aka “buy your own fucking glue”

I’ve only recently signed up to Foursquare. It’s a bit of fun and I’m still trying to find my use for it. I don’t mean to single out Foursquare here, it’s merely the latest service for me to sign up for, but one thing really bothered me about the sign-up process: foursquare thought it knew who I wanted to be friends with on foursquare just because I was friends with them elsewhere.

The definition of friends on different services is huge. Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, all have very different ideas about what a friend or a connection is.

I think It’s time to kill off the “Find people you know from your existing networks” feature. Yup, that handy little tool that slurps in your Facebook, Gmail and Twitter contacts.

My attitude towards sharing and my usage of web services vary remarkable from service to service. Take my two most active networks; Twitter and Facebook. There is less than 10% overlap between my “friends” on both services. My FB is private, and thus probably more intimate, and my Twitter is open and a little more reserved.

My Gmail contacts are again entirely different from my Tumblr followers. Think of your mobile. You’d probably hand out my e-mail address to anyone who asks, but your mobile number? Not so fast.

Every web service has a soul. It has feeling, certain unspoken ground rules to them. By slurping in our contacts we’re not only commoditising that service, we’re wiping out its soul.

Carbon copies of friends lists from other service does not respect that feeling of identity to one service, and does not take into account that people use different services in remarkably different ways.

It’s time to fix that. And the first stop for me, is for new web services to think very hard about the slurp option. It’s not clever and could end up drowning out your service’s soul.