I didn’t sign up for your _______.
“I didn’t sign up for these updates!”
Users must think, say, or subconsciously be frustrated by the type of updates they see on their favorite social networks.
In the photo above, my Path friend may be making a joke (or may actually be annoyed) that I’ve recently been checking-in on Foursquare via Path. To me, it’s a nice way to update Path friends, while letting Foursquare tally and share my location. To him, it’s likely not what he thought he was signing-up for when he accepted my friend request.
In the same vien, Facebook doesn’t work for me, so I rarely use it. At the root of this is the fact that I am “friends” with a wide-variety of people; people from my hometown, schoolmates, business colleagues, community members, family, and my real life friends. These people are all connected with me on Facebook because we know each other in some capacity, not because they decided to subscribe to my every thought and event in my life.
Twitter, on the other hand, is a place where I can share my thoughts freely. Everyone (friends and strangers) who follows me has chosen to do so knowing that I will tweet my thoughts, links, ideas, and conversations. If they like my stream (or put up with it) they continue to follow me, otherwise they’re free to unfollow.
I also love Foursquare. I know what I am signing up for when I connect with a friend on the platform - their location based check-ins. And I can easily manage notifications of their activity.
These single-purpose, focused networks will continue to chip away at the value of omni-networks, as users continue to narrow what they truly care about and what they decide is just noise.
For now, I try to follow this advice:
