Technology of The Year, but what about Privacy?

Ross Mayfield pointed out that Business 2.0 awarded Social Networking as the Technology of the Year. The article is actually very brief, but it does discuss the difficulties of such technologies when it comes to privacy.

The way privacy is handled between Friendster, and Spoke seems to be on polar opposites. Because Friendster requires you to go through a process of approving people as your friend, the friend has the control over some levels of his or her privacy. The end result is a smaller graph size but with much richer nodes in the graph.

Spoke, on the other hand, takes a different approach. You are “connected” to someone not if you know them, but rather if they say they know you. “Knowing” someone is done by having their basic contact information (as minimal as an email address sometimes). Because there is no approval process, the network is MUCH larger. This is due to the simple fact that most of the nodes in the network are not users of Spoke, but rather just “people” that Spoke has discovered that are known directly by some user of the system.

This approach of course requires much more careful consideration of privacy. When you find a person on Friendster, you can immediately tell how you know that person (Jane knows Bob who knows Mary). In Spoke, this information isn’t available, because people generally want to protect some of their relationships. Rather, Spoke only tells you where the path starts (”talk to Jane, she can help”). Then it is up to the next link in the path to carry on the request (Jane asks Bob, Bob asks Mary).

I’m interested to see what people think of these two approaches. Being a developer for Spoke and also a user of Friendster, I see advantages on both sides. Is this difference of privacy (and graph size) just the difference between corporate and home social network software? What about companies like LinkedIn that appeal to the corporate world but take a more Friendster-like approach? Where do they fit in?