Human Scale, Neighborhoods, and MySpaceaphobia

Vauhini Vara's piece in the Wall Street Journal about people defecting from MySpace and Facebook struck a real chord with me:

Neither MySpace nor Facebook will disclose the number of people who have deleted their pages, but a MySpace spokeswoman offers that there has been "absolutely no increase in the rate of deletions."

There's no question, however, that MySpace's recent popularity has brought with it a proliferation of spam that has annoyed some users. Many advertisers take advantage of the "friend request" function and send out requests that are really just advertisements. And programs have cropped up that can automatically send mass friend requests to MySpace users -- in short, a new generation of email spam. Sites with names like FriendBot.com and FriendAdder.com sell the programs starting at $19.95.

The guerrilla marketing has driven away James Kalyn, a 30-year-old technical writer in Regina, Saskatchewan. He kept receiving friend requests from half-naked female strangers through his MySpace page. Clicking on a request usually led to a profile that turned out to be an ad for a pornography site. At first, Mr. Kalyn was excited that "these hot girls allegedly wanted to be my friend." But after looking at a few profiles, he realized: "If it's a picture of someone fairly attractive, they're probably not my friend in real life." Last spring, Mr. Kalyn killed his MySpace profile.

MySpace says it has incorporated technology to identify and block spammers.

Facebook has so far avoided a spam problem. But it alienated some longtime users when the site -- which was once the exclusive domain of college students -- announced last month that anyone can now belong. Nearly 3,000 Facebook users have joined a group called "Official Petition to Keep Facebook Limited to Students." A note on the group's page reads, "Facebook just opened its doors to everyone on the internet. That means your mom, your boss, and every stalker in the world can now make an account."

Meanwhile, another key selling point for Facebook -- that it lets people connect online with people they know offline through friend requests -- has turned off some users, like 19-year-old Julie Miller. Ms. Miller, a sophomore at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo., dropped Facebook earlier this year after a few sketchy experiences left her feeling uneasy.

The invasion of the advertisers, stalkers, and pornographers is a natural consequence of the loss of human scale in these enormous social constructs. Where proximity and connectedness can be subverted through the agency of an omniscient social networking solution, then people will drop out. Let's call it MySpaceaphobia: the agoraphobic feeling of being a tiny individual roaming around in an enormous social context, being chatted up and chased by shills, sock puppets, and unsavory characters.

I publicly left a long, long list of social networking sites a few years back because of the social spam and general lack of creativity in the interactions. I have now gotten back into using some solutions becasue they meet the Kaminski Test (after Pater Kaminski): they foster creative interaactions with others. But that can be countered by sheer size and population density.

Human-oriented social contexts should allow users to control scale: how many people can access what aspects of my on-line persona, what sorts of communication are available based on what degree of connection, and so on. If I want to limit my profile on Facebook to only current students of my university, I should be able to do so. If I want to rectrict access to my music playing habits to only those people that I know, then Last.fm should allow me to.

We need to have these controls to introduce a "neighborhood" feel to online social interaction. In the meat world, I am located at a particular place, for example, the corner bar. Because I choose to be there, other people in the bar have access to me, and could, in principle, strike up a conversation. But I have chosen that experience, and I am willing to be there. If I have situated myself at home, at my desk, I don't expect people to walk up to the door, knock on it, and start a conversation with me about the weather or some movie. It's inappropriate. And even while in the bar, I don't expect people to try to sell me stuff, nor 5000 people to barge in and demand to be my friend.

When social environments balloon to millions of people, new mechanisms to enforce appropriate and user-controlled scale will need to be introduced. Gated communities within the environments may provide some of that, but they have numerous negatives as well. The third place (as Ray Oldenburg styled it) -- the corner bar, the barbershop, the cafe -- where we could interact with people that we don't know well, of different backgrounds, and including chance interactions with strangers -- provide great benefits to healthy societies. We can't live locked up in tiny, homogeneous groups. But at the same time, the scale matters: only so many strangers, only so many folks in the bar, and of course, the ability to choose which bar to be in, and the choice to leave and go home, and leave the crowd behind. If these social environments are to serve as a collective third space, then they will need to reintroduce scale, control, and choice to their denizens.

tags: myspaceaphobia, myspace, facebook, last.fm, peter+kaminski, the+kaminski+test, vauhini+vara, ray+oldenburg, third+place, third+space

Comments

[Marsha]

There are still a few purists out there. I recently discovered a beta site called fanpop.com, simple and smart. A platform degined for community building around shared interests. Users build, categorize and rate the content. A perfect example of the long tail.

[jasonkolb]

MySpace has many deep-rooted problems, which its users are only now starting to realize. Fox News bought a whole bunch of eyeballs in MySpace, and it is failing to capitalize on that. It has turned MySpace into a giant marketing venue instead of nurturing the social aspect of it and improving the product. I've written extensively about the problems that MySpace is burdened with, I think it's only a matter of time before the general public shifts to a more decentralized social network simply because there are so many tangible benefits.

[Vinchi]

Fanpop isnt the only site out there that is new but the one site that I really did like was matchactivity.com because it centralized itself on activities instead of just being friend greedy. The best part is that with promo codes you can get a year free(i used web99). Myspace is cool to find old friends but to really meet new people you have to go places and be at events. Matchactivity is like the missing link because it lets you see people and then set up an activity right away and then you choose who you want to go with.