Subtle Complications of Social Software
Jerry Michalski: “Making relationships explicit, available to any virtual passerby, creates subtle complications.” I have that same pragmatic problem with "social software". It feels weird for me to explicitely mix circles of friends, but to have it done for me without my permission is even weirder.
Unfortunately, social networks are not like clockwork mechanisms or income statements. They are full of human beings, with relationships, expectations, and prejudices, and therefore require a gentle hand from management. They do not teach enough of those skills in business schools, and they teach even fewer of them in engineering schools.
I had a bad enough time trying to start relationships (of any kind) in college without being in engineering school. Luckily—depending on how you look at it—I chose political science as my major.
Finally, some of the social-network service providers and many third parties are already busy mining the data in networks where individuals disclose their expertise, goals, business links, and much more. In my experience, when the issue arises of how this data is collected and used, the key players all too often have lousy intent.
Reading this article on online dating, it struck me as a little creepy that not only were researchers looking at aggregate data from online dating services, but that some of the online dating sites were actually created by researchers! I took pains to keep my online dating profile names private and different than any persona I use publicly (the profiles themselves are now invisible to all). People reading Just a Gwai Lo have a pretty good idea of the level of desperation and "despair" I face. I exaggerate it for comic effect, but still, my parents think I'm a lot cooler than I really am.
