Are You (Really) My Friend?
I have hundreds of friends I’ve never met. Being a gentleman of a certain vintage, I like the idea that attractive young women will accept my friendship without having ever actually met me. So you might notice in my Facebook profile that I have quite a few such “friends”. Other Facebook users seem to want to be friends with famous people or visible people or whatever.
I have been hearing the drumbeat about FriendFeed recently, so I signed up in an idle moment a week ago. Little did I realize that I unleashed a frenzy of new friendings; immediately, I started getting “subscription requests” from people I had never met and who did not identify themselves by their real name. (Since June 30, when I signed up, I have received 38 such subscription requests from people such as “miguel”, “Mrsth”, “Georges” and “Jassim”.) I had thought that this was a service that consolidated various feeds from my real friends into one place; now I’m thinking that it should be named “StrangerFeed”. I searched for a way to remove myself from FriendFeed, but there isn’t. And once you identify a service and give FriendFeed your credentials, you can’t remove the service.
This is the Social Graph? When I hear people talk about the social graph, I shudder. I had thought that the idea of a “social graph” was that you could map your social network in terms of how close different people are to you (one degree, two degrees, etc) in different contexts (parties, sports, passions, etc.). That is not what is actually happening; what is happening is that these so-called social networks have discovered that they must grow or die. So they are abusing the social graph to incent you to connect to as many people as possible, so that they can advertise or promote to those people.
I have not actually met Mark Zuckerberg (and we are not Facebook friends, either), but I have heard him talk several times with confidence about the social graph. What he talks about and what I experience when I use Facebook are two different things. For me, Facebook is entertainment — I play Scrabulous, see how many pretty girls will accept my friend requests, try to steal icons from my “friends” in Packrat. And FriendFeed has innovated by introducing a whole new kind of spam, social spam. Remember Gator?
July 8th, 2008 at 5:37 am
BTW: If you would like to delete your account at FriendFeed, go to http://www.friendfeed.com/account/delete. Too bad they don’t actually tell you that and make it easy.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Great post - i completely agree - social graph my arse - more like social chafe.
August 12th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Stewart,
I totally agree with the wholesale dismemberment of the term ’social networking’. I, for one, believe it does work to some extent. In fact, I have used such services as LinkedIn and others to connect to key people within organizations (although I did get a warning from the service, originating from someone who forget he had met with me previously. Next time, I wear a much funnier hat to trigger that memory!). I am also getting very upset with services like Skype, which save me a bundle on international calls especially, but is getting on my nerves since there are only so many invites I can field from young Guatemalans looking to talk.
In any case, the problem has created a world of itinerant social networking workers always looking for more virgin pathways to get some real stuff done. The solution may be to launch your own private networks (friends and clients) and use a technology that is conducive to creative weeding and fertilization. I recently found such a technology in Scotland, and will soon be working with that company to bring it into the U.S. market.
I’d tell you more about it, but I am not sure yo are Stewart Alsop - but that’s just my anti-social networking paranoia kicking in! :)
Best,
Tim
August 12th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Stewart
The whole social networking world has taken the path of “eyeball collection”, under the guise of friends to a whole new over-hyped level. Mature guys like you and I, and perhaps maybe my esteemed colleague Alan Soucy, we just don’t get it! We’re looking for the qualitative benefits of connecting vs. the market focus of these social networking creations which is just plain numbers. However,LinkedIn and Plaxo have been valuable for me, I must say!
What truly surprises me the most is that some in the VC space keep shoveling money to this guys like it’s Christmas…what gives! Meanwhile, guys like Jeff Spurgat and myself keep filing patents, creating products and writing applications that truly solve consumer problems and we can’t get to first base?
We’ll Stuart, at least with these social networking sites “you already can get to first base”, given your plethora of beautiful new friends. Now if you can get to home….I’ll be kicking Jeff in the butt tomorrow and telling Him we need to get on the social networking bandwagon, NOW(smile)!!!
Remember Jeff and I truly want to be your friend.