Anyhow, a recent news story came across my consciousness. I don’t recall which one, precisely – let’s say it was the balloon boy thing. Now, I have a decently established methodology for learning about what’s been going on, at least things that I care about. Generally, I don’t care about the balloon boy thing. General news falls pretty low in my process, I’ll admit, but I noticed the balloon boy thing, and one thing about it stood out. Almost everything of ‘general news’ that I’ve noticed lately I didn’t notice from the internet news services, or twitter, or my RSS feeds, or the paper on the tube.

So what do Ted Kennedy, Michael Jackson, recent US football scores, the balloon boy, the old guy on the Tube, and other general news stories have in common?

Facebook. People talking about these stories on this bizarre misanthropy of a social networking site, one that doesn’t quite seem to know what it’s purpose is. And I’m not an avid Facebooker, nor do I track down history streams (whatever they’re called?) when I don’t log in for a couple days.  Yet I still noticed all of these via my friend’s ramblings on Facebook.

So – I end up with heavily filtered, likely inaccurate pictures of what’s going on of general import. Once or twice was understandable… but lately its been a trend. Are we creating a method of social news distribution that is more focused on inaccuracy than accuracy? Sure, we can see what people care about – but people are going to come to rely on this, something the opposite of journalistic distribution.

Opinions?

*On the subject of Twitter – yes, I could learn of things like this from twitter, but for whatever reason I find twitter tends to carry more professionally relevant information. I can think of a couple reasons out of hand, but that’s not the point of this post.

On facebook alone more than 5 billion minutes are spent each day (ref: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics) which is equivalent to keeping 3.47 million computers switched ON all the time! This excludes hundreds of servers running Facebook applications and the website itself. While organisations are trying to reduce their carbon footprint by switching off machines when employees leave office after their work hours and are trying to save small chunks of electricity, there is a major problem lying beyond organisational control. Who can control more than 200 million facebook users spread across the globe who spend hours on facebook each day? And facebook is just an example! The list of social networks is endless but not longer than our list of climate change issues.

There were stupid virtual gifts, offers of a virtual knighthood, adverts for stuff I wouldn’t want in a million years, tedious facile applications and surveys (do I really care what proportion of the brain-dead prefer Pepsi to Coke?) I’ve been shown lists of favourite books, and what passes for music: bands with daft names like Flatulent Freddie and the Snot Nosed Psychopaths droning some tuneless ditty.

Personally, I use Facebook as a private personal network. During the odd break I like to find out how ex-students are getting on with their lives. I’m looking for the odd short message telling me of how their lives/careers are progressing – the odd photo of their families or on vacation is fun. It’s perfectly OK to ask me for a reference (although strangely they seem only come in LinkedIn, not Facebook!) I am not interested in friends of friends; one degree of separation is as far as I want to travel. One aspect of social networks that is often forgotten is exclusivity. Far from inviting everybody in, many network members want to keep everyone else out – and why not?

Yet most of what I see are lists of superficial facts, invites to parties (where they play the junk music), adolescent ‘I hate Manchester United’ jibes shared with the world, and facile comments about ‘what I’m feeling now!’ The scale of garbage postings seems to be increasing exponentially. Don’t people realise that this drivel is being read by HR departments – postings say far more about you than your CV ever does.

How do we filter out this overload? It seems we’ve lost track of what the network is for. If we’re not careful we’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m already seeing a sharp rise in postings like ‘X is withdrawing from Facebook until further notice.’ This is only to be expected when social networks become a nuisance.

Social networking’s foremost aim is to achieve a self-sustaining critical mass of people joining their platform. Only then will advertisers pay them big fat sums of money to place advertisements there, with the result that the company behind the social network will be valued in millions. In order to achieve this goal, sites use various techniques to attract users, the most common being to get hold of the email credentials of all participating users on the big e-mail hosts.

It’s hardly surprising that social networking sites blatantly access the users’ contacts – they can send invites to also join the network, but on behalf of the new member; far more effective than cold calling! Now when Sam joins a social network, and ends up giving his credentials for his Gmail account during the signup process, all of Sam’s contacts will receive an invitation with the subject line – “Sam has invited you to join …”. How cosy?

Actually no! I have come across numerous stories where people like Sam have been caused deep embarrassment, when for example such emails reach contacts that are business superiors, like Company CEOs, Managing Directors, and (worse in a business sense) Clients, who may find such invitations overly familiar, and a nuisance. Sam, whose name is emblazoned across the messages, has no option other than to accept blame and offer an apology – not a good business move. Clearly it’s not just Sam (who is guilty of the sin of omission), but the social networking site (guilty of the sin of commission) that brought the trouble down on Sam’s head. 

And it can end up far worse than mere embarrassment, like in the case of Dylan Osborn, 37, from Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire. He joined Facebook, so naturally the site sent an automatic “friend request” to everyone on his email list – including his ex-wife. She had previously taken out a court injunction, banning him from contacting her. Although the message was sent without his knowledge, Dylan spent three days in jail.

The obvious question now arises is that can people like Sam and Dylan avoid getting into this trap? Most social networking sites target users during the sign up process, when they are in unfamiliar surroundings, and a little disoriented. The sites claim (in bold letters) that they will not store a user’s email address or password; the request is presented as beneficial, because it will be used to check who amongst the user’s email contact list is already in the network. Most users consider it safe to share their information. Result – spam mails to hundreds of contacts.

Careful observation of email invitations display a number of patterns, worthy of comment (why not set up an experiment to investigate the patterns in such ‘social’ spam?). For example, I once received multiple invitations from the same person; they reappeared at regular intervals. This clearly means that, despite their promise not store users’ email passwords, that promise did not extend to the contact lists derived from them. Hence the users’ (or should that be victims’) names being used to bombard continuously their contacts’ mailboxes!

In a recent discussion with the CEO of a popular social networking site, I was shocked to hear him proudly claim that the success rate of people joining his social networking platform from such invitations was close to 4%, and that consequently their user base is growing by thousands every day. He had no plans of discontinuing this act of spamming. After all, the bigger the user base, the more money he makes out of his company.

This obviously raises the obvious observation: maybe social networks are nothing but businesses who fool members, steal their information, bring trouble, all the while presenting themselves as helping the community to communicate, entertain, and bind with each other!