Sharing and caring – more on social network manners

4th August 2008, 02:29 pm by Matt Rhodes

A few weeks ago I posted about the nature of friendships and manners online and in social networks (see post here). Over the weekend I heard a conversation that made me think again about this and post a bit more.

Two people on a train from Cambridge to London were discussing Facebook. Let’s call them Mary and Simon. Mary was bemoaning how she doesn’t use it that much because she doesn’t want “people to know what I’m doing all the time”. Simon on the other hand found that he was slimming down his friendship group because he didn’t “want to know what everybody was doing all the time”.

This conversation highlighted for me a rather developed aspect of the nature of friendships in social networks. One of the features of Facebook, Twitter and other networks is the ability to constantly update what you are doing, what you have stumbled upon online, photos of events and so forth. This can be seen in two ways, the second of which is often overlooked:

You are sharing information with your friends – you update what you are doing, post photos and write notes that you want your friends to read. It’s a way of you keeping them up to date
Your friends are being shared with by you – this constant flow of updates and and information is received along with those of every other friend

In terms of how you deal with situation, there is a need for people to understand both of these and then to respond to them. As I said in my previous post, social networking manners is an emerging area and one where people are developing their own approaches to mirror their different uses of the networks.

Some people update regularly, share everything they find and will constantly tell you what they are doing. Others use the networks only report on things that they would possibly previously have done via email. Both are valid approaches but can come into conflict with each other. When a small number of your friends update regularly on everything and other very rarely, then your news feeds will be overrun by this minority.

Of course there are two ways of dealing with this – either unfriending the frequent updaters, or conversely adding even more friends so that their updates get drowned out. But perhaps the best thing to do is to reevaluate what it is you use your social networks for.

Different social networks are for different things. I update Facebook more than LinkedIn, for example, and befriend different people on each of these. Whilst my friends on Facebook may want to know about the wedding I was at over the weekend, those on LinkedIn probably don’t.

When you think about accepting friends and using social networks it worth thinking about who else you are friends with their and what, for you, the purpose of this network is.

Sharing is great, but share the right things with the right people in the right places. Some people want to be shared with regularly and others don’t. The beauty of social networks, and one of the reasons I expect that the proliferation of networks and communities will continue, is that you can go to different places to do different things.

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