The Top 10 Social Networking Annoyances
Taylor
The Top 10 Social Networking Annoyances
It's great to keep in touch with your friends and colleagues, but does
the price have to be spam, zombie bites, and friend invitations from
people you've never heard of?
Scott Spanbauer, PC World
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 10:00 PM PDT
The same question people used to ask about PCs can be asked of social
networks: Were our lives easier or harder, better or worse, simpler or
more complex, before they came around? The answer is yes. For some
folks, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace seem
nearly as indispensable as e-mail, but creating and maintaining these
virtual circles of friends turns out to be quite a bit of work, often
necessarily so. Here are the ten things that bug me most about today's
social networking services.
10. MySpace Kitsch
Unlike Facebook, which adheres to a relatively rigid blue-on-white,
three-column design, MySpace lets you decorate your page with
background images, themes, and unconventional layouts. That
flexibility provides just enough rope for many MySpacers, and the
results range from ugly to completely unreadable. Some MySpace pages
are so poorly designed that they can crash the hardiest browser--and
this alone has caused many social networkers to flee the aesthetic
chaos of MySpace for the relative calm of Facebook. Thankfully, some
enterprising script authors have come up with scripts that tone down
the MySpace bling and clutter: One of my favorite MySpace scripts puts
a button on the screen that turns custom page styles on and off with a
single click.
9. The Worms Crawl In
One of the benefits of social networking is that your communications
with fellow networkers bypass your normal e-mail inbox, providing a
measure of safety against viruses, worms, and other malware--or so
everyone thought. In 2006, however, Google's Orkut service (which is
hugely popular in Brazil) was hit by the MW.Orc worm, which
masquerades as an image file in a user's scrapbook and propagates to
the profiles of other users, stealing personal data along the way.
Despite attempts to block such infections, a new family of worms
written in JavaScript attacked the service in late 2007, and the
problems continue today. Of course, the issue isn't confined to Orkut;
we've heard numerous stories of social networkers catching bugs from
social networking sites outside Brazil too.
8. LinkedIn Is UpTight
Almost anything goes on MySpace, but not so on LinkedIn, where the
strictly-business motif discourages personal expression outside of a
photo (a fairly recent innovation), a status line, and standard résumé
entries. Sure, the whole point of LinkedIn is to put your most
professional foot forward, but really, LinkedIn, couldn't we loosen
the necktie just a little? LinkedIn may never support psychedelic
backdrops or party photos, but it could do a lot more to help you
project something more than an utterly antiseptic persona.
7. Mobile Social Networking Still Kinda Weak
Imagine receiving real-time, location-based status messages from your
friends as they make the rounds of the local bars and restaurants.
Although Facebook, MySpace, and other services are gradually adding
mobile-phone features, that kind of mobile social networking is still
just a dream for a number of reasons. First, to be successful, it has
to work across multiple wireless carriers and social networks--no easy
feat. Second, services such as Dodgeball require you to actively post
location updates before your friends can find you. Until GPS-equipped
phones can update networks with location information automatically,
it's still easier just to call.
6. Ning: Too Much Porn
Ning, which lets you set up your own custom social network, has
attracted attention for its ability to create communities that are
more functional than those created through competing services from
Google and Yahoo. Nonprofits, support groups, and hobbyists have found
their homes on Ning. But, as with many new neighborhoods on the Web,
the seedier side of the culture is often the first to move in. As on
Second Life, pornography reportedly comprises a significant percentage
of the communities Ning hosts. Flickr faces a similar issue, but it
shields unsuspecting visitors from seeing adult content through
default filters (that is, you must actively opt out of the filter).
Ning offers no such setting, which makes the site tough to recommend
to schools and families.
5. Do I Know You?
Facebook started out as a way for college students to put faces to
names: "Hi, I think we took Poly Sci together last semester, and
you're friends with my friend Brittany. Would you be my Facebook
friend?" Now that Facebook is a global phenomenon, exchanges can go
more like this: "I don't know you, and we have no friends in common. I
live in Colorado, you live somewhere far away. And yet you'd like to
be my friend and show me your baby pictures. And you want to see mine.
Hmmm, let me think about that ... request denied." Not only is it okay
to ignore friend requests from people you don't know, your privacy may
depend on it.
4. Thanks for the Add! Here's Some Spam
Slightly more annoying than random friend requests from total
strangers is the increasing presence at social networking sites of
good old-fashioned spam--you know, the kind where somebody is actually
trying to sell you something. On Facebook, MySpace, and many other
sites, you can expect to receive all kinds of unsolicited commercial
and noncommercial requests, promos, and e-mail messages in your inbox.
All manner of enterprises, from fledgling rock bands to escort
services to professional headhunters, are trying to use these
newfangled social network things to drum up business, and that means
spam.
3. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (Too Hard)
Late last year I realized that I'd read one too many inspirational
peace, true love, and happiness-through-vegetarianism bulletin posts
from some random friend on MySpace, and I decided that I'd had enough.
I decided to cancel my account. I wanted to disappear from the scene--
to commit "MySpace Suicide." But I quickly found out that it wasn't as
easy as clicking a Delete Account button. Perhaps to protect accounts
from unauthorized deletion, some services require you to send a formal
cancellation request--LinkedIn requires you to contact customer
service, for example. MySpace does let you delete your own account,
but only if you still have access to the e-mail account you used to
set it up. Unlucky for me, I had changed ISPs during my two years of
MySpace membership, and I no longer had my old e-mail address. So
began a four-week account-cancellation process, culminating in my
actually having to e-mail MySpace a picture of me holding a piece of
paper with my MySpace user name scrawled on it. I might have been
better off just leaving the account active and deleting all the data
and content it held.
2. Zombies, Pirates, and Other Pointless Facebook Applications
Facebook applications allow my friends to share their movie tastes,
opinions, news picks, and other items with me, but accepting these
tidbits requires me to install each corresponding app in my own
profile (at which point it has access to my personal information). One
app informs me that a friend has just urinated on me, poked me, or
vampire-bit me. An alarming number of my female friends want me to
know them by their stripper names. Why my friends devote so much time
to these curious little apps I haven't figured out, but I know that
cumulatively they've begun to demand way too much of my time.
To make matters worse, Facebook applications promote themselves, too,
trying to get in touch, and even peppering me with spam. If you're
encountering the same thing, you can fight back. To make silly apps go
away, open the application invitation and click on the Block
[application name] link in the bottom-right part of the window. Or,
you can banish all applications from your Facebook experience by
installing the Facebook custom app hider Greasemonkey script.
1. Multiple Social Network Syndrome (MSNS)
With the advent of social networking, my e-mail traffic has gotten
worse, not better. Here's an e-mail telling me that my brother has
sent an e-mail within Facebook. Another message informs me that Susie
has updated her profile at Friendster. Another announces that Bob over
at FriendNet has just brushed his teeth. Another proclaims that Dave
has written the latest installment of his ingenious blog at MySpace.
Somebody at Facebook has just poked me. Someone else has bought some
new bling. And on and on and on. To reply or act on any of these
events, I'll have to bring up one of the 12 social networks I've been
sucked into joining, log in, and then view the ads there. All of that,
of course, necessitates a lot of extra clicks and keystrokes, and
after a while, I find that I don't really like my friends anymore.
The major social networking sites are very aware of such frustrations,
and are taking steps to increase their ability to interact with one
another. MySpace recently announced that it will let its users push
their bio information out to other sites such as eBay, Photobucket,
Twitter, and Yahoo. Not to be outdone, Facebook has announced its own
plans to do the same thing with partner sites.
That's all good, but I'm not holding my breath for the day when I can
share data and content directly between my MySpace account and my
Facebook account. Still, it's a positive sign that the big players are
acknowledging that social networking is about bringing folks together
online, not confining them inside large walled gardens.