Ben's Talk3G Blog

For the longest time I stayed away from social networking. There was something about Facebook in particular that just stopped me cold. What I always preferred, and believed would be the 'next big thing' on mobile phones, is instant messaging and chat.

That didn't happen. Yes, IM exists, but it's my no means ubiquitous and, in my experience, a lot of the time being on a PC dominated IM network on a mobile phone is just inconvenient.

What happened instead was that social networking all-out invaded the mobile. Facebook has over 100 million mobile users of its mobile service, and as smart phones continue to gain ground I see no reason why this number wont enlarge rapidly. Twitter is reported as having more than 75 million users, all micro-blogging about all sorts of things and, increasingly, tagging their location to each tweet.

And herein lies one of the fundamental problems with these social experiences. The data that they leave behind, sprawled across the Internet, will likely remain there indefinitely.

If you normally tweet from your home and then tweet while you're on holiday then anyone can look at your twitter feed and know that your house is empty. If you geotag your tweets then they also know where you are now and, more worryingly in the above scenario, where you're not.

Then you've got Foursquare and Gowalla, which actively encourage users to leave virtual footprints all over the place.

It used to be a bit weird that you could look somebody up in the phonebook if you wanted to find their number. If things carry on the way they are, it's going to be trivial not just to find someone's social networking profile and a whole bunch of photographs and videos of them, but to find out where they get coffee, where they work, and all sorts of intimate details of their daily lives.

Privacy issues aside, what advantages do all of this additional data actually grant us? Are we really better off for being able to look at a screen on our mobile and see what all of our friends are up to, in exquisite detail? Wasn't it better when we used to call our friends on the phone and, you know, actually talk to them about what they're doing?

I'm starting to think that I preferred things a little less connected than they are now. I'm starting to think that, actually, I don't want to know a lot of things that people put in their status updates and tweets, and if you want to know what I'm up to then you can contact me and ask! Will I give up my Facebook and Twitter? No. But I will change the way I use them.