Social notworking

It seems that lately social networking has lost some of its shine - every day on the blogosphere I seem to find a new story about some unfortunate soul who has had a disappointing experience with one or other of the platforms. If it's not Google Buzz's privacy issues, it's something about Facebook's recent course case in San Franciso. More and more, people are beginning to take umbrage with online communities and their ever-more revealing presence on them. Especially if their posts are going to attract unwanted introduers.

Of course, you could argue that if you decide to stick a picture of you and your mates chugging beers at homecoming on FB in the first place, then you're basically waving goodbye to your right to be private. What is slightly more worrying, however, is the idea that even private profiles are no longer private, shown by the recent ruling of a Canadian judge. The backlash is even starting to come from within the industry. Online media expert Jaron Lanier gave a fascinating interview with The Observer recently, in which he claims Web 2.0 has basically failed in its pledge to unite people and engage them in an online community. Rather, it has reverted people back to an animalistic pack instinct, where weaker members and newcomers are picked apart mercilessly by others wishing to exert their dominance (bullied nowadays with blog posts rather than teeth). Even Twitter, the holiest of holiest in terms of social networking, seems to be succumbing to this same gruesome epidemic of social savagery.

Is this the beginning of the end for social networking? Of course not. Twitter has only recently announced that its users post around 600 tweets a second (excluding spammers). You could argue that the networks are simply too big to fail at this point, but isn't that what they said about the banks? Even though the big three clearly aren't going anyway anytime soon, some level of damage control is surely needed. Nothing lasts forever, even in the virtual realm.