Social Networks As A Route Around Spam?

from the a-shift-in-thinking dept

I've heard of a few people who say they use online social networking/social software systems to keep in touch with certain people. By using the messaging functionality in those systems - which requires you to know whoever your messaging - it lets them put less pressure on the email inbox. Now, someone over at CNN is noticing this and suggesting that we rethink the concept of email, based on social relationships, by using tools like FOAF, to route around the spam problem. Instead of using your email inbox as a general "catch-all", the idea is only allowing communication via people in your network. The article suggests that this also gets around the problem of a message from a friend "scrolling off the screen" - which happens to me way too often. You still have an email in-box, but you check it much less often. While it all sounds nice, I'm not really convinced such a plan will work for most people. Email makes intuitive sense to most users - even if it gets frustrating at times. Anything that requires a mental shift in how you think about communicating with people is difficult to convince people to shift to. For most people, email remains "good enough" for communications, and so they see little reason to shift to some other solution that raises its own problems.