Purging on Social Networks

This morning I found the term “twitterpurge” trending on twitter. It lead me to a post by Robert Scoble. Scoble un-following his 106,000 twitter followers may have lead to a mini-trend on twitter, resulting in many other users cleaning up their own followers lists. No doubt that things along these lines have occurred for quite some time. Who hasn’t rid their MSN friend list of some primary school contacts?

This purging phenomenon however, is quite interesting and highlights some inherent problems in human relationships on social networks. Cleaning up your friends list requires you to very explicitly re-evaluate every relationship on a particular network. In our real lives we are hardly ever confronted with this. People drift in and out of our social circles and it is a very naturally occurring process. Only in very dramatic settings have I publicly declared to have broken off contact with a friend.

Part of the problem is the auto-friending that occurs on some networks (whether via a machine or personally). It leaves the floodgates open for hundreds of meaningless contacts to seep in. Subsequently, as Scoble says, the whole social network experience becomes unmanageable because the system is not capable of assessing which of these contacts are meaningful or not. What’s more, these contacts or links, never gets removed, they are always there, unless specifically removed. It is as if you are compiling an ever increasing list of people you have ever socially interacted with.

The Dunbar’s number is also very often grossly exceeded on many social networks. My personal Facebook account (231 “friends”) is one such example. But, in it’s defense, social networks aren’t exactly like our real social networks, probably exactly because of the reason’s stated above.