Am I Your Friend?

If you follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my FriendFeed, then I guess you can consider myself as a friend, right? In my opinion, you make me part of my day. In return, I will most probably follow you and see what you’re up to, especially if I don’t really know who you are. I think that social networking has opened many passages when it comes to advertising, friendships and it lets you tell the rest of the world how you feel!

But what if you go to school, or you have folks who wish to heed the call to join a social networking group. A “trusted friend” (or member) feature adds another layer of control over privacy, allowing those who are closest to you to be marked as “trusted”, so that they can view everything at full accuracy. To my knowledge, the only major social networking site that gives users to activate the option is BrightKite. Though, there is a very good reason that Martin May, CEO of BrightKite, implemented this feature; isn’t it clear that without that option, BrightKite could become the world’s biggest stalker resource center (would suck for celebrities too)? But wait, you do know what BrightKite does, correct? It lets users track their friends, lets you meet up with real world people who use BrightKite as well (though, I think it would be odd going up to someone and saying “OMG! You’re Erika! Aren’t you? You said you’d be right here on Clark street, right?”, hmmmm?).

So, that is why I am taking a stand! We need more social networking groups like Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace and maybe Facebook to have the “trusted friend” option (and no, I am not talking about the “Top Friends” application which I’ve been invited to by people several times and is pointless). Not that I don’t mind the occasional “I don’t know who you are, but hello!”, but we should have this option, especially if information such as where your going to be at 8 P.M. can be shown to the public.

One last thing: the reason I brought up Facebook was because too many of my friend’s accounts are getting taken over by phishing sites. I don’t understand how many of my classmates could be so technically declined. The same for MySpace I suppose (I never really got to use MySpace all too much). But, seeing that our knowledge of the tech world is far more vast than theirs, it should be out duty to educate them. Then again, the best thing to tell them would be to not share the information in the first place.

Feel free to comment!