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RSS"A friend is a present you give to yourself," read a fortune cookie I received last night. With all due respect to Robert Louis Stevenson, the 19th century poet and novelist responsible for that quote, an overflow of friends in social networks and Web 2.0 is simply making them less like presents, and, in many cases, unmanageable! Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm not alone.
My colleague Pete Blackshaw wrote recently about the overwhelming number of friend invites: "Lately I've been getting so many darn friend and connection invites that my head is spinning. From LinkedIn to Facebook to the all-too-common (and bogus) MySpace invite from the girl 'who just broke up with [her] boyfriend and is just looking for fun,' it's all getting a bit crazy. Is spam king Sanford Wallace running this gig? Or am I just reliving Groucho Marx's famous quip, 'I'd never join a club that would accept me as a member.'"
Indeed, friendship overload is not just driven by human friend requests, but by blurring, if not arbitrary, assignments of the term. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, wrote this week in an email and blog post to members of his new micro-publishing community: "Folks have noted that there's too much overlap and confusion between 'friend' and 'follow.' As Twitter has evolved, these two concepts have emerged in parallel and clouded things up. So, in the spirit of simplification, we are no longer going to define people as your 'friends.' The functionality of adding people remains, but the interaction is focused on the term 'follow' instead."
But friendship overload also is propagating thanks to social-networking and publishing hacks that may have good intentions, but whose efforts result in aggressive amplification that compound the original problem of too many friend requests.
Scott Karp recently commented on the spam potential as people (including me) experiment with cross-posting blog posts with updates to friends (now followers) in Twitter and Facebook: "So I got my Publishing 2.0 feed set up to crosspost to Facebook and Twitter, but I'm wondering about the utility of doing so, given that most of the people I'm connected to on Facebook and Twitter also subscribe to my regular blog RSS feed. I'm starting to think that this has the potential to be hugely annoying -- and misses the point of Facebook and Twitter. I'm basing that conclusion on having come across the same blog post (for several different blogs) in Facebook Notes, on Twitter, and then again in Google Reader -- actually TWICE in Google Reader, since I subscribed to the RSS feed for my Facebook friends' notes."
We're experiencing friends overload, and it's a tragedy of the commons. The practice of friending has morphed way beyond the term's original intention and utility. And that is why I declare friends -- at least in the social-networking context -- passé.
I became totally convinced of this recently when Surinder Siama of ResearchTalk podcasts not only invited me to be his friend and join his ResearchTalk group on Facebook, but also requested that I serve as an "officer" titled "Mr. Engagement." The feeling of inclusion and importance that accompanied this officer gesture was nearly as powerful as some of the original friendship gestures I received on Friendster several years ago, when friending was more novel. And this officer request certainly was far more meaningful than any friend request I've received lately. It sounds awkward, but is officer the new friend? Probably not, but it underscores the importance of qualifying our social connections -- versus haphazardly branding everyone and everything a friend.
Let me be clear: Social networks are very much alive and well, but our traditional, generalized notion of friend is dead. When online friendships begin to scale artificially -- such as randomly or via the all-too-easy click of a button -- they run the risk of overwhelming us, causing the aggregate value of deeper social-network friendships to erode.
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Dude, that's pretty cool. How did you do that?
Cheers, Kaila
And yet the ability now with FB to have more a professionally toned sphere has intrigued many companies and organizations to step into the space. And LinkedIn has finally gotten the mass to make some positive sense when trying to hire, find connections for a new project, etc. Yet it lacks some of the flexibility, open API-based tools, and fun of FB for those that are both professional and personal "friends".
And yes, it is those mass friending tools, hooking up the Gmail and Yahoo email lists that you have been aggregating for some time, that is causing this morass you've lamented. I sheepishly just did that recently for both FB and LinkedIn, realizing I had left obvious professional friends off. To my surprise, the response has been quite positive -- lots of folks pinging me with their new projects, commenting on what I've been doing, etc.
So as the Cool Kids move on to the next tool, us slower movers are just finding how these really can have some personal power...and connect old friends as well...
Unless we sleep together, drink together or work together, I'm usually not sure how to categorize most of my acquaintances.
Glad Twitter got it's act together. The obsessives that use it can rejoice that they are now followers.
Ultimately, the value of an individual's business-oriented social network is determined by the level of discretion they apply when deciding whether or not to connect (or LinkIn, or whatever verb the platform uses). While a "500" next to someone's name on LinkedIn might look impressive, it's very unlikely that they have deep relationships with many people in their network. Conversely, a "10" next to your name on LinkedIn might suggest that you are not well-networked, but if those 10 people are connectors themselves, you're likely better off than the person with the 500.
The number itself is meaningless... Does your network help you further your career? Identify new job opportunities? Help with strategic introductions? If the answer is no, then your network of "friends" or connections is not unlike a bottlecap collection... fun to amass, but ultimately of little value.
Privacy needs to be more clearly addressed, since you are more thoughtful and candid with your true friends rather than your online associations.
You can complain all you want about the frivolous friend requests, but having a big network in that kind of environment is kinda the point of the environment. And, don't these sites already have tiers... isn't that what recommendations on LinkedIn is meant to do?
When we examine culture, we must always look for unintended consequences and especially those that alter the definition of words that we use to communicate. A young person today reading Stevenson's quote would view it differently than, say, my mother, and this kind of re-writing of the source code of our culture is more serious than we realize.
Also, there are the friend requests from complete strangers and people one barely knows that erode the value - and fun - of the social networks.
The only solution I can think is (other than people have some sense) is for social networking sites to introduce tiers of friendship.
I guess everyone just wants more love – that and those who want to shamelessly schmooze.
So....did you add me to your friends list yet?