Avoid social spammers! (spamming on spock, discussion on Spock Power Users forum)
Michael has started two days ago a very serious discussion on Spock Power Users forum,- about spammingon spock and how to protect ourselves from co-called "power networkers", people that have a completely mistaken understanding of the TRUST and RELATIONS concept.
The topic is here- spamming on spock. And my comment was probably too much strong taking into account that I am for 3+ years a Evangelist of Business Networking with LinkedIn. But it's what I truly believe in! you may not agree, and for sure you'll not agree if you're from such "power networker"- mega-connector, or "lion" or "toplinked". Anyway I'll put my comment also here, it's very important for me.
I can only agree with Michael, since we discussed this problem in personal talks.
My quite big experience with social networks says there will always be a place for "Social Spamming" like in the case of Michael, but in "another places" it's quite easy to deal with it: you setup your profile access preferences + it's usually enough to once blacklist somebody. On Spock some tools are available, but there is no clear strategy/ guidelines or it's not properly communicated to the Users- how to deal in such situations? how to protect the own profile from "social spamming"? How to refuse/ blacklist definitively and how to rollback the action in the case of a mistaken a decision?
Misunderstanding of the "trust" concept? It happens everywhere! :( I am a LinkedIn Evangelist myself, probably one of the most known everywhere :), but I HATE the idea of those "lions", "open networkers" and toplinked.com lists and so on. LinkedIn is a professional and business networking tool, but those people call themselves "power user" when they are just "connection collectors", so "not trusted peers" and "to avoid for serious requests" from my point of view, and for lots of other people that believe that the POWER of a Business Network is not the quantity but the quality of it peers and relations between them!
With Spock it's an issue, since it's totally 2.0 so community managed... and if somebody or lots of suck folks do not understand the concept of trust, or I'd say they probably do understand it but ignore the sense of it, thinking only about the NUMBER of relations (in relations to Spock- they think about POWER)- in respect of those mistaken networkers we must have a mechanism to deal with. Otherwise on Spock it will become very hard to maintain own profile clean.
and one thing is my profile or Michael's or Marcello's one, we are "power networkers" in the sense of experience so we'll find a way to "defend" ourselves :). but you imagine what such social spammer could do with the profiles of VIP people, of CEO-level people that do not have so much time to understand the rules, to clean, maintain their profile and etc- performing social networking regularly. Those people will be unlucky and most probably will ask Spock to remove their profiles at all!
I think the only solution for this problem is to delegate to the COMMUNITY, the most trusted peers, managing this and similar issues, giving us some proper tools to mark inappropriate content/ relations/ profiles etc! I know some of such tools are already available, inclusind Spock Robots/ Police Agents, I know, I just continue my thought :)
I think keeping the sophistication of Spock in the background and maintaining a clean, simple interface is very important.
It might be a nice feature to have "advanced mode" where a power user such as yourself could specify options for further protection, or for assisting in improving spock's database.
[for example, I'd like to be able to add the relationships of people more simply - creating a matrix of people who are all interconnected, such as classmates or co-workers can be a little tedious. The score doesn't matter - but I am committed to helping improve spock's database, especially in regards to how people are related.
[one of my current projects, for example - and anyone is free to help in this!! - is linking together ancient families or student/teacher relationships. For example, so-and-so was a student of Aristotle, who was a student or this one, who was the grandfather of this other one). I know spock.com is not a family-tree maker or a company chart, but the power in freely defining the relationships between people is absolutely astoundingly easy on spock and it's becoming a passion of mine.
I can see real potential in this. Of course, one of the dangers is linking yourself to your grandmother, for example. If you show your grandmother then that has your mother's maiden name. [usually your mother's maiden name is your grandmother or grandfather's last name]. A dubious sort could utilize that otherwise difficult-to-discover information for identify theft purposes. Of course, there are websites that already have compiled this information freely, so perhaps the cat is out of the bag already!
Even with the potential for abuse, I hearily recommend that everybody see what their spock profile says and update accordingly. It's going to become more and more relevent in a google sort of way as time goes by.
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