Wal-Mart’s Social Network, Redux

Did Best Buy learn anything from Wal-Mart’s failed social network experience? Hopefully it did because it’s launching a social network … for teens.

The good news is that the site has a positive mission and seems to offer teens a place to talk about the upcoming election. An “About @15″ page is full of optimism and feel-good copy:

You are obviously key to the success of our stores. How would your parents know what to buy without you? You know us. You are important to us, but we also see that you are important to our communities, to our society, to our world.

We’re listening to you and want to support you and make sure you have opportunities to learn, to make a difference in your schools and communities, to build life skills and relationships.

Yep, we hear all the bad stuff about teens. People freaking out about drugs, gangs, drop outs and the rest. But we believe in you. Not because you’ll be 25 some day, but because you have special power to do great things and make the world better. Right now.

We see that power. We admire it. We don’t want to direct it. We just want to fuel it.

The bad news? How many teens will buy into this copywriter’s overkill and actually use the site? Not many, I’m afraid.

And it’s a bit discomfiting to realize that I can view profiles without logging in or registering. I read the profile of “Mai.Mai” — who posted the name of her school and the city she lives in. At the top of the page there’s a tab labeled “track” – even more creepy – where you can apparently track Mai.Mai’s postings on the site.

Where Social Networks Are Going

I’ve been in PowerPoint h*** the past several weeks (with a vacation to Cabo in between). I envy the way some people crank out slides with no effort … the same way I envied my husband for being able to write an entire college essay in one sitting, while I struggled and thought and rewrote and rewrote over the course of several days.

But I digress. Sort of.

For a while now I’ve been saying, in my eMarketer reports, in presentations and in media interviews, that social networking will eventually transition from being a destination (I go to Facebook or MySpace, I visit my profile page, I chat with friends or download apps…) to an activity. It will become more diffuse, and part of  of our Web browsing experience.

Well, all of that is starting to happen. Facebook’s new Connect feature lets sites add connections back to Facebook, seamlessly. Say you post a comment on a blog or a news site. If that blog or news site uses Facebook Connect, you will have the option to sign into that site with your Facebook credentials and then, if you choose to, tell all your friends about the comment that you just wrote. The notification would appear in their News Feed. Or, you could tell just some of your friends, by clicking on their pictures (their Facebook pictures) that pop up when you sign in to the blog.

The New York Times covers this idea in its basic form this week. But there’s a lot more to it. Others are doing similar things — such as Gigya’s Socialize product. And while there’s a lot that’s compelling about sharing your Web activities with your friends, I have a hard time believing this will ever become a common activity. I’ll fully admit that those words may come back to haunt me someday so I reserve the right to change my mind.

But think about all the Websites you’ve visited so far today. How many of your activities there do you actually want to share with your friends? For example, I’ve been to CNN.com several times. At one point I read an article about volleyball player Misty May-Trainor’s achilles tendon injury on Dancing With the Stars. Would I want to share the fact that I read that article with friends? Or what about the article about John McCain’s health. If I commented on it, I might be able to tell my Facebook friends about my comment. Do I want them to see it? Which friends? All, or some? Does this extra layer of questions add anything or make it more difficult to decide whether I want to comment or take an action in the first place?

Another example. I just uploaded pictures from my Cabo trip to my Shutterfly account. Here, I might want an easy way to let my friends know about the pictures. But only a few of my Facebook friends would probably want to see my Cabo photos. And other friends who might want to see the pics aren’t even on Facebook.

I recognize that young people may not share my attitudes toward sharing and privacy, but I also wonder if all this sharing will make anything easier or just add to the clutter of things that come at us every day.

More thoughts on this as I continue to ponder the socialization of the Web. Like I said at the beginning, I don’t always have all of my thoughts in order when I start to write.