Social networking invitations – the NEW spam?

It’s been a few days since I last blogged. In those few days, I noticed how much my email inbox is clogged with invitations to one social networking site or another. You are probably with the general format of the invitation, “So-and-so want to you join him/her on SerialKillers.com”. The recent scourge of so-called social networking options is astounding.

One good thing has come out of this for me. It has made me take a hard look at my own social networking philosophy. Up until recently, I would answer nearly every invite in the affirmative. “Jirvan Nepal in Banglor would like to add you to his TagMeNow.com network.” Click the link, sign up for the new service, and Jirvan becomes part of my network. But who is he? Who cares. It’s the sort of mindless collecting that obsessive compulsives engage in when they are trying to satisfy an urge.

I now have over 7,000 LinkedIn contacts in my rolodex. Several thousand of them, I will probably never have the need or the urge to contact for either a social or business need. They’re just there. What’s worse, the 7,000-plus contacts are breeding. The people that engage in social compulsive behavior have spread to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Plus, they are flooding my inbox. When will it stop?

Well, for me it stops today. What a glorious way to waste time. Time that I don’ t have. Time that can be devoted to work, to other truly social activities.

One truly fortunate thing–more good luck than good management–is that I shifted a lot of my internet activities, including email, over to Google. Google Mail has an amazing mail filtering system.

The Google Spam filtering system is as accurate and effective as any spam management system I’ve ever used, and I’ve used more than a dozen over as many years. There is also an easy to use mail filtering system for diverting specific types of mail to a set of your own online folders, including a Trash folder. This Trash folder is smart too. It holds the Trash for 30 days before permanently deleting it. So, if I’ve been a little too zealous in filtering a particular email address to the Trash, I have a few days to review, and see if I truly want all my “sillypost.com” mail to really go there.

Great stuff. It’s allowed me to get back more than a few minutes every day. It saves me hundreds, if not thousands, of key clicks managing my email–which is still my primary online activity. And for the hundreds of social networking invitations I now get every week in my email, it provides a solution that save me time and gives me a little extra peace of mind.

In the meantime, I will try to develop a new practice of “just say no” to online invitations.  Eventually the madness will stop.