Please fuckin’ stop!

I keep on deleting these messages and never bothered reading them. So there is a stop-the-harassment link at the bottom that I just saw. Just type your email address
.

I’m not an anti-social (or maybe I really am) . Sir Nash has a good point on “social” software being anti-social. Why?

• Using social software is discrimination. You just can’t say that this one person is your friend, you have to request to be that person’s friend.
• In real life, societies are interconnected to each other. In “social” software, it’s not. Not all your friends in Shitster aren’t in CrapSpace nor Bull5. It just stops at the “sixth” degree.

To make it fair, I took the time to think of an inhibitor for Antisocial Personality Disorder on the web.

• Use OpenID. Still requires signing up, but it’s just once.
• These social networks should be more friendly to each other and network with other networks. Just add one friend and that person really is your friend already.
• You can add a friend but you don’t have to confirm. In fact, I should be able to say that my friends that don’t have social software accounts are my friends. When they start using social software, all I have to do is say that I’m referring to that specific friend. It’s like asking another friend if they know another acquaintance of yours.
• Mass email invites are not different from terrorist attacks. They waste people’s time, CPU cycles and server space. Clicking and spotting the delete button takes about 1.5 seconds, the accumulated time in doing it could be equivalent to barring someone from socializing. And that doesn’t include the time wasted on figuring out what and from whom that message was. All those resources could’ve been allocated for pro-social stuff like cancer research.

I know some people who work for these social software and I hope they read this post. I’d build one myself but it’s not my thing. If I plan on doing it, remind me to call it “Yet Another Crappy Social Network”.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 21.53.37 and is filed under Software/Code, Techitude, The Web/Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.