Heap Overrun

When we think about friends, we typically think about those few people with whom we share a fairly close bond. Friends are people who we can turn to for support, advice, assistance and many other mutually beneficial things. Despite this, social networking has turned almost everyone we have ever met into a "friend", even people we only have occasional superficial conversations with. This is not to say that a friend must be someone we have met in person (or "in real life", as opposed to only through letters or the various forms of correspondance over the Internet) or who we speak with frequently; I myself have people I consider friends who I have never physically seen or who can only be spoken to infrequently for various reasons.

With the rise of social networking, including services such as Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca, we now have all new ways to keep in touch with people we normally would rarely communicate with. The argument by social network proponents is that this allows us to be more connected than ever before. However, that is only one side of the story; what is often left out is that social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and others have limited or no support for our real life social networks, instead taking the simple and easy route and putting everyone we know into the "friend" category. Granted, some social networks allow you to define groups that you can assign people on your "friends list" to, but only Facebook takes the logical next step and allows you to restrict access to content based on these groups and this is very poorly done. Not necessarily because they're being lazy or because they're deliberately only implementing basic functionality (although either or both reasons are plausible) but because this is actually really hard to do well and even harder to do right.

The Facebook way is the way of least common access. In short, each person viewing your profile can only view each piece if all of the groups and categories applicable to them are allowed to see that piece. For example, consider a friend named Jane who you have assigned to two Facebook groups, "School" and "Work". Now, you set privacy such that "Work" cannot view your photo album, but "School" can. Poor Jane, since she is in the "Work" group, cannot view your photos even though she is in another group that grants that access. Without having some very complicated groups, you actually cannot model real-world interactions and relationships.

This of course can lead to some problems, such as having people ignore your updates because they see too many things they don't care about or having some friends see things they shouldn't. This can be especially problematic if you have younger children as friends, such as younger siblings or maybe even your own children. You may also end up on the other extreme, where friends are excluded from seeing some of your status updates because they happen to be in a group that the update was hidden from, which can lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

Of course, this isn't the only problem with Facebook and similar social networks. We're also seeing what I feel is a lessening on real friendships because of social networking. One thing I was always told growing up was that there's a huge difference between quantity and quality (hint: one refers to an amount) and that quality is preferable to quantity. Having very few high-quality interactions is better than having a substantial quantity of low-quality interactions. I can use Facebook to see photos of the trips my family members take, photos of my soon-to-be-niece, and in a month or so I'll also be looking at photos of my nephew. I also see a huge number of Biblical "quote of the day" posts, random posts in the style of "lawlz, I just woke up backwardz and I's sick", and the constant stream of updates as people go about their daily lives and inform the Internet. When I see the people posting these things, I have to choose between asking what's new and looking like I don't bother to read their Facebook stream or just launching right into talking about something I read...and hoping that everyone else around was also privy to that information. The end result is that I find myself not caring whether I actually talk to some of my Facebook "friends" since I already know what's going on in their lives and asking about it on Facebook is the only way to make sure I don't inadvertently make public information they would rather kept semi-private. I'm not a fan of the Windows Live Messenger service that almost everyone uses, since I can only really talk to one person where Facebook lets anyone who can view the post jump in. Yes, that does mean I would greatly prefer using IRC as an instant messaging service instead.

Having said all that, social networking definitely lets me very easily keep in touch with some people I see very infrequently, including a few people on the opposite end of the country from me who I rarely get to talk to and actually see in person even less. In general, Facebook (and other social networking in general) usage seems to be sending our abilities to interact with real live people without some sort of electronic intermediary on a very steep downward spiral. For those people we rarely see anyway, social networking is a benefit but it is one that we should not rely on to the extent that we do. There's something unique about talking to friends in person and conversing over photos and sharing experiences that no social networking service, not even Facebook, will be able to replace. Even if it eventually does.