The Problem With Social Networks: When Worlds Collide

from the keep-'em-separated dept

There's a famous episode of Seinfeld where the character of George Costanza freaks out that his worlds are "colliding" when the woman he's dating starts becoming friends with his friends. It made for an amusing episode, but it is true that most people have separate "worlds" of people that they know -- and that can cause problems on social networks. Most social networks effectively treat every one of your friends the same. There may be some slight levels of differences, but there's still a lot of overlap. And that's troublesome when your college buddies know you as one sort of person and your work colleagues know you as someone else. As the article above notes, as more and more people get on Facebook, and more of these worlds collide, it actually may cause some people to stop using the social networks as much and to pull back from sharing certain bits of information that made the various systems fun in the first place. Next up: which social network will allow you to have totally different profiles depending on who's looking at the page?

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