Fig 1. Expect next year's gripping sequel, Naked Came The Stranger To Facebook
As social networking becomes more widespread as a tool for keeping in touch with with friends, family, business associates, and nice people you bump into at conferences, it's increasingly becoming a good idea to create a "friending policy". But what's the good of a policy saying who you want to approach you, if someone has to approach you to find out what it is?
Some of my friends and colleagues on Facebook have a very open policy regarding invitations: if you invite them to connect, they will accept. Period. Some ask that invitations come with a personal message that gives the relationship some context ("Hi! I was the guy at MonkeyFest 2007 who asked you what brand of chow you feed your Rhesus Macaque.") Others accept invitations only from people they've met in person or interacted with online, and others will only add close friends and family to their network.
That's quite a range, isn't it? Whether a stranger's invitation to connect is sociability or spam is defined by the invitee's personal preferences. There's no way to figure out what those preferences are through Facebook. You have to hope that they've made that information available somewhere else, such as their blogs. (Here's Shel Israel's; and here, a professor spells out his policy for new students.)
Facebook could help resolve this problem by giving users the ability to create a policy (or choose from a menu of preferences) that would be visible on their search profiles. MySpace actually has a nice setting that requires potential friends to know either your last name or e-mail address in order to send you a request--that's a good start, though not as flexible as what I'm envisioning.
Some services deal with the issue by treating all invitations from strangers as spam, and make such invitations grounds for terminating an account. Take a look at paragraph three of the article "Pulse Connections and your Address Book " on Plaxo's Help center (via fweez):
Who should I connect to?
Everyone you care about! Your family, your REAL friends (not your “social network friends”), and your business network. It’s also important that you refrain from connecting to people you don’t know. This will weaken your network and make the content in your Pulse less interesting - besides, it's rude and against Plaxo's use policy.
You can add people you don't know to your Plaxo Address Book, but you can't connect with them on Plaxo without violating its Use Policy.
And here's a snippet from LinkedIn's User Agreement (the boldface is mine), in which you agree not to:
Upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation. This prohibition includes but is not limited to a) Using LinkedIn invitations to send messages to people who don’t know you or who are unlikely to recognize you as a known contact; b) Using LinkedIn to connect to people who don’t know you and then sending unsolicited promotional messages to those direct connections without their permission; and c) Sending messages to distribution lists, newsgroup aliases, or group aliases.
I genuinely appreciate their efforts to protect me from spammers and other irritants. However, I'd like to have a more flexible way of managing my social life online, one that doesn't rely on Terms Of Service to tell me who my "real" friends are.