Social Network Fat Discrimination
In the last few days, I’ve uncovered a conspiracy. Facebook, LinkedIN, Dopplr, and who knows who else, hate fat. Yep, it’s true. They hate fat contact lists. They hate that I’ve developed a large social network and that I’m trying to link it up over various platforms. And I’ve been stopped.
LinkedIN got mad at me for sending tons of invites. In their case, they were partially right. There were some names in the ton of folks that I invited that I didn’t directly know, but that I’d met tangentially from my work with Video on the Net. That’s at least fair. They don’t want someone blanket-spamming every email address they ever had.
Facebook got mad when I tried to import more than 150 email addresses at a time to send invites. It just kept choking on them. So, I had to parse my 1790 contacts I was pulling from, and dump them 100 or so at a time into the platform.
Dopplr just can’t even contend with me. They won’t take my Gmail contacts, and they’re choking on my Twitter friends list, too.
Somehow, I’m Too Fat
Back in the day, Twitter handled it just fine. They used that nifty Plaxo widget. Pop. All my gmail contacts had an invite to Twitter. (They’ve since stopped doing that because they’re fat and happy, themselves.)
So what’s a man to do? Go on a people diet? Delete most of my contacts? Spoon feed it? Dopplr won’t let me do that.
Stop fat discrimination in our time. Fat social networkers are people too. : )
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
At the risk of sounding overly bitter or jaded, we should all have this problem. :)
But if we did all have this problem, then the services we use would have to better accommodate it, though, right?
[…] that shouldn’t be. Many people have been adding far too many contacts then they should. Chris Brogan writes that LinkedIn wasn’t happy with the fact that his contact list had many different […]





What I do is import to find out who’s already in the social network and then add them. I don’t sent invites to people not alread on. I feel like I’m spamming on the social network’s behalf otherwise.