Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Recently, I have been playing with Foursquare, a mobile geo-location application that allows you to "check in" from your mobile phone where ever you are in the world. It allows you to connect with your friends so they know where you are and you know where they are.

Very similar to all the other social network applications out there, you can look for people you know and "friend" them. Though unlike most of the other apps, on Foursquare if you choose to ignore a friend request the person can continually re-request to be your friend. Note to Foursquare - You might want to look into that.

This weekend I received several friend requests from the same person in Foursquare, each time I chose to ignore his request. I don't want you to think that I am some high and mighty Foursquare person who does not accept friend requests, but this person was a person who I did not know, had never met and he lives on the other side of the country. Because of all those factors, I decided not to connect with him.

After his second request, I took a look at his profile and was not surprised to see what I found. He was a person who had easily a 1000 friends in Foursquare and I would be willing to bet that he knows less than 25% of of those "friends". This is not something new, go take a look at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. The goal for a lot of folks within these networks is not to connect and engage with other people, but just get as many friends as possible.

For me social networking has nothing to do with numbers. The goal of social networking is to engage, interject and potentially influence what people are thinking about and discussing online. From my experience, usually that involves much smaller group of people, specifically I am referring to influencers. People who carry big a stick within their online communities. The folks who when they say something influences others within his or her community.  And it seems that this gentleman among many others do not realize that having thousands or even millions of friends does not make you an influencer.  

So to the gentleman who keeps friending me, I would suggest stop trying to get more friends and maybe take some time to engage within the community you have already built. Though I am not going to accept you as my friend, sorry.

Last week Capstrat's John Romano asked a few questions about the digital afterlife .  I set out to investigate what might happen to my online identity if I were to pass away.

Here's what a few online services say about the deceased in their terms of service.

Facebook

"When we are notified that a user has died, we will generally, but are not obligated to, keep the user's account active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments."

Yahoo (Flickr)

"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."

MySpace

MySpace does not have an official policy in their terms of service, but I found the following in a CBS News article. "MySpace said in a statement it handles deceased members' pages on a "case-by-case basis" and does not "allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user's profile." Profiles can be deleted if that's requested by family members."

Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Brightkite, ClaimID, del.icio.us and Pownce don't seem to have anything formal in their terms.  So, in short, they aren't obligated to do anything.  My digital identity might live on, or it might not.  What is it going to take to bring this issue to the forefront and force the proprietors of the social web to address it?  I suppose only time will tell.