How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook
November 27th, 2007 — admin
In some ways, Facebook is the ultimate enabler of “local” connections. The site allows you to connect (or reconnect) with all sorts of communities, and as this column in Information Week notes, the problem with that is you’re often connected with people you would just as soon forget.
By the time you’ve reached your forties, chances are you’re out-of-touch with more friends than you’re in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans… Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.
You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.
This problem is something to consider as you work on ways for local users to connect with each other. People don’t always want to be found, or contacted or sold to by advertisers.
As a local news operation, one of the biggest advantages you have is trust and comfort. Keeping that bond with your users doesn’t limit your sales opportunities, but it does offer up some special challenges. The advantage for you is that you’re building a relationship with your local users that will last longer than their current infatuation with whatever hot social network is currently grabbing headlines.
