bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Saturday, March 20, 2004 ::

snam, snam, snam, snam...
Oh, the things we learn from reading Fast Company. This week I learned a new word: snam. It's short for "social network spam" -- those annoying, impersonal messages from social networking services like orkut, the "online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends." ~~(The "snam" story is so far only available in the paper version of April's Fast Company so don't bother following the link to find it.)~~ Update: The "snam" story is now online.) This past week, I received three invitations to join orkut. I haven't acted on any of the invitations, other than to write my trusted friends a personal email thanking them for the invitation but explaining my reservations about the entire schemed.

There are a few things about this snam business that stick in my craw:

Not only are the messages impersonal; they're also intrusive -- like spam but moreso, because they enter your mailbox under the guise of an acquiantance. You open the invitation from your trusted friend, expecting at least a brief personal note, something along the lines of: Hey, Andrew, I think you're really cool and want to invite you into my circle of trusted friends. Read on! But no. Instead you get:
Trusted Friend [trustme@trustefriend.com] invites you to join his network of personal friends at orkut.com.

orkut is a community of friends and trusted acquaintances that connects individuals through a social network that grows person by person.

With orkut, you can catch up with old friends, make new acquaintances through people you trust, and maybe even find that certain someone you've been looking for everywhere.

orkut helps you organize and attend events, join communities that share your interests, and find partners to participate in the activities you most enjoy.

To find out why Trusted Friend thought you'd enjoy orkut and to discover who else you know is already a member, click on the link below:

The "link below" tells you absolutely nothing about why Trusted Friend thought you'd enjoy orkut. It simply leads you to a form where you're supposed to enter your email address and sign up. How misleading is that?

These types of abuses of online communication strike me as inherently fascist, like that horrid Outlook feature that allows people to schedule time with you without asking first. People in IT on our campus use that feature all the time. It's invasive and fascist. Don't use it.

Shouldn't social networks be more organic, evolving over time and through consistent communication? Each of the three orkut invitations I received this week were from people I've communicated with online (one of them offline as well), but who I wouldn't consider to be in my network of "trusted friends." They're all good folks, or seem to be, but we seldom communicate. One, in fact, delinked me from his blog several months ago and I've yet to understand why, although I've asked for an explanation. (When I received his snam earlier this week, I wrote him a nice note explaining my reasons for hesitating in joining his inner circle, and hoped for a personal response. Instead, the guy re-sent the original orkut request. Or maybe orkut has a built-in timer to re-send them after a certain period of time. That would be a fascist thing to do, but anyway, it's also ballsy and does little to assuage my concerns.)

What really galls me is that these people who supposedly want to network with me do not respond to my emails -- written by me, not churned out by some orkut robot. Talk about cojones.

This quote from the Fast Company piece (it's called "Networking Overload," by Scott Kirsner, on page 38 of the April 2004 issue) says it all: "For some people -- I'm not one -- being a central node in an online social network can impart a feeling of importance and connectedness. For the majority, though, it'll be a hassle. The people you might want to contact aren't all members of the same service: they're probably spread across different sites such as LinkedIn, Ryze, and a new site launched by Monster. And who wants to spend time relaying appeals from people you don't know or answering questions for friends-of-friends?"

So, dear readers, if you wish to network with me, simply leave a comment on this blog, or send me an email. Or even respond to an email I send you. I'd like to get to know you. Really, I would. I'm just not ready for the kind of commitment you're seeking.

Besides, orkut is a dorky name for a social network.

:: Andrew 11:13 + ::
...