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.

plaxo pulse

New social networks know a little too much