perfidy

Social networking sites have been quite popular in the last several years, few more so than MySpace.

It turns out that, as in many other ventures, it's possible to get too much of a supposedly good thing. In Thursday's WSJ, there was an article entitled "MySpace, ByeSpace", exploring a trend away from MySpace and Facebook. In it, they report that a lady with several tons of "friends" on the site decided they might not be true friends:

After Ms. Thompson created a MySpace page two years ago, she found herself sifting through dozens of requests daily from would-be acquaintances seeking to link to her page. By early this year, she'd amassed 4,000 such "friends," most of them strangers. Many flooded her page with remarks like "omg" -- shorthand for "oh my god" -- "you're so beautiful." By June, Ms. Thompson, who resides in New London, Conn., was sick of the comments and posted a farewell ode before deleting her page...

No shock, really - sites that facilitate the social equivalent of pretend popularity whoring may provide entertainment, but they're surely not building social networks worthy of the name.

Social networking "spam", both from people trying to build their imaginary networks and from advertisers has become a real problem, we're told. And I don't doubt it for an instant. I was about to abandon the article as "dog bites man" news, until I came across the portion of the story dealing with James Kalyn, "a 30-year-old technical writer in Regina, Saskatchewan".

He kept receiving friend requests from half-naked female strangers through his MySpace page. Clicking on a request usually led to a profile that turned out to be an ad for a pornography site. At first, Mr. Kalyn was excited that "these hot girls allegedly wanted to be my friend." But after looking at a few profiles, he realized: "
If it's a picture of someone fairly attractive, they're probably not my friend in real life."

He's officially disqualified from being my friend in real life, solely for admitting to having thought random, half-naked women wanted "to be his friend". However, based on the sole criterion I could glean from his quote, I'm otherwise qualified to be one of his friends in real life. Which is a bit of a shame, both for me and for all his actual friends in real life.