The growth and proliferation of social networking on the Internet has hit a new wall- too much social networking. Recent reports that Facebook has disabled members for too much social networking apparently is a reaction to concerns of suspicious behavior which really boils down to using the site too much. Facebook’s 100 million users are susceptible to spam. Phishing, and malware just like all webmail services. It seems ironic that there could do too much social networking, but the report of 64 large-scale spam attacks is not too surprising. So it seems that social networks are being abused like the rest of the Internet.

+97 Billion Emails a Day

No one is surprised by the proliferation of email in general, so when IDC announced in April 2007 that of the 97 billion email per day about 40 billion were spam. The impact of the Internet on social change continues at a pace unknown in the past and difficult to actually predict too far into the future. From an Information Technology perspective management of email at with growth rate makes planning difficult and expensive.

Growth of Emails on e-Discovery

Since every lawsuit filed has some electronic evidence, this proliferation of email and social networking makes e-Discovery more perplexing. Not just in volume, but locating the evidence to begin with. For instance, even though employees rely on their company email systems, they also use Facebook for social networking and webmail such as AOL, Hotmail, or gmail. So in the context of e-Discovery lawyers are now confronted with finding and searching these sites for evidence. Issuing subpoenas to Facebook, AOL, Hotmail, and gmail to get records is not as simple as requesting opposing parties to search and produce records from internal email systems.
 

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