networking

The social network pruning series is a collection of brief articles, each covering a technique you may wish to use to prune your social networks to a more manageable size.  You can read last week’s post (#1: Full names only) by clicking here.

Social network pruning heuristic #2: Eliminate cross-posters

Considering the popularity and ubiquity of status-update social networks (e.g., Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook Status), it’s rare that users have every single one of their friends on one service alone.  Rather, most individuals likely want to keep up with, and broadcast to, friends on a number of networks.  So what do these people do?  In the interest of time, they use cross-posting tools to send the same message to a number of different services.  While these tools such as Hellotxt and SocialThing! make broadcasting a bit easier for the user, they have the unfortunate side effect of creating noise for those that follow that user.

Fortunately, the solution is simple, albeit time-consuming: take a few minutes to unfollow any individuals that repeatedly send the exact same message to a number of services.  An aggregator such as FriendFeed or SocialThing! can help determine the duplicate content perpetrators, but tracking down these individuals can be a hassle even still.

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As commenters Wayne Smallman and Heidi Cool have noted here and here, social networks can quickly get out of hand if you track individuals that are too different, too random, or too noisy. However, reducing a list of over 800 people can be a pretty daunting process unless you utilize some rules of thumb to help you along the way.

With this in mind, I present to you the first in a series of brief articles, each covering a sample heuristic you may wish to use to prune your social networks to a more manageable size.

Pruning Heuristic #1: Full Names Only

Here’s an easy idea to lose a few pounds on your favorite social networks. Stop following anyone who doesn’t provide their full name on the service of interest. Although degree of preferred privacy varies on a per-network basis, an individual who makes their full name available is exhibiting more trust, responsibility, and openness than one who doesn’t.

Use this to shorten your follow list. Of course, a user’s handle on a certain service will rarely be his or her full name, but more often than not, a little bit of sleuthing through other public profiles will reveal one’s full identity. My Twitter username is ‘kadesoto,’ for instance, but you can find my full name in my Twitter profile, not to mention other sites and services I have linked to that account.

Limiting your attention to those that you know by name has a more basic practicality to it, too: it’s simply more likely that you are connected to a greater degree to a social networking friend you know the name of rather than one you don’t. A stronger connection generally predicts a stronger interest in this friend’s activities.

(Of course, this heuristic is not to suggest that individuals concerned with privacy are unreasonable to do so.)

Apply this rule to your most bloated social network today and see what happens! Your Socialthing! feed’s ‘rename’ feature will thank you for it.