Good practices for social networks

One of the funny aspects of social networking is there seems to be a "wave of popularity" just as much as in other aspects of daily life. The "hot or not" principle applies to communities as it does to cars, fashion, actresses and music. For example: 8 to 12 months ago I got a wave of invitations from people who wanted to connect with me on Jobster, 6 months that became Facebook, two months ago Plaxo and today it seems to be Spock (although Plaxo is still going strong).

Known as an ardent networker, I'm always happy to get in touch with people I know, and to meet new faces (even electronically). The more diversity the better! However, there are two things in social network invitations that profoundly get on my nerves. (and I'm talking built-in features of the community, so it's not the fault of the users)

First, I really don't appreciate having to log into the system completely before I can read the message one of my contacts sends me. I understand why community founders do this of course (and quite a few adopted this policy), but I find it counterproductive. Since I know that 50% of all messages can wait (meaning they don't have to be dealt with right away), I hate getting "trapped" into losing time to log in and then discover it was for nothing. If you get an email from someone, you see the message right away too, right?

Secondly, I resent communities where you cannot choose the frequency of receiving messages. Some only let you pick between receiving messages as they come in -meaning you get a busload of messages every day- and logging into the system to receive your messages -meaning you have a busload of messages waiting for you if you happen to forget about this prticular community for a while. What's wrong with giving your users the opportunity to choose the one a week option?

Anyway, all this to say that I just complimented the guys from Spock on an email they sent today. I was just getting annoyed with them for pestering me with point 1 and 2, and they seem to have good New Year's resolutions to at least fix annoyance number two :-)
Here is an extract of their mail:

Hi - I noticed that you got a lot of emails from people you know or who know
you, asking for trust on Spock.com. yes!
It looks like a lot of people want your trust, which is a good thing:)

But, getting dozens of emails asking for trust can be a bit annoying. keep going!
We are working to make it a digest so you only get a compiled list of people requesting trust once a week. why didn't I think of that?
Sorry about all those emails :( we forgive you
We did not think this search feature on Spock would be so popular so quickly.

To accept their trust, you can just click below: tell me what to do and promote your network in a nice way
http://www.spock.com/do/trust/incoming_requests

They also say in their email that most of the new features come directly out of the suggestions members make to them. So we can actually make a difference in how we want our Web 2.0 life to be organized. Next time your getting annoyed about a community feature, don't whine; send an email (ok you may whine a little first before sending the email ;-)