The concept of relationships used by social networking software is a limited one compared to the concept of relationships used in sociological social netowrk analysis. I social networking software all relationships are positive. You only have friends, not enemies, so any connection between two people is assumed to be positive and privileged by the software as such.
Outside of computerised social networking services, real-world social networks can contain *negative* relationships. You can have *enemies*, and they can cause you real-world harm. You don't want them being given the privileges within the service that friendship affords. Considering the information that social networking services contain, this can have harmful real-world consequences. When a company decides to automatically create social networking software relationships for you based on all the relationships they can discover from other data sources that implicitly contain information about real-world social networks, such as your email contacts, this cannot differentiate between the two kinds of relationship. When they create positive social networking service relationships this gives negative relationships the same privileges as positive relationships. Which is why Google really shouldn't have done that with Buzz - http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/fuck-you-google/ "I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother. There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts. You know who my third most frequent contact is? My abusive ex-husband. [...]" _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
