In an ideal world, technology would only be harnessed to communicate effectively; ideas would be shared, new concepts born from remote collaboration between dreamers and designers, and not once would you see even the faintest glimmer of txt spk.

Sadly, this is not the case.

It seems that more and more, people are abusing this technology for their own personal gain without any real consideration for the consequences.

I must confess; this article is more of a moan than the usual informational piece. Every day I see people using communication tools in completely the wrong way, so I’d like you to join me as I run down my top gripes with the popular communication platforms of today.

Join me on FarmVille?

Isn’t Facebook brilliant? The social networking platform is revolutionary and its execution has always been second to none. I can keep in touch with my friends from my home town, University and the countless random people I have met at various meetings and events.

But since Facebook has allowed third party developers a free reign, we have been bombarded by nonsense applications that offer nothing but tacky procrastination and a waste of perfectly good bandwidth. What’s even more annoying is that recently we are seeing pitiful attempts to get users to join groups by promising a picture or, apparently gobsmacking revelations.

No - I do not want to play FarmVille with you and nor do I want to see how much some guy pissed off his girlfriend, let me get back to using Facebook in the ways it was originally intended.

Claim your prize $150,000,000,000,00,0,,,0000,,0!!!!!!1

Email spam is something that everybody is familiar with – those rubbish emails that have no relevance to anything in your life and, try as you might you just can't remember opting in to receive news on those awesome trainers from that shop in China!

Spam is never going to go away. Foolish people who cite it as useful marketing to send unsolicited email just because they have access to somebody’s email address will make sure of that. Not to mention the scammers that attempt to trick users into providing their personal details in exchange for $1.5bn inheritance from the entire family that died in that airplane accident.

I don’t think even the most naive and trusting of computer novices would buy into that idea.

Sweetlikesugar174 is now following you on Twitter!

I was very apprehensive about using Twitter a couple of years ago because shortly after registering I was being followed by "cam girls" and bombarded with direct messages from people trying to sell me SEO services. It was only after persistently wading through all this rubbish that I finally realised its true use.

Even today, there is still a lot of fat to be trimmed from the product before you reach the meat of it. Trending topics are, in most cases, utterly useless and you can guarantee that most people who follow you are doing it purely because they want you to return the follow so you can see their marketing messages.

Which is another gripe – why do some people use Twitter purely to promote their business? Twitter is a communication platform, not an advertising space. Advertising on Twitter comes as a successful bi-product of using it correctly. All too often I see people attempting to leverage the power of Twitter to promote their business but end up using it in completely the wrong way. You need to participate with the sprawling communities and offer unique and interesting content first, then people might look at your website.

STFU n00b

Message forums, or bulletin boards if you were around in the 90’s, are a wonderful invention; a linear, simple to use area that allows for discussion of various topics via threads and posts.

It just so happens that our nature, as Humans, seems to be synonymous with conflict and more often than not message forums are a breeding ground for massive arguments that last for weeks, if not months.

So much for accepting another’s opinion and responding in an intelligent manner – you’d rather hit them with some cool Internet lingo wouldn’t you?!

Then, as usual, there are the spammers. The little idiots that register on a forum and then post a blatant advert in every thread they see, before toddling off to the next forum. I would not have considered this an effective means of marketing even as a teenager desperately trying to promote my music website, so why this seems to happen so often still is beyond me.

...and breathe

It’s not that I lose sleep over any of this. Not at all. I’m actually kept awake by my nightmares of the future!

It worries me that as a society we’re failing to grasp these technologies and how to use them correctly. These tools exist for us to enrich our lives, bring us all closer together and to learn from one another.  Instead, if we’re not fighting, we’re promoting questionable looking websites or trying to trick each another out of personal details and money.

You could say that the Internet simply reflects our social attributes, but I think it has the potential to promote the good and strip out the bad. We just need to want it enough.