social networking sites
there’s an explosion of social networking sites recently (friendster, tribe.net, linkedin and many more, i’m sure), and it seems to me that these are all very fragile concepts.
the value of these things depends a lot on the number of people participating, but it’s going to be very easy to alienate or otherwise drive away chunks of the network. of course, the company can “screw up” – a major private-information-exposure scandal would certainly do it – but there are more subtle things that can break these networks….
people participate in “general purpose” networks like these, but i have to assume that they generally have a fairly specific purpose. if the network (or the software supporting the network) can’t deliver on that purpose, i’m gone. so that’s a lack-of-value problem. how do you create (and more importantly, maintain) specific value in a general network? is more open better?
the other side is “driving people away” – if i feel like i’m being “harassed” or “bothered” by people in the network, that’s just as likely to drive me away. how do you keep the “signal to noise” ratio tolerable in an open network?
i don’t know how it will shake out, but i think these companies and sites will have to follow where their networks lead – if they try to force them to fit a pre-defined model, they risk alienating large chunks of the network they’ve managed to build.
The groundswell of social software and networks has me a bit unnerved. For the most part, these things are being developed by intelligent and well meaning people.
However, in my opinion, precious few of these developers have given even an iota of thought to the privacy issues they open up with their shiny new people meeting software.
They do not see that it is the aggregation of personal data that the Machine thrives upon. It is not difficult for me to imagine cleverly written spiders that creep about extracting bits of information about users from various networked services. Users don’t want to hear about this. The just want to surf Friendster looking to get laid, blissfully unaware that they leave their sticky little traces everywhere they go.
I’ve tried to sound this alarm in various forums and wind up being labeled a paranoid. Which is fine. It is my own ass I need to be looking out for and that is what drives my own personal privacy software projects.
I won’t laugh when theire identities are stolen, but I might just mutter an ‘I told you so’. It is amusing that people feed the Beast due tot he allure of profit.
Comment by scott — August 4, 2003 @ 11:28 am