One of the amusing (or annoying) things about social networks is the phenomenon of the "fake friend" -- the person you really don't know whom you somehow end up being "friends" with anyway. There's
any number of reasons why this happens, but it often seems to boil down to the fact that the aggressor treats social networking as a big game to collect the largest number of online friends, or he or
she just has a different idea of what social networking is for (or a different idea of what constitutes a "friend," for that matter).
I will now invoke my blanket caveat when writing about
social media, to the effect that all these concerns are incredibly petty and insignificant in a world filled with Haitian earthquakes and Polish plane crashes. Fake online friends? I know: who gives
a ****?
Well, I do actually, because I think it's interesting from an anthropological perspective. In short: people are weird and that's interesting. From a marketing perspective, I will add
that it also threatens to dilute the value of social networks: if someone's profile is filled up with hundreds of people they don't really know, how engaged can they really be with the goings-on of
that network?
Of course, it's a free online world out there, and every individual is free to accept or reject friend requests from people they don't know. However this puts them in a bit of a
dilemma -- or at least, it put me in a dilemma, because I was raised to be painfully polite -- but again, these are trivial concerns. So you hurt the feelings of someone you don't know online: so
what?
Nonetheless, the phenomenon of fake friends is now pervasive enough that a new generation of social networks (and social network apps) is promising to limit your contacts to only your
real friends. One of these, Rally Up, is a location-based social network with iPhone and iPad apps, which allows you to choose from four settings for each friend -- "real," "feed," "lurk," and "mute"
-- thus controlling the amount of information about you available to them (and about them delivered to you). Rally up has also foresworn Twitter feeds, in order to keep your friend-related content
stream more "pure."
Meanwhile Microsoft is rolling out the Kin, a touchscreen phone with a built-in feature -- Loop -- that allows you to aggregate your "real" friends from across various
social networks, moving their profiles and updates to the top of your profile on each network, thus creating a sort of meta-network of "real" friends.