Pierluigi Rotundo

I’ve found this to be a problem for a long time. It is fairly surprising to me that this was considered particularly prescient.

Of course, there is some possibility of how to avoid this; for example, don’t actually have a friend option, but possibly some other method of connecting people (a listing of people you already have some connection to, possibly?)

http://www.myspace.com/itde if you’re interested in experimental radio, btw..

If they did that, I’d be on it. I tried for a couple days, but soon found that my multiple social groups don’t lend well to such a service. Work people, who definitely are friends, were suddenly seeing comments from high-school/college friends who do things like take off their clothes for a living and talk a lot about it, or people I’m friends with whom they know but don’t know we’re friends… It’s just awful. In real life, you have several sets of friends, and you can keep them insulated from each other, for both your own good and for theirs. Not true of these sites.

If I ever got enough gumption, I could just solve it with a blog, but commenting BB articles is about all I have time for.

(sigh…)

Secondly, i love deleting friend requests from total strangers. Who cares? If i don’t know you in real life, i’m not going to be your pretend online buddy just so you can bump up your number of friends. I’m not a number.

Thirdly, i wish when friends were deleted from an account, that person would disappear in real life. Who cares if someone deletes you. It’s not life or death. It’s a joke. “So and so is mad at me and deleted me from their friends list” Well guess what? If you pansies can’t pick up a phone to fight, and insist on fighting online, you should both be deleted from the human race. Sounds like 8th graders to me.

Fourth, i love counting…

See also: http://dev.null.org/blog/archive.cgi/2007/11/27#1316_whyfacedo

Specifically, his posts here and here seem pertinent.

Keith

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.

They see us, we don’t see them, we don’t get their Vampire SuperPokes, and in the unlikely chance they sent us something they consider important enough to remind us of later, oops! Must have been lost in the noise.

Most of my ‘friends’ were adults but communicated to each other like 8 year olds… except when I kept getting soft porn videos posted to my ‘SuperWall’. Why you are sending me this? I know where to get real porn…

Finally I’d had enough, shut down my account, and telephoned (imagine that!) my ‘friends’ and told them I was done and if that offended them… well too bad, so sad.

Maybe I AM just an old fart, but really, people… pick up the damn phone and talk to each other…

I’ve been MySpace sober for a year now and I’ve never felt better. It has changed my life. I now realize that the only “social networking” I’ll ever need is a little face to face conversation, something that apparently terrifies the majority of the MySpace/Facebook community. Good riddance.

That kid who beat you up in 7th grade? The overbearing boss? You know you dislike, possibly even hate them. It’s time they know too. Clicking that big grey “Deny” button should feel like a vindication after years of oppressive aquaintance agony.

Denying that aquaintance your digital friendship is just the first step. Next, start snubbing them in your day to day routine. Make a habit of dropping small hints like, “Could you please stop talking to me?” and “Oh… it’s you…” Start throwing parties and pointedly not inviting them. Bake them a lovely bunch of “brownies” the day before your company implements their first annual drug screening. Vilify their dearest held beliefs. Light their grandma on fire. Whatever it takes.

After a long and arduous process, you too can finally be free of pointless social interaction with people you despise.

On a slightly less serious note, I think you (Cory, Mr. Doctorow, Cap’n Fantastic, however you would prefer to be addressed)nailed the problem with all social networking sites with the line:

“In the real world, we don’t articulate our social networks…”

The fact that all of the current networking services exist in a completely different, but somewhat parallel reality to our actual, person-to-person, real life social network is the core of the problem (at least in my poorly informed opinion). Attempting to bridge the gap between your real-life social network (the people you can escape from) and your internet social network (the people you can’t) means reconciling the difference between your real self (nice guy, good grooming, etc.) and your internets self (asshole, poor bathing routine, mouth like a sailor). It’s like mixing your business and professional life. Next thing you know you’re sleeping with the boss and drunk at work all the time. Bad times all ’round.

To echo those who posted before me, these sites need to allow us, the endusers, to structure them in a way that reflects our actual relationships with the people now lumped into “Friends”. A section for friends, aquaintances, contacts, artists we admire, artists we despise, and all the other complex relationships we develop and nurture in real life.

Ideally, I would like a network that allows me to integrate my email, mobile phone and blog all into a single, easy to use interface. The “Friends” who I have accepted are given a varying amount of access to my personal details based on individual user rights I assign them and/or rights assigned to a given category of “Friend”. In a perfect world, I could use one site to track my friends, aquaintances, business contacts and favorite artists, access it from my PC, phone or any other internet ready device, and keep each category as separate or unified as I choose.

Since we’re granting wishes, I would also like a pony.

For an international person like me who’s lived in five different countries, and gone to international schools with people scattered all over the world, it’s great! Hey whatever happened to that Thai-Hungarian guy (my school was like that) in 7th grade who left the next year? So he went to farm on a commune, well would you adam and eve it?
It’s kind of difficult to have high school reunions like that.

If I never liked the person, I say no, and I don’t sign up anyone I never had some form of conversation with, and don’t want to. I say no, non and nyet.
I do agree that the apps are a pain in the ass.

Somehow that works just fine, thanks.

Facebook is a scam to get your private information and sell it to someone. Wake up, people.

Then my friends moved to facebook because it protected your privacy alot better, and it’s less littered by fake profiles trying to scam you, and it enabled people to plan events quickly and effeciently. Sure, I still think there’s a crapload of flaws in its design, but they aren’t as frivolous as banner ads and trendwhores.

I occasionally look at MySpace, but don’t really have an account there.

I prefer LiveJournal, which is text-based, not app-heavy, and seems to be full of people I’m interested in communicating with. And, of course, blogger.

Or maybe there are more adults using social networking sites than you think. Facebook’s fastest growing demographic is people 35 and older. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean they don’t.

I did, against my better judgment, accept a Facebook friend request from the beautiful entrepreneur with whom I exchanged five words at someone else’s party. The outcome was predictable: two exchanges of “how do you know X?” later it became clear that she had no idea who I was. I’m guessing that she views Facebook as a business tool (which is probably why she’s wealthy and successful and I am not) and sees friend requests not as declarations of “friendship” but as a way of building a business network.

The much more interesting problem is the one that this example – and some of the other problem cases described in the rest of Cory’s IW article – illustrate. Social networking services don’t currently provide a way to partition your networks. In real life, you have a social network of friends (probably several, actually), social networks of colleagues, and so on. Sometimes someone who belongs to one network will ‘cross over’ (a colleague becomes a friend, you introduce your buddy from the motorcycle gang to your pals from the needlework circle), but they don’t do so until you’re sure that they won’t be horrified by the sight of your crazy friends.

Social networks need to allow at least as much fine control as you have in real life (there are some interesting challenges here for the ‘open social graph’ folks). Until they do, maybe the best way is to use different platforms to do the partitioning. That could even give you a graceful way to soften a refusal: tell your boss “Oh, my Facebook account is kind of a mess … but I’d really like to have you as a contact on Linked-In.”