I was looking through the Internet and came across a Facebook article on Boing Boing. Cory made an interesting point, how do you keep the creepies from finding you when everything is out there?

Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster are consistently in the news for one thing or another. Whether its good or bad news each network grows daily, and who knows maybe the bad news boosts them even higher. Social Networks of course are great for connecting with long lost friends, keeping up with your college classmates, and meeting new people. There have also been times when people have been hurt by interacting in these communities. For instance, a guy was fired from his job at a bank because his employer found questionable photos of him out with friends. However, there is a new topic being discussed that might actually be the cause of the mass exodus we see from each Network time and time again.

The theory is that as these Networks grow the rate of exposure to non-friends increases which directly is related to increases in annoyance in your network. Lets take a look the following scenario: A friend request shows up from the kid who bullied you back in school, or the person who screwed you over years ago. Typically Social Apps have either Add or Reject buttons for handling this. In this situation you would normally be inclined to click the Reject button, however when the Network displays that you have rejected someone as a friend this socially becomes a taboo behavior. Regardless of the past, socially people feel obligated to add any one that requests to be their friend. This leads to a giant list of friends that ends up being annoyingly unmanageable, thus leading to key influencers to leave the network for a new Social App.

I find this to be a very interesting idea and hope to see more insight into the social ramifications of this type of behavior in applications.

The following people are commenting on the original Boing Boing article with their thoughts and feelings on the issues brought up with various Social Networking sites.

Kraquehaus, one of the people who commented on the article, made a good point,

The “user experience” I am referring to is purely with regard to the UI of the sites. The companies are delivering UIs based on heightening page reloads and page views in order to ramp up profits. This reward system does not feed a positive return for good UI.

What I would like to see is this: Take the ads out of the system and use a subscription based model.

However, his argument was for the banners that are on the site, not many of the people who go to the networking sites pay attention to the banners, at least I don’t. When I go to Facebook it is simply just to see who has poked, prodded, nudged, attacked and messaged me. I am rarely seen at any of the other sites that are advertised on Facebook or MySpace.

More people went on to complain [or rather piss and moan] about its lack of privacy. zFactor, another of the posters had put his ideas out there plain and simple.

The solution is so retardedly simple that I’m shocked no one has patented it: Take a page from real life and give users the ability to create multiple “views” of their profile. For each “friend,” specify which views they are allowed to see, and for each new bit of content you add, specify where it belongs.

So, let’s say I create 3 views:

1 - work/academic

2 - family

3 - drunken debauchery

His idea of a perfect social networking site would allow you to have different levels for each category. But! Doesn’t Facebook already do that with a Limited Profile option? Hmm I do not think this kid did his homework.

Another person, Freshacconi had said, “Facebook can be fun, mainly to be nosy, I guess. But beyond that, it just doesn’t seem that important.” Making me laugh with that I read on to see, “The simple solution is for Facebook to let us do exactly what we do in real life: Tell them they’re our friend. But lie,” posted by a Jay Levitt. If those solutions do not work for you, try what Hooray said, “Just leave them in limbo––that in between, waiting for confirmation or rejection stage before you click the buttons. That’s what I do, and it works great.”

How sad and unfortunate, Facebook is full of mean kids with the power of clicking no. In RealLife you can just ignore people that are not friends with you, there is no magical link between the two of you that says “HEY I AM THIS PERSONS FRIEND” as there are in Online Social Networks. So my question is this, just how different are the Social Networks from RealLife networks?

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