The Big Social Network Noise Pool

I cancelled my Bebo account, it was turning into a giant teenagers playground. And, I for one, wasn't wanting to sit around to watch.

I did a purge on my Twitter followers, they responded in the same fashion (as to be expected really), "if you don't follow me, I won't follow you". Fine by me.

Tonight was Facebook's turn. My original intention was to keep this one to people who I knew but as time wore on friend of friends start turning up and I blindly accepted thinking that their comments here and there may have been useful. In most cases it was a waste of time.

The signal to noise ratio is increasing at an alarming rate. Twitter's @reply is me basically shouting in a field of 100 other people with the person I'm trying to reach standing at the other side. The mere fact that @replies don't get email alerted has caused me more misses than hits. Identi.ca solves this problem (yay!) but the interface isn't very inviting to use and, finally, is treated more of a techy plaything than anything else.

Myspace is in decline, ITV are desperate for a buyer of Friends Reunited, Twitter isn't money making yet. I'm starting to wonder where this is all going. We could have the biggest set of redundant data on our hands, just waiting to be mined or searched but never quite got round to it.

While a few companies like Salesforce.com, SAP and Sysomos are trying to get sentiment out of social networks and blogs the amount of increasing noise will make their lives more and more difficult. While the ACE Conference in Northern Ireland says the province needs to concentrate on it's social applications there's a good chance that the boat has already been missed and the decline to a more normal way of doing things will start to appear.