Everyone wants to bring new social networking ideas to their product and services, and that doesn’t exclude even Google. They just announced their latest 2.0 features in Google Reader. Google has allowed us to share with our friends our favorite blog posts we view using Reader. You get to select what you want to share. When you marked a new item as shared, your friends who use Reader would see it. Technically, your shared items were on a public Webpage, so they could have been seen by others who are not your friends, Only if those people could figure out how to find that page.
Google is now assuming that anyone you have had a conversation with using Google Talk is a friend, so they'll automatically be able to see and read what you've read and marked as shared. You can still manage your friends list and explicitly tell Reader not to share with some of your newfound friends. Of course, you'd have to know that Google had started sharing your items more widely, which many people apparently did not, even though Google alerted them through a pop-up window.
Google is desperately trying to play in this Web 2.0 space with social networking. It wants to make many of its applications and services more "social," to, for example, tell your friends what you are reading with Reader or cataloging with My Maps. But unlike Facebook, they have n ideas who your friends are. So they jump ahead and assume that anyone you’ve talked to is your friend and that you don’t mind sharing your favorite stuff. Let’s be realistic, not everyone on my Facebook or Linkedin is someone I called a friend. I guess it comes down what’s one definition of what a “friend” is and it differs from time to time. This is not for Goggle to decide. There are often competitive issues even among my friends and colleagues.
Consider how two of my strategists use Google Reader's sharing feature: to alert another colleague about articles they believe of interest and one of them talked to a ex colleague who consulted with a competitor of one of our client. Do they really want their former colleagues to know what research they are reading related to their current projects? Probably not.
The popularity of social networking sites introduces the use of mediated–communication into the relationship development process. These sites can be viewed within a larger trend that shifts the influence of interpersonal correspondence to mediated messages. In an age of social media, do we really have any privacy? Form Oscar Gandy’s (1993) perspective, we probably do not. Using the metaphor of a Panopticon — an architectural design that allowed prisoners to be monitored by observers — Gandy argues that surveillance systems can exert the same type of control in contemporary culture. He states: “the panoptic sort is an antidemocratic system of control that cannot be transformed because it can serve no purpose other than that for which it was designed — the rationalization and control of human existence.” He calls for an agency to ensure the survival of privacy. Everyone organization involved in social networking really needs to think hard anytime they introduce a new “share” feature. It is amazing how much you can find out about one’s personal life by mining info from these social networking sites.
Social networking sites create a central repository of personal and collective information. These archives are both persistent and cumulative. Instead of replacing old information with new materials, all data are archive–oriented compilations of entries that can be searched and pieced together in an automated fashion. Should we be worried?
