Apparently, the Internet wants me to become more social.
Facebook has, for the past few months, been pointing out people who I haven’t written on the wall of, messaged, chatted with and so on. ”Share news,” the website suggests. ”Send them a message!”
And in some cases, Facebook is replacing ads with friend suggestions. ”You both are fans of marmalade!” it might say. ”Add him as a friend!”
Really, Facebook, I’m okay.
I’ve discussed before my aversion to adding people for the sake of having a larger number of friends, but this is getting ridiculous. There’s no utility in connecting with people who I don’t remember, or may never have met – it just seems creepy and wrong. Also, it violates the new social contract.
I’ve always been under the assumption that social networking sites were created to enhance pre-existing friendships and interactions. It’s easy to send people an invitation to a party you’re throwing, show them vacation pictures, tell them happy birthday or strike up a short conversation. And if you do use the sites to contact strangers, then it might be similar to the case of using LinkedIn to find out more information about a recruiter or hiring manager to get a leg up over the competition.
But through a combination of the site’s relentless urging to connect with people who are more on my social periphery (ie: some days, I wonder, “what’s going on with my Sophomore year lab partner?” and can easily find out, rather than sit and continue wondering) and recent comments by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg about privacy, I’m starting to wonder what the site is trying to do.
I was (and am) a big fan of the way that Facebook constructed its business model – build slowly and gradually increase its audience by adding universities and colleges, whose members (students) are well-versed in the Internet and word-of-mouth communications, then expand geographically so more features can be added along the way, and markets can be more easily managed as the company grows. It was nice that the site was the cool, underground and almost secret thing before it was unleashed upon the masses.
But now, the site’s increasingly more confusing privacy settings make it trickier to manage for those who don’t want the whole world seeing their account. Several of my friends have quit the site because they found it easier than blocking off search engines from finding them.
So the larger problem becomes, how does a website known for innovation continue to innovate when it has grown so large? And it seems that Facebook’s answer is for people to first grow out their friends lists past the point of knowing someone in the real world and to the point of six degrees of separation connectivity. While this strategy may pay off on sites like LinkedIn, where you want more professional contacts, so a 2nd or 3rd degree connection is helpful, it fails for a site like Facebook, where you are developing personal contacts.
The site itself has become a global powerhouse and has forever changed the way that we interact online. But if Facebook stops treating its members like people and more like customers, it will find itself losing relevancy, and more importantly, profits.
So, no, Facebook, I don’t want to reconnect. I don’t want to connect to someone who I don’t know. But I do want to use the power of a social network to help me communicate with other people.
