A friend of mine asked me some questions about social networking sites. He wanted to know about validation:

• how do they validate that a user is who they say they are?
• how does one get to be part of the community (invitation, referral, etc.)?
• are there restrictions to being part of the community?
• how does reputation get established?

I was eager to respond and after writing a huge email, I realized that I have been thinking about these sites for a long time. Here is my response:

I have an account on LinkedIn, FaceBook and MySpace. You didn’t include these, but I also consider them social networks and have accounts with them as well: LiveJournal, Flickr, Twitter, Classmates.com and Runner+.

I don’t believe there is much validation of who each person is. I know that FaceBook will delete people who obviously are not real, like they did with Jonathan Swift. I have never had any of them actually call me to verify that I’m an actual human being instead of a spam account. So many of the accounts are of the “spicychica2” variety that validation would be impossible.

I was able to sign up for all of those accounts on my own without an invitation. It seems that the sites that are invitation only are in the growing stages and they dole out invitations to prevent their servers from being overloaded.

If you are obviously just spamming, then your account will be deleted. Sites like MySpace and LiveJournal have a way to flag users as spammers if you get email from an offender.

Reputation is a funny thing. It seems that the young folks don’t care. I’ve seen them set up accounts, write tons of content and then just abandon the account with no remorse. Me? EVERYTHING I do is in my full name. I NEVER use a pseudonym, so the concept of setting up an anonymous account and abandoning it is foreign to me.

On LinkedIn, it seems that being a “friend whore” is looked down upon in some circles and seen as a badge of honor in others.

All of these social networking sites are missing a key factor. They treat all friends with the same weight. There are many people that I’ll call friends, but only a few I would tell personal secrets to and even fewer I would fully trust. This trust thing isn’t digital. It’s almost infinite in the differences and changes on a daily basis depending on how we interact with each other. It’s not an on/off type of thing, and that’s what a lot of these sites are missing.

My best advice to you is to set up an account in each network and play with them for a while. They are each quite different. Personally, I’m sick of them all. What’s the point of a social network if it isn’t focused around something that you do together. That’s why I am perfectly willing to edit my profile and gather friends on Runner+ or Flickr because we have a common love (running or photography). Sites like MySpace and FaceBook really haven’t been very useful to me and I just use them to point at my REAL blogs.

Here are some links to some people who have specialized in various social networks. Lindsey Pollak is a great person to talk to about FaceBook. She wrote a book about getting jobs after college and is an expert on Gen Y. Jason Alba is the person to talk to about LinkedIn. He just wrote a book about LinkedIn and how to use it for your career.

Wow, I didn’t realize that I had this many thoughts about social networking sites. I think I’ll post this on my blog.