The top 10 social networking annoyances
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
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