With a new Facebook home page layout being released, and the launch of Google Buzz, teh intrawebs have once again been full of talk about social networks. Lots of people are jumping up and down demanding this and that, but they seem to me to have a rather naive view of their relationship to social networking platforms.

To understand why let’s take a trip back into the dim and distant days of the 20th Century. Does anyone remember the concept of the “portal site”? The basic idea of the portal is that it would act as a filter, helping users navigate the dangerous world of the Internet and providing a guide to the best content. Portals were a failure because it turned out that people were smart enough (and brave enough) to browse the web for themselves. But the idea of becoming the site though which people interact with the web has not gone away.

Social networks work better than portals because they offer their own content as well as providing links to other people’s. Crucially the content they provide is created for them for free by their members. And it works. For example, I am on LiveJournal solely because there are lots of people in SF fandom who only interact with the blogosphere through LiveJournal. They use it as a feed reader. Nowadays a similarly large group interacts with blogs only through Facebook. So if I want people to read my blog, or the blogs of conventions I’m promoting, I have to be on LiveJournal and Facebook.

Gaining a monopoly on people’s interaction with the web, however, is only part of the problem for social networks. They have to make money too. LiveJournal does it through selling advertising, and by charging for premium accounts. Facebook does it through selling advertising and by charging companies who want to provide entertainment to Facebook members via games and the like. And, of course, the networks need more and more information about their members to be available widely, because their members are their content.

It comes as no surprise to me, therefore, that Facebook is continually changing its privacy policy in an effort to trick members into making more of their information public. It also helps game manufacturers trick members into signing up for games, and makes it hard to get rid of them once you have signed up. (Their most recent re-write has even hidden the logout button.)

It all comes back to the idea that consumers these days expect so much for free that corporations are increasingly resorting to trickery to make money. And because companies like Facebook want to make money from you, they are going to keep trying to find new ways to exploit you.

All of which brings us to Google Buzz, launched with great fanfare yesterday. It was no great surprise to me to wake up this morning to find Bill Gibson tweeting about a way in which Buzz surreptitiously makes information about users available to a wider audience. The worrying thing about Buzz is that people with Google accounts already use many different services through them. If Google follows Facebook’s tactic of continually changing its privacy policy to encourage buzz users to share more information, a lot of people could get caught out.

For now I have turned Buzz off until I can get a handle on what it does, and what it is likely to do. As it happens, I don’t see any great use in it. I’m already on Twitter, and as I don’t use my gmail account for any serious email I don’t keep it open. Also I spend far to much time on social media as it is. With LiveJournal I am able to block comments and direct people to comment on my blog. With Facebook I get email notification of comments, though I’m much less likely to respond there. I could export my Twitter feed to Buzz, but I don’t want to have to keep it open in case anyone @replys to me. Until such time as Buzz can export those @replys to Twitter, or someone provides a client that manages both systems for you, I don’t want the additional distraction of a Buzz presence.

As for the security side, my advice, as always, is that if you don’t want something made public, don’t put it online. It really is the only way to be safe.