In France, there’s a mini-scandal brewing over a blog network called Ladies Room (www.ladiesroom.fr), whose members create the content for the site. It turns out that Ladies Room is owned by a marketing agency called Heaven. A lot of people are upset because this was not clearly disclosed and had it been, several users would probably have never opted to become members. The French newspaper, Le Monde, talks about a strike among the contributors, but one of the commenters to the article says only a few members actually went on “strike” (i.e. refuse to post any more content). And again, one wonders who exactly this commenter is, whether she is really a member of the site or someone from the marketing agency (or a friend of the agency).

This is the biggest problem with these free services, whether they are social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, blogging services, or applications like Twitter. How are they supposed to make money to cover the cost of doing business? Advertising. They must cater to the desires of those who pay them — the advertisers — even if it means using our personal data and content in a way that we did not envision or desire. There is a built-in aversion towards transparency, openness and honesty.

The solution: give members the option to remain on the free service (with the knowledge that their personal data and everything else they do on the site will be sold to the highest bidder); or pay (for privacy).

Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention.

When an application such as Facebook makes it too easy to send a Cause Invitation to 100 “friends”, the invitation starts to look like spam. When it’s too easy to invite 800 people in your address book to Facebook or Linked In or whatever new social network someone dreams up, it feels fake. Why don’t applications developers purposely make it difficult to choose which friends to invite — make people type in each email address or click on each friend’s name.

My prediction for the coming year: we will see more invite-only, closed social networks.

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war.

I left LinkedIn, a popular business networking site precisely because lots of people wanted to be my contact and began pestering me for endorsements even though I hardly knew them. It was a complete waste of time. If I need to contact someone, I don’t need to go through LinkedIn. I have a very good network already and my friends are more than willing to make introductions to other people.

Facebook is purportedly worth $15 billion. If my company were worth even $1 billion, I would spend at least $100M working on a super-targeted advertising solution and with that kind of money, $100M, I could do it. First, I would definitely ask the person to whom I am showing the ads what he or she is interested in.

Clearly, I don’t live in California. Even without asking me, Facebook would have known NOT to show the ad. Who gets ripped off? The advertiser. Who gets annoyed? Me.

If this is all Facebook can muster, what can I expect next in my feed? Dog and cat food ads, even though I own no pets? Weight-loss diet ads even though I weigh 100 lbs (five feet four inches in height)?

Wouldn’t surprise me. Sloppy, unprofessional work from a company worth bucket loads of money. I am not impressed.

UPDATE: Several hours later, I see on the left hand side of my Facebook feeds, two ads delivered one after the other: (1) Botox and (2) Tired of Dating?

First, I do NOT need Botox. I may be 46 years old but I don’t have hideous wrinkles and the thought of getting large needle next to my head to inject poison sounds gruesome to me. Second, I don’t give a damn about dating or being tired of dating. Where the hell does Facebook get this idea that I need wrinkle-reducing treatments or help in my romantic life? Is my photo THAT bad?

Today, I got an email via Plaxo from someone named Sidney. The message says: Sidney wants to add you as a business connection on Plaxo Pulse.

Who’s Sidney? No last name, no photo, no other details about Sidney were communicated to me either in the email or in the online invitation I had to view on Plaxo. Is Sidney an axe-murdering dope fiend? Maybe. So I rejected the invitation and sent an email to the Plaxo people telling them that I want out of their online network.

We are not using the privacy settings of Facebook, and are too polite to say no to invitations from people who want to friend us. No wonder, the social environment is starting to resemble a crowded nightclub. (You go to clubs to be seen, not talk.) … What we need is something more intimate, more private. It’s not about the number of friends, but it’s about connection.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago on why I’m not buying the Facebook hype. Sure it has an open API, very nice for developers, but now that thousands upon thousands of applications can launch on Facebook, it will, like all portals, suffer from having too much. You will have to wade through endless lists of apps. Another giant time suck.

I took several steps this week to weed out the useless activities that only clogged up my schedule and created stress:

(1) I unsubscribed from more than a dozen mailing lists.

(2) I stopped using Twitter and Jaiku. They were novel and fun in the first week, but extremely annoying in the end. I did not want to twit whenever I was going out running, doing grocery shopping, etc. The people who asked to be my Twitter “friends” would write updates almost every 5 minutes it seemed, so that my Twitter screen would be filled with their useless garbage. Anyone who twits that much is, in my opinion, a TWIT.

(3) I deleted 75% of the RSS feeds on my RSS news reader. 75% of people have nothing important to say to me.

(4) This week, I did not respond to time-wasting emails from people who wanted me to do their work for them. In a number of cases (lazy journalists), I did respond, but gave them a link to the appropriate online resource where they could find the answers themselves.

Deleted my account at Linked In

The boldest move of all was to leave Linked In. Read here about why I left the networking site. It was utterly useless and only a burden (all those people I couldn’t care less about wanting to connect, asking questions and worst of all, wanting me to endorse them).

False sense of guilt is the biggest offender

As Om Malik mentions in his Facebook fatigue post, the reason we accept invitations to be friends with someone on Facebook or other social networking sites, or in my case, to endorse someone on Linked In, is that we feel guilty about turning them down. We don’t want to hurt their feelings. So we do all the things we don’t want to do and waste time and energy. I decided that my time is very precious and that if someone I don’t know wants to waste it, I need not feel guilty about saying no.

A lot of social networking sites today, including Facebook, have privacy filters so we should use them more often. It’s time to put the guilt back where it belongs: on lazy people who want you to do their work for them, pathetic connection hounds who have no friends in real life, people who have no direction or purpose other than to waste their own time, and “noisy” people (those who run around doing ten things at the same time – multitasking – but accomplish absolutely nothing).

We need private networks that are like private clubs

I am sure these exist already, but the time is really ripe for these things to spring out of the ground. Ning, a social networking site, allows you to create a private social network. It’s time to bring out the virtual doorman.

Time and privacy are two aspects of our modern lives that are in short supply . . . Time and its management are highly personal issues, but when it comes to privacy, the chinks outweigh the average person’s capabilities. And that prompted me to as the question: can privacy be offered as a value-added (premium) service by carriers and web service operators such as Google.

The most obvious way to save time is to:
- unsubscribe from mailing lists
- pare down the list of blogs on one’s RSS news reader
- delete (and refuse to respond to) time-wasting emails (from people who want you to do their work for them)
- stop using Twitter or Jaiku
- minimize use of social networking sites

To protect one’s privacy, it’s best not to join any online business or social networks. But there are certain services that may be very useful, e.g. Google search and location-based services, that inform others of what you are up to, either in your head on physically. Om points out that search engines do a poor job in privacy protection probably because they sell ads around the searches.

Is the concern over privacy an age-related one, with the under 30 generation not at all bothered about having their revealing photos and intimate details online for all to see?