Ouch. Scott Kirsner at Fast Company reports on the appearance of a new term: "Snam."

Scott Kirsner

[from Networking Overload]

I don't know Kenneth Norton, but he's a mere two degrees of separation from me. Norton is director of product management at Yahoo, and he has coined one of the best new words of 2004. The word is "snam."

Everyone knows what spam is--unwanted email. Snam is a mutant variant. It's unwanted email generated by such "social networking" Web sites as Friendster, LinkedIn, and Tribe. Social networking . . . snam? Get it?

I've written several times about social network spam, although I wasn't Czechoslovakian enough to call it snam. And I don't limit it to the unwanted email generated by such systems. I include other stuff that gums up the works:

• The guy who posts what smells like blog spam (sbam?) at social networking profiles
  
• those that use every available contact as a means to hawk their companies' good and services (or is that the purpose of the sites, anyway?)
  
• those who subvert the network routing algorithms by amassing the largest networks as a means of charging 'fees' for introductions passing through them(is that legal? or is it just consulting on how to effectively exploit social networking?)

At any rate, perhaps any effective use of social networking for business will have to generate some sort of pellet-sized business proposition that will smell like snam. And it isn't restrincted to the email path, but all the mechanisms of communication that become channels for social networking systems.