In a recent piece, Clay Shirky digs into my recent Darwin column on the implicit agreements that underlie social networking applications, and how we can fall into a problematic area when we expect conventions to support us that just don't exist:

Clay Shirky

[from Many-to-Many: Un-Linked In]

..., Stowe Boyd tells an interesting story about a guy selling one degree connections to him (scroll to “SNA jacking”), on the grounds that he has snammed enough people to act as a valuable bridge. The snammer in question

"is making contacts with folks on the LinkedIn network under false pretenses: We all presume that he is like us, and that his network is made up of people like our own business and personal contacts, not clients paying for access. Don’t get me wrong, I think that his model — pay to play — is potentially a good one, so long as everyone involved is operating under the same set of rules. However, that’s not the set of rules I was operating under when I joined LinkedIn, and it wasn’t what I thought was going on when I accepted his request to become a contact. I don’t want him to make money on my reputation and contacts, and I especially don’t want him to do so without my knowing about it."

It’s interesting to me that Stowe invokes the ‘rules’ he joined under, when no such things existed. What he means is “I made certain assumptions about the social fabric that this guy is violating, and as in real society, I expect my assumptions to be both shared and actionable.”

That they are not comes as a surprise, and this tension between what we expect vs. what the terms of service say and the software allows is a lot of what makes the currently clunky YASNS world so interesting to watch.

I personally feel that it is time for the social software companies to collectively ratify some such set of principles. Its long overdue, and there have been more than enough murmurings -- among the vendors, analysts, and users -- to justify such an activity.

Where do I sign up?