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“Social network invites can be a plague”

Posted by Daniel Terdiman

Web-based social networks is probably one of the fastest growing industries in the contemporary age. It effectively brings friends and families a lot closer through the internet. We are no strangers to Facebook, MySpace, and many other social network sites. And we are definitely familiar with all kinds of email notifications automatically generated by them every day, such as friend requests, event notifications, etc. And the chances are at large that we joined these social networks in the first place were because of friends’ invitations. This article “Social network invites can be a plague” from the CNet News discusses the problems exist among this new kind of social networking.

For some people who constantly have their inbox stuffed with invitations and notifications from all sorts of social networks out there, their first reaction is probably annoyance. In a way, these emails could be considered spam, however, they are much harder to be taken care of then simply click “Delete”, since they are actually sent from a friend or an acquaintance of yours. You are probably unsure whether you can just ignore it if you still want to maintain this friendly edge between you and your friend.

On the other hand, for people with much more social and outgoing professions, they perceive indirectly receiving tons of emails from close or distant friends a sign of their success in social networking, which could be very closely tie to the success of their career. For example, the article mentioned a vice president of an Entertainment Media Venture, due to the nature of her job, she holds a much more welcoming attitude toward all these automated social network emails than a visiting professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Several solutions to this problem are also mentioned in the article. One is to simply terminate your membership at that particular social network like how Bill Gates did, since he was receiving more than 8,000 friend request per day. However, looking at the bigger picture, the social network industry should probably look more into creating more specific, and functional sites that target toward different age groups, different professions, and different interests; so that these social networks can serve a better purpose for all kinds of people that seek easy breezy ways to simply connect with their friends without having their daily life disturbed.