Your Swirl Connect friends list is very different from your buddy list on services like My Space or Facebook. Even though Swirl Connect includes some social networking features, it is not a social network. It is a service used to stay connected with your friends — your actual, real life friends — and connect with people and places near you. We use the word ‘friend’ quite literally.

With social networks like Facebook and My Space, friend collecting is common. You see a post you like, you add the poster as a friend. Someone shares the same interests, you add them as a friend. Someone looks cute, you add them as a friend. This is a not the wisest strategy for using Swirl, both for privacy/security and practical reasons.

You can, of course, use Swirl any way you see fit, but personally, I don’t want 100 acquaintances knowing where I am whenever I’m logged into Swirl. I also don’t want them peering at my pictures as I take them. I prefer to share these types of things with my actual friends. Before you add someone as a friend or accept a friend request from someone else, put yourself in a hypothetical situation (say, it’s 2:00 AM, you’re alone, and on your way home), and ask yourself if you want that person knowing where you are and what you are doing. If you cannot safely answer "hells yeah!" then you probably want to think twice about keeping that person on your friend list.

From a practical standpoint, the more friends you follow, the more alerts you’ll receive. Do you really want 100 alerts a night? And do you want to wait while we periodically query the statuses of 100 people? Do you want to wait while your poor, overworked mobile phone tries to display hundreds of activity items? Do you want to constantly zoom in and recenter so that you can see your nearby friends’ activity (by default, we zoom out so that you can see all of your friends)?

For best results keep your friend list short.

Please be safe and have fun.

Filed under:
Swirl Connect, Using Swirl by Shaun