How many Facebook friends do you have? Do you feel somehow inadequate when you compare your number of Facebook friends with how many your other friends have? Do you conduct a mental inventory of people you have ever known and consider who you can enlist to increase that number,no matter how long it has been since you last had any meaningful contact with them or how much you really like them? Do you start your day with a cup of coffee and a perusal of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or any number of other social networking portals? If you answered yes to any of these questions you can at least take comfort in the fact that you are not the only one feeding the machine.

There is no doubt that sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr or YouTube can be handy little tools for connecting and sharing. For the most part, they offer up a free and fun environment to create your little space on the net. If you simply use these tools for their basic purpose then you end up on the winning end of the equation. The scales start to tip the other way when these sites become a focal point of daily activity and you find yourself habitually checking and posting without realizing that the space that you have carefully carved out is not actually yours at all.

Social networking portals are not creations of good cyber-Samaritans intent on bringing the world together just because it gives them the warm fuzzies. Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and others are carefully crafted, well researched and deliberately engineered applications built upon continually refined interaction models designed to keep users “on-site”, returning and pulling other new users into the vortex. Why do they expend so much effort building these elaborate mouse traps that suck users into their memorizing mental maze? The answer is the same for pretty much any question you can ask about the world today, money.

Monetization is the magic word in the social networking industry. How to turn captured traffic into money is the puzzle that administrators of social networking and large community sites ponder every single day. The golden nugget they have stumbled upon is a little quirk of the modern human psyche, people want to be famous. Ok, maybe that is an over simplification, but essentially what drives these larger social networking applications is this motivation of people to be recognised and acknowledged. People want to post their pictures on Flickr so that other people will look at them. People rush to upload their latest video clip in the hope it will make the YouTube frontpage or at least get a few thousand views. People want to list their top ten favorite films on Facebook so other people will look at the list. People update their status so other people will know what they are doing. People collect “friends” so other people will see how many friends they have. The larger question of why people feel the need to stake their claim to a little piece of net notoriety is something to ponder, but understanding this need and harnessing its power to drive a net vortex is the alchemy of the social networking trendsetters.

The other aspect that couples so well with this need for people to be recognised and what really fuels the success of social networking sites is the self perpetuating content model. Content is king on the internet and content generation is often the most challenging and expensive element in creating a significant web presence. Developing a content model where the user is the main producer of the content and the content produced by the user is leveraged to recruit more users is the kernel of genius that makes these online “show and tell” platforms so socially significant.

From a societal perspective, the interesting aspect to all of this is the willingness of net users to feed these content vortices with pretty much anything they can scrape together. People will gladly post detailed personal information, pictures, and intimate details of their relationships, past work histories, educational chronology and just generally create a massive open scrap book of their lives that is largely open to anyone who feels like accessing it. Somehow the popularity of a given content aggregator diffuses an individual’s natural common apprehension toward freely releasing their personal information into the custody of an entity beyond their direct control. Interestingly, if someone placed a big community notice board out in the main street of your city and asked you to post your family pictures, lists of friends, companies you worked for, schools you went to and any number of other elements that make up your life, would you? I would hazard a guess that most reasonable people would not take up that offer and yet when a digital version of a worldwide community notice board is installed on some computer server located somewhere in the murky net nebula, people flock to it in droves to fill it with all sorts of personal tid bits.

You might be thinking that there is little risk is posting a picture here or an educational history there, but as you leave a trail of breadcrumbs around the net , these various fragments can be pulled together to form an amazingly complete profile of a given individual. It’s not to say that everyone who participates in openly posting personal information on the web will become a target for identity theft, but there does need to be a greater recognition that once information is committed to the vast, interconnected information nebula of the internet, there is precious little you can do to put that genie back in the bottle.

Is it that less technically savvy internet users do not fully grasp the infrastructure of the net? Do they feel that because they access these social networking sites through their personal computer in the privacy of their own homes that somehow they have ownership and ultimate control over the information they choose to release? Is it a phenomenon of monkey see, monkey do and follow the leader that gives people a sense that if millions of others are doing it, it must be ok? Whatever the psychology underpinning the false sense of security in feeding these content hungry vacuums, there are some clear facts that can’t be overlooked. Social networking sites are applications hosted on servers that users do not have ownership of or direct control over. The main aim of these sites is to accumulate traffic for the purpose of generating revenue and potential monetary value for the principal owners.

Sure, you might think this is a cynical view of the brave new Web 2.0 world we live in and you may be right. Cynical or not, it is true and I think (I hope) savvy users know the reality of these business models and make intelligent choices on their contribution levels by weighing up the risks vs. benefits. There is however a large proportion of less technically adept users in the community who do not fully grasp the potential risks of unrestrained contribution to these black holes of content that could well find themselves regretting their eagerness to spill their guts into bottomless cyber pits.

You can’t live your life in a paranoid overly vigilant state. What fun would life be without taking a few risks occasionally? The point is that our world today is built upon a complex and often chaotic lattice work of information threads that criss-cross all corners of our lives. These threads of information construct a profile of each one of us within the global systems ether and in the absence of any overarching enforceable data integrity polices, it falls to each cyber citizen to become far more net aware and systems savvy.

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