Social networks deciding who our friends should be? Only on Yammer

[almostwitty]

Imagine you logged into your social network of choice (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and discovered that your list of friends and contacts had been changed by the social network to reflect who THEY thought you should be following, as opposed to who you had chosen.

That’s exactly what seems to be happening with Yammer, a social network aimed more at intranets and behind company firewalls. They recently sent me an email that said:

Having used Yammer at work to have a vague idea as to what colleagues across the company are doing and interested in, they decided to send me an email this morning saying that as “My Feed” followed everyone, they were going to unilaterally unfollow everyone on my behalf.

“Here’s the thing: as Yammer networks grow in companies, we’ve learned a few things. We’ve learned that as your company network gets bigger, Following Everyone can clutter up your MyFeed and impair your ability to find what’s most relevant to you.

On Friday, October 29th, you will stop following everyone in your network. Before then, you can start following updates from specific people at *** by clicking here.

This way your MyFeed will be focused on the messages that matter to you most.”

Well, I don’t want that to happen. But helpfully, the only way – it would seem – to protest this decision is to make a meagre posting on their uservoice customer forum.

Disgraceful behaviour.

Mirrored from almost witty.

Comments

[theta-g.livejournal.com]

I was going to write something about the reality of consumers being mere playthings of commerce but following that train of thought toward solutions went in the sort of radical direction that gets people marginalised by the playthings themselves. So let's just say I didn't write this.