Dear social networks
Dear Facebook,
You know all those people with whom I have mutual friends? The ones you like to suggest I befriend? Did you ever wonder if there might be a reason why I am not friends with those people?
Please stop telling me who you think I should be friends with, or suggesting that my friends need more friends.
Also, please stop telling me who to poke. That sort of thing is best left to those of us with a speck of human judgment.
Love,
Non-Poker
Dear OKCupid,
Thanks for telling me, on my receipt of a message from a new sender, that you think we both like “Vegetarian”, “Ender’s Game” and “Hiking.” Because there’s no possible way I could figure that out for myself.
Also, “you both like Vegetarian” is not grammatical.
Love,
Adjectives are not Nouns
Is anyone else annoyed by the way social networks seem to be positioning themselves as knowing far more than their users do about who their users want to interact with?
Funny – I don’t find it annoying that they try, but that they’re still failing. I find it promising that they try. The future is almost to the point of being broadly enough distributed that we can have self-optimizing information feeds, auto-correcting contact lists, etc. I’m kind of excited about it (also creeped out, because I think it’ll create whole new kinds of injustice, but I think the new ones will be less egregious than the ones they replace or obviate). It’s the gathering dawn of the congenial economy.
Comment by Gavin Weld White — 3 November 2009 @ 12:09 pm
I think the problem with this is that in fact information is not broadly enough distributed for the networks to attempt this seriously (rather than idly, which I guess is their approach now, since they are doing it badly and must be aware of this).
Facebook primarily knows what you’ve been doing on Facebook lately — it doesn’t know what you’re doing in other media, or, most relevantly for some of the silliest failures, in real life. Several people in my network have highlighted being told to message their siblings or spouses; I just got prompted to message a coworker I talked to on the phone today.
Whether this information should be more tightly linked is an interesting subject of debate. Theoretically, it can be — any site which has your contact information (as they almost all do) can be linked with any other site that does as well, but most networks’ privacy policies prohibit this, and many users don’t want it. See: Beacon, which is no more. (Automation of this process is also subject to errors, as for some reason multiple people believe that they own my Gmail address and there are therefore a bunch of odd accounts associated with it that I didn’t create. And even an email account is not a person, although it’s the Internet’s closest equivalent.)
And of course that troublesome dark horse, real life, is always going to be a laggard in this respect. :)
Comment by Alexis — 5 January 2010 @ 11:36 pm