Social Networking : The New Virus?
I recently attended a User eXperience seminar at Intergen where Eamon O’Rourke was the speaker. He made two really interesting points (actually, there were six, but I’m only going to touch on two) and one of those didn’t even have anything to do with the topic. I’ll treat the point on creating the autocracy in a separate post. For this one, I’d like to look at the next form of virus: the social network.
Social Networking is one of the great phenomena of the Web 2.0 revolution. It has brought us in closer contact with friends and loose acquaintances alike, it allows us to share content such as photos and videos and allows us to create a unique web experience customised to our individual needs. The web is now a tool that allows us to communicate, work more productively, learn and be informed like never before. But it also desensitises us to the previously-learned security traps.
Let me start with an example Eamon gave that will no doubt be familiar to many of us:
Eamon receives an email from a known and trusted friend inviting him to join a great new social network called Plaxo. Not having heard of it before, but being quite the adopter of new technologies, he signed up without really finding out too much about the service first. Plaxo then asks him to recommend it to five other friends to “complete the registration process”, which he dutifully does. Job complete, Eamon sits back and straight away asks, “Er… now what?”.
Plaxo, it might be argued, is actually a perfectly sound service offering. However it is also completely viral in its user acquisition strategy. Like it or not, now that you’ve signed up Plaxo has a good amount of personal information plus connections to your Facebook, Flickr, LastFM, YouTube and many other accounts.
But it isn’t alone in this approach. Facebook is a huge viral network. If you’ve signed up to FB, you’ve probably also seen:
Your friend, Joe X, has rated / poked / identified you on ThisApplicationName. Add ThisApplicationName and send it to all your friends.
Ok, I’m paraphrasing but you get the idea. With Facebook, some of these added applications are actually starting to include full-blown virus components or behaviours. The vector by which these viral applications spread are through your networks: because you trust your friends and their recommendations, right?
Maybe this is a little overly-conspiratorial, but have you experienced this sort of behaviour? Do you think security is something that tends be – at best – an afterthought when using social networks? Are people really conscious of the privacy and risk when using social networks?
I think users may still have a little way to go in their awareness of web technologies.
Other Reading:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/06/16/X-Me-is-a-Facebook-Virus
http://tomatosaucestains.blogspot.com/2007/10/facebook-not-just-virus-laden.html
