March 21, 2006

Your 100% Right, Dare.

[UPDATE: Please see my extended follow-up piece on my O'Reilly blog]

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Instant Messaging Networks vs. Public Social Networks

Of course, nothing stops the recruiter from just blogging about our relationship or creating a blogroll of "people I'm trying to poach from Microsoft" but that's just her word against mine. With publicly exposing her social network, it is now confirmed that we have some sort of relationship. That's not what I agreed to when I accepted her as an IM contact.

A lot of this is gut feel from a lot of us who use and build these products. However I'd rather err on the conservative side than piss off our users in a crass attempt to increase the usage of one of our features.

Whether this scenario, or any other, the fact that I might have someone on my IM "buddy" list *SHOULD NOT* infer any rights upon that person (who would in turn have me on their contact list) to make this information public in *ANY WAY*.

By forcing me to explicity allow someone to add me to their social network, whether public, semi-public, semi-private, or private, puts that control into MY hands, not theirs. With this in mind the following quote:

Dare warns about automatically converting a Buddy List into a social network. Hmmm - we’re about to find out how that works with AIM. This notion of the Buddy list as social network tantalizes me - the results will be fascinating. Dare claims it will be a 'privacy nightmare'. I don’t necessarily agree with him - but (as I said above) we're about to find out if this is true - in spades.

and in particular this statement:

Hmmm - we’re about to find out how that works with AIM

... makes me happy to know that I stopped using AIM, more or less, as soon as I started. The reason for stopping really had nothing to do with anything that went beyond taste -- I simply didn't like the look, feel, or function of AIM. MSN Messenger, Yahoo, and now GTalk have always sat well with me in this regard; each for slightly different reasons, but none-the-less, they each look, feel, and function in a way that has kept me as a so called "customer", or member of their network.

I can tell you one thing, if that wasn't the case, or in other words, if I was still a member of AOL's Instant Message (AIM) network, that membership would now be coming to screaching halt.