I still remember the first time I was introduced to Facebook, Twitter and many other products. In the case of Twitter it was three years ago. I thought of it as silly at first, then a great way to communicate with friends, and then as a good way to promote things. I can recall myself being a huge advocate of Twitter to people who I encountered. But lately I have had so little communication with friends on Twitter that I don’t use it very often. To make matters worse, when I do there is so much irrelevance that I am bombarded with that I feel like it may be time to pull the plug. This is a familiar feeling. I went through the same range of emotions with Friendster and MySpace. It started with spammy user profiles. Over time the number of spammy user profiles added up to a level of noise that was deafening. As I write this I have more than 100 follow requests in my inbox from Twitter. Many of these are from people who I know, but the vast majority of them are from completely random people who I have no connection to and no interest in engaging. A few of the lastest ones have included @MyCareerCoachOnline, @monkey42, @justjobs, @travel agents, and other random profiles. If I go look at these profiles many of them put in city and state combinations as well as names that are fake. I end up blocking far more profiles that I follow – in part because I don’t want my Tweets to show up in a splog or stweet (splog = spam blog with posts ripped without permission form someone else’s blog trying to make money off of ads, stweet – splog bait using someone else’s tweets). There are tons of blogs out there to help measure authority, buzz, etc., but at some point this all becomes a measure of noise not relevance.
Had I never spent time working in the web startup space I probably would not have given much thought to why this was. So why is it that social media is overrun with fake profiles, fake posts, and so much noise? Let’s break it down. First off, if you are in the web business you are evaluating your success based on how many users you have. If you have more than Facebook you are king of the hill. In addition to the number of users you are evaluating your success based on how much activity your users are generating. Naturally, you want more users and more activity vs. less. For a website like Twitter you naturally want to be bigger than Facebook. To get there fast you could do it organically or you could do it by cutting some corners. By allowing fake profiles, and millions of profiles that are essentially what I’ll generally identify here as “proxy” profiles (think marketers, spammers, or anyone promoting something online) you get your number up much faster. The only problem is, along the way these profiles begin to eclipse the unique users who have profiles and who are interacting with your website. This can add up to a huge problem. In fact, I would argue that these proxy profiles are critical factors in the decline of Friendster and MySpace. I know that I’m not the only person who stopped using MySpace because the the absurd amount of spam that I received there. Facebook managed to avoid this problem by instituting a no holds barred anti-spam and proxy profile policy. If you are like me you know at least a few people who had their profiles on Facebook deleted because they were flagged as a spammer, because they used a bogus name, or because they did something that otherwise prompted a reprisal from the Facebook team. You may recall that event social media celebrity Robert Scoble was kicked off of Facebook for going out of bounds. The company even took matters to court, suing spammers. Where Facebook took on Spam early and often, in part by creating an invitation only and highly restricted environment, others have been content to look the other way while their numbers climb.
I guess you could just look the other way, but what is at stake here is not the user’s inbox. Social Media exists because people like to share! People go on all of these social media websites looking to share what they are doing through photos, status updates, and other forms of personal narrative. They like to know what others are doing too. On a really basic level, Social Media is a lot different than the user’s inbox. In fact, it is a lot more like the Citizen’s Band or CB Radio and Amateur or HAM Radio, which both saw a huge rise in popularity back in the mid-70’s around the same time that personal computing began. Some even predict that Twitter will die off in much the same way that CB Radio died off.
The challenge for Social Media websites and founders out there seeking to create products around social media websites for the day is to figure out how to ensure the consistency and quality of the user experience where communications and self expression are concerned while building a user community that is full of real people. Perhaps the answer to Twitter’s problems is to create a new class of profile, one just for people. This would not be such an outlandish evolution, but it would mean that Twitter is just another social network. Would that be such a bad thing? I for one would not mind having an alternative to Facebook where I know my friends already are.
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