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Social nets do battle over profile data sharing

Jay Small — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:44:57 +0000

I should have seen this coming a few weeks back when I wrote about the sudden proliferation of social network invitations.

The people at LinkedIn are not happy that Plaxo's new social networking application reaches in and grabs LinkedIn connections and profile data.

Well, guys, many of the rest of us are not happy that we now must waste online time just to contain the proliferation of our own profiles and friend links.

New social networks know a little too much

Jay Small — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:30:33 +0000

Am I the only one creeped out by how easy it is to invite acquaintances en masse to new social networks such as Spock and Plaxo Pulse?

Both these nets use the program interfaces of existing services such as Facebook and LinkedIn to let a new user log into those sites and pull their entire "friend" rosters into new accounts.

If I had done that, and automatically invited everyone on my rosters, we're talking about hundreds of e-mail invitations from Plaxo or Spock going out to people I know for all kinds of reasons -- some business, some personal.

Though the intent appears to be "meta" social net management, it feels like spam.

These new-generation social nets use the older nets' (weird to describe Facebook this way) back-end interfaces to copy over news items about people on a user's roster even if that user did not invite those acquaintances to join the new nets.

So I can track a Facebook friend's activity on Plaxo even if I never "connected" with that friend on Plaxo.

Both Plaxo Pulse and Spock advise new account holders to be very selective about invitations and connections. But that makes little difference if people from your other social net rosters, and even your e-mail address books, are treated as connections in the news rolls of these sites.

I maintain my LinkedIn profile and connection roster actively, because they have been valuable to me in my work. I have a Facebook profile but find all the zombies and slayers mostly just distracting.

When a new crop of social nets comes in, I wonder: Does anyone really need this many places to go scan the mundane details of lives of less-than-best-friends-forever? Do we really want our own mundane life details multiplied under the table to sites beyond the ones where we actually signed up?

I turned 45 today. Maybe I should be checked out for degenerative Luddite syndrome, because I clearly miss the point of these new services.

Facebook ... faceless?

Jay Small — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:51:08 +0000

As I suddenly start receiving many invitations to connect on Yet Another Social Network -- in the most recent case, Plaxo Pulse -- I note the ever-astute Scott Karp contemplates the current crisis suffered by the darling of these nets, Facebook.

Karp, in considering the uproar caused by Facebook's advertising beacon, concludes technology and design of same offer less substantial and less enduring competitive advantage than ever:

One look at Plaxo Pulse validates Karp's point. It obviously apes some of the best networking features of both Facebook and LinkedIn. And it has quick processes for importing one's connections from either of those services.

So Pulse says me-too and switching-is-easy. But it doesn't give me a compelling, unique reason to switch. I'm still trying to find a compelling, unique reason to keep up with both Facebook and LinkedIn. The latter has helped me in my career; the former, not so much.

Karp nails it:

The next great internet company will not be one that makes a breakthrough with technology -- it will be one that makes a breakthrough with people.

If my chosen industry -- newspapers -- didn't already have such an undistinguished reputation (that may be too kind) with so many people, I'd say that was good news for us. We're certainly not going to win on technology.