Note: As the official blog post pest here at matchmine, I sent out an all-internal email yesterday trying to generate new post ideas. An employee sent me the following post and asked to remain nameless (and since we’re all about anonymity here at matchmine, I couldn’t really argue with that). I absolutely loved the post, so here it is in all its anonymous glory. -Nathan

Frankly, I don’t care about you.

I don’t care about what you have to say, your hopes, goals, or your caloric intake at lunch. I rarely call my own mother, so why would I care who fish-slapped you on facebook?*

With the exception of a very small collection of people in my life, there is no one out on that vast internet whose daily tribulations will ever be of interest to me, whose opinions on politics or books or business will ever be held high in my regard. So why would I bother to explore new social networking and media recommendation websites?

And, the fact is, I don’t bother. Or I didn’t anyway. matchmine made me do it. I had to join facebook to test our new MatchMeter application in the real world. I logged on. I found a goofy pic for my profile. Now I’m hooked.

Because even for the most antisocial of us, the luddites, the wallflowers and the unibombers, social media really does provide value. It’s not what one fifteen year old with a MySpace page does that makes a difference. It’s not even the collection of wisdom offered by the active and insightful upper management at matchmine that proves useful to me. It’s the sum of myriad ratings and reviews, discussion threads and photo-posts that, with a little help from smart software, gives me something worth calling my mother about.

Thanks to the symbiosis between collaborative filtering and dedicated reviewer-exhibitionists, I really can discover new books to read and movies to watch (alone). I can find candid traveler photos of the hotel I just booked and discover new blogs about topics I enjoy (Are single-player games doomed?) And that is cool, even to me.

So if this lifelong anti-hipster can find value in something so cool and so social, matchmine must be onto something big. Bigger still when you consider that my matchkey enables me to access all that communal goodness without ever showing my (digital) face. Social media for the anti-social? I love my job.

*Except for you, Troiano. I care very deeply about what you have to say.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.