The top 10 social networking annoyances

by Scott Spanbauer

May 16, 2008 —

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 your friends
as they make the rounds of the local bars and restaurants. Although Facebook,
MySpace, and other services are gradually adding mobile-phone features, that
kind of mobile social networking is still just a dream for a number of reasons.
First, to be successful, it has to work across multiple wireless carriers and
social networks--no easy feat. Second, services such as Dodgeball require you
to actively post location updates before your friends can find you. Until GPS-equipped
phones can update networks with location information automatically, it's still
easier just to call.

6. Ning: Too Much Porn

Ning, which lets you set up your own custom social network, has attracted attention
for its ability to create communities that are more functional than those created
through competing services from Google and Yahoo. Nonprofits, support groups,
and hobbyists have found their homes on Ning. But, as with many new neighborhoods
on the Web, the seedier side of the culture is often the first to move in. As
on Second Life, pornography reportedly comprises a significant percentage of
the communities Ning hosts. Flickr faces a similar issue, but it shields unsuspecting
visitors from seeing adult content through default filters (that is, you must
actively opt out of the filter). Ning offers no such setting, which makes the
site tough to recommend to schools and families.

5. Do I Know You?

Facebook started out as a way for college students to put faces to names: "Hi,
I think we took Poly Sci together last semester, and you're friends with my
friend Brittany. Would you be my Facebook friend?" Now that Facebook is
a global phenomenon, exchanges can go more like this: "I don't know you,
and we have no friends in common. I live in Colorado, you live somewhere far
away. And yet you'd like to be my friend and show me your baby pictures. And
you want to see mine. Hmmm, let me think about that ... request denied."
Not only is it okay to ignore friend requests from people you don't know, your
privacy may depend on it.

4. Thanks for the Add! Here's Some Spam

Slightly more annoying than random friend requests from total strangers is
the increasing presence at social networking sites of good old-fashioned spam--you
know, the kind where somebody is actually trying to sell you something. On Facebook,
MySpace, and many other sites, you can expect to receive all kinds of unsolicited
commercial and noncommercial requests, promos, and e-mail messages in your inbox.
All manner of enterprises, from fledgling rock bands to escort services to professional
headhunters, are trying to use these newfangled social network things to drum
up business, and that means spam.

3. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (Too Hard)

Late last year I realized that I'd read one too many inspirational peace, true
love, and happiness-through-vegetarianism bulletin posts from some random friend
on MySpace, and I decided that I'd had enough. I decided to cancel my account.
I wanted to disappear from the scene--to commit "MySpace Suicide."
But I quickly found out that it wasn't as easy as clicking a Delete Account
button. Perhaps to protect accounts from unauthorized deletion, some services
require you to send a formal cancellation request--LinkedIn requires you to
contact customer service, for example. MySpace does let you delete your own
account, but only if you still have access to the e-mail account you used to
set it up. Unlucky for me, I had changed ISPs during my two years of MySpace
membership, and I no longer had my old e-mail address. So began a four-week
account-cancellation process, culminating in my actually having to e-mail MySpace
a picture of me holding a piece of paper with my MySpace user name scrawled
on it. I might have been better off just leaving the account active and deleting
all the data and content it held.

2. Zombies, Pirates, and Other Pointless Facebook Applications

Facebook applications allow my friends to share their movie tastes, opinions,
news picks, and other items with me, but accepting these tidbits requires me
to install each corresponding app in my own profile (at which point it has access
to my personal information). One app informs me that a friend has just urinated
on me, poked me, or vampire-bit me. An alarming number of my female friends
want me to know them by their stripper names. Why my friends devote so much
time to these curious little apps I haven't figured out, but I know that cumulatively
they've begun to demand way too much of my time.

To make matters worse, Facebook applications promote themselves, too, trying
to get in touch, and even peppering me with spam. If you're encountering the
same thing, you can fight back. To make silly apps go away, open the application
invitation and click on the Block [application name] link in the bottom-right
part of the window. Or, you can banish all applications from your Facebook experience
by installing the Facebook
custom app hider Greasemonkey script.

1. Multiple Social Network Syndrome (MSNS)

With the advent of social networking, my e-mail traffic has gotten worse, not
better. Here's an e-mail telling me that my brother has sent an e-mail within
Facebook. Another message informs me that Susie has updated her profile at Friendster.
Another announces that Bob over at FriendNet has just brushed his teeth. Another
proclaims that Dave has written the latest installment of his ingenious blog
at MySpace. Somebody at Facebook has just poked me. Someone else has bought
some new bling. And on and on and on. To reply or act on any of these events,
I'll have to bring up one of the 12 social networks I've been sucked into joining,
log in, and then view the ads there. All of that, of course, necessitates a
lot of extra clicks and keystrokes, and after a while, I find that I don't really
like my friends anymore.

The major social networking sites are very aware of such frustrations, and
are taking steps to increase their ability to interact with one another. MySpace
recently announced that it will let its users push their bio information out
to other sites such as eBay, Photobucket, Twitter, and Yahoo. Not to be outdone,
Facebook has announced its own plans to do the same thing with partner sites.

That's all good, but I'm not holding my breath for the day when I can share
data and content directly between my MySpace account and my Facebook account.
Still, it's a positive sign that the big players are acknowledging that social
networking is about bringing folks together online, not confining them inside
large walled gardens.

PC World