Can Social Media Go Away Now?

OK, social media has had its run. LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us ... it seems that every day there's some social media application that needs my attention. Every day, someone wants me to sign up for something or join their network or take some quiz. Can social media just go away now?

It all started with LinkedIn. Someone asked me to join, and I just kind of forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, he sent me a reminder, and I joined. I took a quick look at it, and it seemed like it could possibly be useful. But I wasn't exactly jumping in headfirst.

Pretty soon, invites started rolling in. People were inviting me to join their network because they were notified that there was a new person from their school or company. I didn't invite a single person, but within a month I had 40,000 people in my network.

I was getting invites from people I barely knew. The whole point of LinkedIn is that it's supposed to let you find people through personal referrals. A knows B, B knows C, and C knows D. So if A wants to know D, it makes sense that B and C can introduce A and D to a friend of a friend. But if B just met C once, or barely knew them ten years ago, then what's the point?

LinkedIn wasn't that bad because once you join, you don't really have to do anything beyond dealing with invitations. But it didn't stop with LinkedIn. Once people knew I had taken the plunge into social media, they started inviting me to join other ones. MySpace and Facebook came next, and I found that on top of all the invitations, I was being asked to take Princess Bride and Saved By The Bell quizzes. Doesn't anyone else have a job?

And now I'm hearing more and more about StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and so forth. There's always going to be another thing to join, but I still haven't used the first one! Do we really need to invite everyone we've ever met into our network on each one? In a world where everyone is already way too busy, do we really need to invite more distractions into our lives?

This is all part of the "Web 2.0" deal. Even Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, said that Web 2.0 "is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means." But I know what it means—it means slapping a new label on something to make it sound cooler. The one awesome thing to come out of Web 2.0 is Wikipedia, which receives far more criticism than it deserves about the accuracy of its information.

Let's bring back Web 1.0, keeping Wikipedia but ditching all other forms of social media. Inviting millions of people to join all these networks to hang out and play games isn't a good idea for well-adjusted people who have better things to do. Social media, it's time to go away.