Online social networks are one of the blessings of Web 2.0. Plenty of people use them to stay in touch with their friends, meet new people, make work-related connections and more. Unfortunately, it seems like you can’t have something good on the Internet without someone coming along to abuse it, and that’s as true of online social networks as anything.
I’m going to be using the term “social network spam” rather loosely here. Wikipedia defines it one way, but I’ve seen others talk about different phenomena that also deserve the term. First I’m going to cover my own varied experience with it, then branch out into other descriptions.
One of my earliest experiences with online social networking can’t really be called spam, for all that it was unexpected and unsolicited. A freelance writer who had submitted some articles occasionally to our company invited me to join LinkedIn. I did. It was a painless experience, but I haven’t really done much with it since. If I did more business networking, it would have been more useful to me. As it happens, I do expect to do more business networking over the next year, so I’m glad to have a place to start.
Sometime in the past month, I received an email from a friend inviting me to join Tagged.com. Like the LinkedIn invitation, this message appeared to have been automatically generated by the network; unlike the LinkedIn message (here I’m operating from memory), it looked as if it was sent directly from my friend’s email account. That meant no risk of triggering the spam filters. Also, it went to my personal rather than my work account; this made sense, since my friend had no reason to have my work email address in his online address book.
By this time I’d reviewed several social networking sites, and knew of the existence of more. I currently have accounts, or at least sign-ins, with Live Journal, Searchles, Zude, Yahoo 360, LinkedIn, Spock, Orkut, and probably a few about which I’ve utterly forgotten. I’ve heard of Fark, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Powerset…I could name more, and I know how to Google for even more than that. The point is, I’d never heard of Tagged.com, and I thought that was a little unusual. So I decided to do a little investigating before clicking that link.
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