Social Pollution

Everyone that knows someone that's used a Social Networking Service (SNS) has undoubtedly received some form of Social Network SPAM. You know the message, the one that anxiously impersonates a "friend" of yours and the long lost value they've found in this new tool.

Finally, it's starting to get into very annoying, and dishonest, cracks and crevices. The latest culprit, Multiply.com, is getting a lot of flack from a growing audience of annoyed victims.

David Weinberger first hit on this with his "After receiving my 15th request to be someone's friend at Multiply.com" where he notes "These social networks in my experience continue to be all maintenance and no value.". Clay Shirky picked up the torch not too long afterwards with this interpretation of motives:

The canonical example of a negative externality is pollution — if spilling effluvient into the nearest river costs me nothing, so what if it kills all the fish. That’s certainly cheaper than installing filters, now isn’t it? Multiply is social pollution, and the environment it’s polluting — my willingness to assume mail from friends and business contacts is likely to be of value — is exactly the environment that social services require. In the long term, they are fouling their own nest.

But they don’t care about the long term, they only care about getting more members now now now. Fortunately, the subject header of the mail always has the non-common word Multiply, so those messages are easy to flag as the spam they are. Better, though a bit more work, is to write everyone who gives Multiply permission to spam you and ask to get them to take your name out of the Multiply db. It won’t keep Multiply from spamming in the short term, but it may hasten the day when your friends stop granting permission to spammers to use their name to reach you.

Source: Many 2 Many, "Multiply and social spam: time for a boycott"

David's point hits on something I have been building the case for here over the last year: SNS 1.0 is significantly flawed. As I've previously noted, "SNS 2.0 will have one striking characteristic, an underlying Purpose-Model".

If there's a secondary characteristic, it is that is will be respectful of our personal space and privacy -- privacy is a requirement, not a feature.