Social Networking Etiquette

As social networking sites continue to proliferate and self-propagate across the web, millions of users are becoming increasingly aware of the ramifications of information overload. Subscriptions to RSS feeds, e-mail groups, live updates of blog postings, and other network collaboration tools can easily fill up the inbox to the thousand-email mark. Most network sites today offer ways to organize and disseminate the information, with e-mail services such as Gmail offering search and sort functions to make the process easier. Still, social networking to the extreme is clearly on the rise with the increased exchange of personal e-mails for contact information, and the consequences of just too much information when spam, junk mail, and blog receipts reach seemingly epic proportions.

The consumer shifts on social networking sites are evident at the most basic level; how and when do people make the decision to sign up for an automatic feed, versus just going straight to the site to research a particular topic? The rules are open to the masses, and the pool of information continues to get bigger and bigger. Blogs are becoming a core resource for news on a variety of topics. Today’s largest subject aggregators are picking up both media-driven articles from the Associated Press, along with general consumer blogs, critics, and postings that have similar tags and keywords.

‘Critical mass’ as many speculators predict, is reaching its glory for a variety of networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster. As readers swarm to specific portals for each niche subject, readership can grow to monstrous proportions seemingly overnight. Overcoming an information dump isn’t difficult with some simple social networking etiquette strategies: it’s the web's process of elimination. How does a user get the most accurate, relevant, credible, and worthy-of - attention information in the shortest time possible?