Social Networks, Email and Privacy

With all the buzz around more sophisticated social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, its easy to lose sight of the fact that if you believe in Metcalfe’s Law—a network’s value is proportional to the square of its users—venerable email is still the biggest social network of all. As Max Kalehoff points out at Online Spin, email is “the mother of all social networks” with 91 percent of people ages 18 to 64 utilizing the medium.

Even though many pundits would point out that younger generations eschew email in favor of IM, text messaging and other more personal networking means, Max argues that as this younger generation enters the work force, email, by the nature of its widespread adoption, is a de rigueur social network in the business world. He also adds almost all social networks still use a person’s email address as the main hub for identification and widespread communication needs. Email may be a more “stuffy” way to communicate than those who use today’s social networks prefer, but email has reached critical ubiquity, and at least it provides a firewall on most personal data.

Lately, concern has also arisen over how much power these social networking companies possess and who owns the personal data that resides on their servers and websites (see Scoble’s posts Disabled and Erased). Doc Searls also has an interesting take on the Scoble/Facebook issue over at the Linux Journal (Dependence vs. Independence). So does B.L. Ochman (Data Ownership and Portability) .

No doubt, social networking sites serve an enormous and popular communication function, and it seems their continued growth for the foreseeable future is assured. But it would be ill-considered to think that email will diminish in importance anytime soon in the face of these much newer, more personal and feature-rich social networks. And given the relative importance of a Facebook or MySpace presence is to some people, it may be wise to see how this unsettling privacy issue resolves before assigning blind trust to a corporate interest that could misuse your information or turn your visibility on the Web out like a light.