From an article in the Economist on Facebook’s plan to cash in on word-of-mouth advertising:
Yet another problem, says Paul Martino, an entrepreneur who launched Tribe, an early social network, is that the interpersonal connections (called the “social graph”) on such networks are also of low quality. Because few people dare to dump former friends or to reject unwanted friend requests from casual acquaintances, “social graphs degenerate to noise in all cases,” he says. If he is right, social-marketing campaigns will descend into visual clutter about the banal doings of increasingly random people, rather than being the next big thing in advertising.
The noise-to-signal ratio on Facebook has definitely gone up in the months since I’ve joined. I find that much of my Newsfeed is often taken up by “friends” I barely know who are especially obsessive about sharing videos, articles etc. Will I ever have the courage to dump them? Or will I just stop checking Facebook?