social networks here.

Before I start talking much about social networks, I would like to address some of the general criticisms of social networks. It seems like a common occurrence with any new technology is as the technology starts gaining popularity, people start coming out and pointing out how the technology might be less than people expecting. Some of this is, perhaps, just a normal part of a technology adoption curve. It may be in part, people who are afraid of being disrupted pointing out the problems with a disrupting technology. Some of it may simply be people looking at a glass being half empty instead of being half full, and some of it may be best summarized in the quote that Robert Kennedy adapted from George Bernard Shaw, "Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."

Before I launch to far into my thinking about online social networks, let me delve a little into what they are. With blogs, people have often talked about the comment section of a blog being like a persons living room. The person whose house it is can kick out anyone they please if they don’t behave nicely in the living room. Blogs are places for discussions. Likewise, an online social network can be thought of very much like a market place. You run into friends there, catch up, meet friends of friends. You might have some small discussions there, but usually not as in depth as you would have in your living room. Also, you spend time meeting new people in the marketplace, but you don’t usually have organizational meetings there. I think this is important in how groups should think about their interactions in online social networks.

Online Social Networks, like any network is made up of some key components. First, there are the nodes of the network. In a social network, the nodes are the people. The links of the network are the connections between people, friendships, acquaintances, sometimes called ‘ties’ by social network theorists. These ties are often referred to as strong ties or weak ties, to signify how well people know one another. The are assumed to be symmetrical, both sides know each other equally well. They also tend not to look at the ties in terms of specific areas, e.g. I may know a person very well in the political sphere, yet not know them at all when it comes to some arts sphere.

Different social networks address the nature of these links in different ways. People can assign a value to the link for how well they know a person. They can categorize the link as friend, classmate, family member, and so on. Some of the categorization may end up happening by people being parts of different online social networks, e.g. DFALink for political activism, MySpace for connecting with people with similar interests in bands, Facebook for interests in talking about which schools they went to etc.

In network analysis, another key aspect is the amount of traffic on a network and the role that different nodes play on a network. Is a node a connector? A bottleneck? Is there a lot of traffic on a network, or is the network quiescent? These are important things to think about when you look at how you are going to use a network.

Yet one of the most important things to consider draws not from network theories, but from organizational dynamics: What is the primary task of the network? This draws us back to the early adopter issues and problems with early online social networks. Early adopters find something interesting. They may not have a sense about why it is interest, just that it is. They play with it. They don’t have a primary task, other than to play with something new and cool. As the technology starts becoming more popular, people start asking, what is the primary task of the technology.

I believe that this is some of the reason some of the earlier online social networks are fading. They don’t have a compelling enough primary task. LinkedIn is a social network to help people search for job leads, sales opportunities, and other business related tasks. It does a fairly good job of that. It has a clear primary task and stays on task well. MySpace, Friendster, and Orkut, do not have as clearly defined primary tasks and while they have attracted large crowds, they have less stickiness. Change.org and essembly.com appear to have clearer primary tasks, promoting interests in non-profits and in political discourse. They run into a different problem of getting sufficient critical mass. DFALink and PartyBuilder have good specific tasks around organizing political events and do well at these tasks. Since I’m an Edwards’ supporter, I haven’t stepped into the Obama social network, but I suspect that, if used right, it will be similar to DFALink and PartyBuilder.

The primary task doesn’t always have to be all that lofty. Facebook seems to stay on task of helping friends stay connected with one another in a partial continuous attention mode and works very nicely as a marketplace to hang out in, much the way teenage girls hang out at the mall.

So, how should groups do organizing with online social networks? As I alluded to in my comments above, hang out in social networks, the same way you might hang out at a shopping center or beauty salon when you are trying to recruit and identify supporters and volunteers. Get people to hang out for you in these spaces with ways that they can identify themselves as part of your group. (I almost always where my John Edwards ’08 T-shirt in Second Life). Then, when you’ve identified supporters, get them involved in more than just the online social network. Take the online connections and bring them offline. That is part of what made Meetups so powerful.

Online social networks can be fun. You can make a lot of good connections there. They can also be a time waster. Think about what you want to do with online social networks, and then jump in. If you want to connect with me on online social networks, here are some of my pages.

Facebook, change.org, essembly.com, DFALink, PartyBuilder, MySpace, Friendster, Tribe, Orkut, SLProfiles, Flickr, gather.com, Blip.TV, vox.com, Yahoo 306...