A few months ago, I read that MySpace or Facebook, or one of those sites, released a tracking feature – you could see who had visited your page and when. This backfired pretty badly because (a) people were creeped out when they saw that strangers were coming to their page over and over and (b) people got mad at their friends for not hanging onto their every update. So they pulled the whole tracker concept.
Now Facebook has introduced this feature that shows you what people on your network are up to (e.g. “added a new application”, “changed their profile”, etc) which has been driving people away somewhat (my 22-year-old cousin said “I guess I’m too old – I find this thing a bit invasive. I don’t really want everyone to know what I’m doing.”)
I don’t know how I would feel about a tracker on Flickr – would it be more like seeing who came into my open studio space, or would it be stalking? Would I want strangers to know I had gone to their pages? What would I want to know about someone before leaving my calling card at their open studio space? What about you?
And once I know who is visiting my stream, would I want to, say, restrict those visitors? For example, should I be able to forbid all Flickr users who are members of certain groups, or who have certain tags in their streams, or certain friends, from seeing my stream?