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"Can social connections and recommendations be automated?"
08/05/2003 Entry
Earlier I commented on some of the potential downsides of a service like Friendster, which is a Web site that allows people to meet the friends/acquaintances of those in their social circles.
Taking the idea of using computer networks to mine data about social networks to another level is the new service called Visible Path. USA Today reports on the idea, which is that a program can mine the email address books of people to see who is connected to whom. If you then want to get an introduction to someone, you don't have to ask people whether they know that certain someone, you can just check using this program.
I like Valdis Krebs' quote in the piece: "We often get the technology right, but we screw up the sociology."
Would you really want a program scanning your calendar and address book to see with whom you've been in touch recently? It seems like too much invasion of privacy. Even if contacts are restricted to work affiliations, it seems problematic.
The piece does a good job of exploring some of the downsides of such technology with additional good quotes from Valdis so I won't get into more details here.
Replies: 1 Comment has been posted, click here to see it and add your own
We often get the technology right, but maybe our criticisms often consider that users don't realize the consequences unlike us the social scientists. It doesn't seem like such a big stretch to consider that people realize their social networks are visible. People also realize that some of that visibility can be used for validation (well if THIS person listed you as a friend, you must be worth knowing after all), social research, even harassment.
Users and social scientists however, seem to differ dramatically from the engineers, the people that create technology. I've often wondered why that was, but a recent conversation with a collegue was really quite illuminating: the engineers are not concerned with social implications, but with the idea - can this be done? The idea though and the toy/product created can not live without a user base. And its the users that will make the social judgements of what they want and what they do not want. So if you get the technology right and the sociology wrong, the product will die the death of many other products that have been created in a similar fashion.
Posted by Irina @ 08/06/2003 05:47 PM CST
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