Ten years ago, if you had asked yourself whether people would voluntarily sign up by the millions in order to for private companies to make a profit from your relationships to your friends, colleagues, family, etc. you might have thought that this is a preposterous idea. Yet now we have many such sites, including some that rank in the top ten for traffic on the internet.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and basically all of the social networking sites do just that. There entire business model is based around the idea that they are going to try to get you to direct as much as your social interactions as possible through their site so that they can sell as much advertising as possible. One interesting thing is how these companies got themselves into this position. Most of these social networking sites started as a non-commercial project, perhaps with some initial intentions of turning commercial, but perhaps not. After generating a substantial user base, they have switched to completely commercial.

Facebook is a great example of this idea, since they are constantly expanding all of the options available for interacting. Their open API encourages more people to create ever more ways of interacting with people via Facebook, and that in turn drives people to use it. I see two directions that this could go. First, they become ever more popular, and the vast populace that used to spend so much time behind their televisions will now spend their time behind their computers. So while it is purportedly all about friends, it will in effect take people away from their friends and encourage them to only interact with their friends via these commercially mediated spaces.

Second, most people realize that their relationships are better when someone else is not mediating them for their own profit, so these sites fade from popular use. There is definitely value to social networking sites, but this seems to me to be the achilles heel of the genre. As long as they are tightly focused, like LinkedIn, which focuses on business connections, it seems to me that they won’t suffer nearly as much from the ills of commercialization.

Perhaps it would be possible to start a non-profit social networking site, which could encourage creativity without the pressures of the business world. It may sound crazy, but wikipedia and craiglist are two examples of how to make such a thing work.