Earlier this week, I wanted to send a Facebook message to my dancer friends in the Bay Area to invite them to a local event.  I ended up manually sifting through my entire friends list, since there’s no way to invite or message an intersection of friends.  Similarly, I wanted to post a twitter note to my Google buddies in a particular geographic region, but Twitter doesn’t support any sort of useful narrowcasting, either.

Basically, social service nowadays seem hellbent on having us share our lives and connect with more and more people.  I don’t want that, and I’m betting a lot of you feel the same way:  we want to deepen our relationships with our current friends, share details of our lives with the friends who are most likely interested in those particular details, and so on.

A lot of the brouhaha over FBs aggressive more-sharing push has been over privacy, but in the rush to protest “ZOMG, I don’t want my mom to know THAT!” the complementary concerns of narrowcasting have been largely ignored.  I’m personally a lot less worried about someone finding out something I don’t want them to know about, and far more concerned about burning out my friends with info they find irrelevant and uninteresting.

Is it not madness that I can’t post a note joking about a local politician just to my Mountain View friends?  This highlights one of a great many situations in which there are no privacy issues (I’m not trying to keep my bad sense of humor a secret from my friends in Europe), but rather that my friends outside MV aren’t likely to care about this topic.  And worse yet, these friends will likely stop reading my posts altogether unless I either post less overall (a bummer!) or magically somehow write entries that are appealing and relevant across my diverse group of friends (pretty impossible).

*  *  *

I love you (you, you, NOT you!), but I don’t always love how you try to contact me.

I have a few respectful requests:

• Use my contact page, please.  It’s super-easy to find (top page in Google for “Contact Adam Lasnik”), and I even list my e-mail address on there.  Every time you instead try to get my attention via Twitter or Facebook message or LinkedIn or Flickr, Goddess kills a doggy [hint: that’s bad.]
• Please use a descriptive subject line.  This precludes “HELP!” or “Hi!” or “Great Pharmacy!!1”
• Don’t unsolicitedly send me a detailed business plan.  Seriously, this one really pains me to write, but when I receive a heartfelt and amazingly-detailed-with-multiple-attachment business idea for an existing Google product, my cover-my-posterior-reaction is to delete the note without reading it.  Google already gets sued a ridiculous number of times a week, and I don’t want Google (or me!) to be sued for “stealing someone’s idea without credit.” :-(  On the other hand, bug reports, a clever feature request or observation… if you can’t find a way to share this info with the appropriate Google team (e.g., via an official forum or form), feel free to fill me in and I’ll do the best I can to get it seen by the right people . and, on a related note…
• Please forgive me.  I’m still behind on my personal e-mail (about 380 messages in my inbox, down from last year’s high of nearly 5,000), so it can take me a while to reply.

Thanks!