{"id":1622,"date":"2007-06-21T11:16:35","date_gmt":"2007-06-21T18:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2007\/06\/21\/why_not_friends\/"},"modified":"2007-06-21T11:16:35","modified_gmt":"2007-06-21T18:16:35","slug":"why_not_friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2007\/06\/21\/why_not_friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Does This Mean We’re Not Friends Anymore?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“If I thought you weren’t my friend, I just don’t think I could bear it.<\/a>” (audio) <\/p>\n

When I first signed up for LinkedIn, the initial volley of inbound invites was about what I expected. The requests for connections were from the anticipated audience of former colleagues, friends, and others I’ve worked with over the years. After the opening flurry, silence for a time. <\/p>\n

Eventually, the flow of invites resumed. But as it did, the percentage of requests from strangers climbed steadily. Not, mind you, people I didn’t know well. Or people I’d never met in person. Or people I knew of but had never spoken with. These were, as far as I could tell, total strangers. <\/p>\n

No obvious connections to me, RedMonk, the technologies and projects I cover, or any of my former employers or schools. Without giving it much thought, I accepted a few of these and forgot about it. After considering it later, however, I decided that this was a poor policy on my part, in that it would introduce noise into my information flow. And that was LinkedIn, a service I hear from perhaps monthly. <\/p>\n

This pattern, with slight variations depending on implementation, has replayed itself in virtually every social networking-ish application I’ve signed up for from Facebook to Twitter. And it’s a mild concern. <\/p>\n

Not for the most obvious reason: privacy. Which is good, because most of my information is public. If you’re really that interested, you can find out where I went to school (Facebook), where I’ve worked (LinkedIn), what music I listen to (Last.fm), what I’m reading (del.icio.us), what I like to take pictures of (Flickr), where I’m traveling (Dopplr) – even what I’m thinking about (Twitter). But it’s easy for me to relatively sanguine about that sort of declarative living, a.) because I was voted the “Least Likely to Attract a Stalker” at Mountain Lakes High School (don’t tell anyone about ThinGuy’s random Google visitor<\/a>) and b.) because I manage the information on those services more carefully than might be obvious (try and find pictures of my friends, for example, on Flickr).<\/p>\n

No, it really doesn’t have anything to do with me. What concerns me is rather what someone else might think if their subscription isn’t receiprocated, or worse, withdrawn. <\/p>\n

When you unsubscribe from a Twitter contact, for example, the confirmation message is something like “[INSERT NAME] is no longer your friend.” [1] Ouch. The first time I saw that blunt system message, my immediate reaction was a horrified “man, I hope they don’t get an email saying that.” And of course they don’t, or at least I haven’t when folks have unsubscribed from my useless prattle.<\/p>\n

As Joshua discusses<\/a>, however, there is the flip side to the Twitter\/et al “friend” coin. Namely, that not reciprocating a “friendship” can have a negative impact. Nor is this limited to software; in an article I regrettably seem to not have del.icio.us’d, one recent Zune buyer wrote of the emotional impact of having the carefully selected track he sent to a fellow Zune user rejected. Discarding a suggestion for a restaurant to eat at is one thing, music quite another – personal as it is for most of us. <\/p>\n

Regrettably but unsurprisingly, I don’t have a magical solution for this issue other than to be very up front about who I’ll “friend” in this brave new (digital) world. To that end, here’s the deal: if we’ve interacted (email\/IM\/conference\/phone\/IRC\/blogs\/etc), I’m more than fine with invites. Happy about them, even. If we don’t know each other in any context, however, the value of a connection is minimal anyhow. Higher traffic channels like Twitter are a bit of a special case – I’m forced to be even more selective there lest the channel grow to crowded for me to track. <\/p>\n

The good news is that the actual negative impact from trivial social networking rejections tends to be fairly slight. But eventually I think someone playing with less than a full deck will take it the wrong way and react badly. Which assumes, of course, that this hasn’t happened already. It’s just a matter of volume, and by extension, time. There are more requests coming from more channels every day, so the odds are ever more in favor of eventual unpleasantness.<\/p>\n

But that’s different than life…how? <\/p>\n

[1] I know they have the “Leave” button in there as a less final option, but I can’t see the point of that; if I don’t want to track them now, what’s the likelihood I would in the future? And why wouldn’t I just resubscribe in that case? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If I thought you weren’t my friend, I just don’t think I could bear it.” (audio) When I first signed up for LinkedIn, the initial volley of inbound invites was about what I expected. The requests for connections were from the anticipated audience of former colleagues, friends, and others I’ve worked with over the years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-networking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}