An editor here at the paper recently complained to me about how she’s started getting a ton of unrequested invites to the business networking site LinkedIn.
I occasionally get those unsolicited requests, as well — often from people I’ve never met — and now it turns out there’s a growing backlash against the random social networking invite.
One rather well-known tech executive, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently decided to quit Facebook because he was getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day.
That, of course, is an extreme example, but to people like Kelley, the never-ending invites often feel like a plague, and one that simply won’t go away.
“I first noticed it like one notices a new allergic reaction,” Kelley, who said she is or has been a member of at least 14 social networks, told me by IM. “Over time, I started noticing a more and more negative reaction to each new one that surfaced. It was similar to the feeling of hearing about a new startup during the height of the (dot-com) bubble. It just defied all logic and kind of offended me as a thinking human.”
We’ve all — I hope — learned the basics of e-mail etiquette over the last few years.
Maybe now it’s time to develop some rules for sending social network invites.
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