It struck me this afternoon while I was shoveling, that I haven’t got nearly as much “friendly spam” as I used to about a year ago. I think it came to mind as I got a classic forward from a friend that got filtered and I happened to check that before I got working. Then, looking around the profiles of different friends, I spotted all the “forward this to umpteen people” and funny picture emails that I used to get. All this stuff has found it’s way onto Facebook (and likely other social networks) and found itself trapped. Good for hard core/old school emailers, but is it so for social networkers?
I’m not sure. Part of me has always thought that, though annoying, these spams were a way of maintaining an open communications channel between two or more people… a poke, reminding those involved that the sender is still there and “still cares”. Well, even the poke is there in Facebook… so the social network has taken over almost all of that social communication and email has drifted to something more formal. So now that the poke doesn’t happen in email, what about those that don’t participate in SNs? Well, I’m sure there are still a few of those out there, but as likely as not, they are not the ones who are even bothering with electronic communication.
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