What's wrong with "the people you may know?"

You may have noticed “the people you may know” feature crop up on social networking sites. Facebook and Linked In both use it. In fact, Linked In defaults this to display on your homepage. What is it? It’s a service that riffles through the connections you have on-line to other people, between other people, and to organizations you have in common with others to spit out a list of probable matches. I’m not sure the algorithm is the same for every social networking site, but that’s basically what it’s doing.

I’ve found this to be a great value-add. Through these services, I’ve found people from previous jobs that I’ve lost contact with and casual acquaintances that had vanished. However, today this service threw my ex-husband into my “get reintroduced” list. I realize there’s no way to program social mores into a networking tool. It’s a dumb beast that will throw people into your path whether or not you want it. However, I think there should be a customized exclusion list built into the tool to prevent interactions that you know you don’t want.

Not that I have anything against my ex. I just didn’t want to see his name lurking there or know that I may be lurking on one of his lists.

As my friend B says, “Social networking is all good and interesting until it bites you in the ass.” Indeed.

Freedom Wall