I just discussed a few days ago, what it means to an end user, when social networking sites start opening up and issue API’s to 3rd party developers for developing applications. My major concern at that time was privacy and still is. There are other annoying aspects of the social, to which I’ve been exposed over the last week and couldn’t help but rant here.
So you’re a concerned about sharing your private data with others and like me, opted out of the social features. Good for you but what about your friends who did opt in? I rely heavily on orkut, which is a social networking platform from google (on a very smaller scale than facebook or myspace) to get in touch with friends back in India. Unlike facebook or myspace, google’s orkut, I believe, came out haphazardly with their API’s or did not undergo quality control for its “applications”. So here I am online on orkut and see a friend online. I click on his display picture and visit his profile - All hell breaks loose.
This particular friend has installed some application and every time I visit his profile, this application will get data from its own servers and try to display it on my screen. For some very unknown reason, this results in a memory leak and Firefox (2.0.14, 3.0 RC1) or IE 7 stop responding… I have to stop the program using task manager and make a mental note to myself to never visit that friends profile again. I’d love to get in touch with him but orkut is, now, not the best way to do that any more. I guess an email or a call will do.
Some more rants follow in terms of the “Friends update” feature… I’d love to see what my friends are doing right now and this was a welcome feature on orkut (which strikingly resembles the mini-feed feature of facebook). However, I’m in no way interested in knowing that “abc” slapped “xyz” because he felt like so - using the slap application. There should be a way to opt out of these notifications. I’m content with just watching the updated photos and videos.
So coming back to the question in hand - Are We ready for the social? Well, apparently I’m not.
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