No. Early social media like FOAF and the first commercial iteration of FB was designed so that people could connect and share with and meet a limited number of people – two, maybe three degrees of separation at most. An individual’s social network was not seen as billions or even thousands of people, but something closer to Dunbar’s Number (I don’t think it’s co-incidence that one of FB’s choices is exactly double that number).
Fame whores and corporations and trollies and advertisers used the base tool to try to extend their reach to six degrees, giving us the mess we see today. Meanwhile, the social media services never bothered to put in place easy-to-use tools to segment those an individual might want to reach (e.g. immediate family, friends, co-workers, etc.), but instead put all their efforts into creating advertising segmentation tools.
