Here are a few thoughts on social networking (mainly directed at Facebook).
The Issues:
- Collecting friends becomes a habit
- The collection can become little more than an online status symbol
- If this happens are these people really your friends?
- You just opened up your world and made it ‘ privacy invasive’, you’d likely never dream about telling all these people all about your movements; do you shred your bills!
- You have become or always were a naive user, you may be prone to joining many groups and using many applications – all of which gain access to your details
- Your a member of a closed system, which pretends to be open. Facebook is looking for ultimate power on the web and every bit of data we provide makes them stronger.
A few points that would address the fake friend issue:
- Facebook could introduce specific spheres of influence, that can be tuned to suit your needs; its all a bit basic at the moment
- Your (so called friends) would move between these based on interactions and access to your information/life would reduce/increase
- Your closest sphere could mimicking real life i.e you likely have very few or one best friends, many friends and stacks of acquaintances (many who drift away)
Just in case your in denial:
- Facebook Friends are not equal to real friends
- Twitter Followers are not equal to real influence
- Yes, will you be my friend 😉
What is Facebook sharing about you? (scary stuff )
4 responses to “Is Social Networking really social?”
Spooky, I was planning on blogging about the need for Facebook privacy filters for status updates. Currently all you can do is block people from reading your status. It would be far more useful to be able to set Group Level privacy on each status update. So personal updates could be kept personal, work-relevant updates could be shared with colleagues etc.
The current system is incredibly basic, which is probably why it is so popular (sigh).
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Spooky, I was planning on blogging about the need for Facebook privacy filters for status updates. Currently all you can do is block people from reading your status. It would be far more useful to be able to set Group Level privacy on each status update. So personal updates could be kept personal, work-relevant updates could be shared with colleagues etc.The current system is incredibly basic, which is probably why it is so popular (sigh).
+1
And who would have thought it? : http://www.celerity.co.uk/facebook-provides-powerful-new-status-privacy-settings.html