Alexia Blogs

In a quick to and fro-ing with @PaulWalsh of Segala on Twitter yesterday, (I would post a link to the Tweets, but of course, Twitter is down) I mentioned my patent dislike of the ‘Top Friends’ application. That made me think more about why I dislike the application and why it sullies the spirit of social networking.

Social networking as esposed by the thinkers of the realm like Jyri Engestr?m and Hugh McLeod is all about interacting around themes of interest. In the spirit of that, I like to think of the social networking landscape as a republic of sorts. A haven where feudal conventions raising contributors above their peers do not exist.

Am I being naiive here? Quite possibly. At it’s core, social networking holds the topics we crave to interact around. Is there anything more democratic than sharing ideas across the flats of easily available web access on Jaiku or Twitter? Could our communications conduit be any more open? Probably not.

The ‘Top Friends’ application represents the anti-thesis of this philosophy. Is there anything more jarring than seeing a Facebook profile of a valued colleague, friend or business contact that doesn’t rank you in amongst their ‘Top Friends’? Tough shit, I hear you cry - but it’s a valid human reaction.

If you really want to connect with as many people as possible in a open and transparent way, then I suggest that you don’t install the application. Yes, I know that you will be bugged to install the app if someone adds you to their ‘Top Friends’. Be the better networker and nix that request to install the app.

UPDATE: Of course, Twitter comes back up as this post goes live. Here’s the Twitter commentary referenced in this post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Culture, Irish, Opinion. 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.