Everyone suddenly wants to be your friend (emarketer on social network spam issues)

A good read on the privacy and spam debate on social networks just came in via EMarketer, here.

I think Privacy and 'Digital Obesity' (i.e. eating too much information all the time, and suffering from Continuous Partial Attention) are the 2 top issues that are impacting the pace of development of the Social Web, and the related sectors such as advertising.

Whoever can solve the challenge of skillfully getting solid, real, personal, meaningful and 100% opted-in information from people so that they will want to look at targeted Content-Ads (as I like to say... Contvertising, see my related posts here) without the users becoming totally transparent has the keys to a Trillion dollar market.

Also, imho, it's good to keep this in mind: the potential perils of an open network - of ‘Too Much Freedom’ - will always pale beside those of a closed, controlled and authoritarian Network (*read this somewhere and just remembered it - need to find the source;).