Our real life relationships are not bounded by accepting/ignoring/blocking/following, they are far more complicated than that. The social web is still very early in its development and is likely to take years to mature.
We’re only yet building Connections and Groups. Relationships are starting to form in places as systems learn from people’s interactions (email, IM, social networks), but it will take many years to for computers to understand Meaning. Understanding meaning will be necessary to provide tools that deeply support people’s communication needs, and to provide advertising that people really value.
There are many examples on today’s social networks to illustrate our early development state:
- Awkward friend suggestions for people you don’t want to be connected to.
- Only accepting certain requests because you feel some sort of obligation.
- People from very different parts of your life coming together in an unnatural context e.g. both commenting on your status update but with different perspectives.
- Some of your connections asking you to explain your status update (which was actually a private joke with other connections).
- People from one aspect of your life (e.g. work) seeing content from another aspect (e.g. clubbing) that you’d prefer them not to see.
- Seeing content from people you don’t care about and missing content from people you really care about.
on Sep 30th, 2009 at 12:27 am
Interesting post. I think almost everyone can relate to those issues. That’s why I tend to use twitter for work-types and facebook for everyone else. But it’s of course a very blurred line between the two.
But hasn’t Facebook actually designed functionality specifically to try to deal with these issues — the whole groups/lists thing?
Now mind you, I’ve never actually used that at all. I’d love to know what percent of people actually do (I imagine it’s tiny).
I think a huge part of the challenge is that the appeal of these things (facebook/twitter) is in their perceived simplicity, but soon we get to all the issues you point out. So in many respects it’s a real design challenge — how can we address these problems without sacrificing one of the main strengths of social networking — their simplicity?
Perhaps as these networks grow in genuine importance to people, they’ll be more willing to invest a bit more time to sort this out, but more likely it requires exceptionally good design that makes it virtually effort-free to be able to segment our networks.
on Sep 30th, 2009 at 12:54 am
It’s interesting. I find I self-censor a lot. (For example, I wouldn’t twitter while drunk in a Las Vegas casino.)
I’ve also found similar confusion in cross-over between groups. When I updated Facebook with a question to former work colleagues about what was going on at my previous employer, people at my current employer thought I was referring to my current workplace. With hilarious consequences.
on Oct 1st, 2009 at 6:35 am
Thanks Brian - I think that the reason people don’t use groups in Facebook is because the perceived effort of setting them up is greater than any perceived benefit. They just need to be designed better. This is definitely an area we’ll see more work in though, Twitter announced “Lists” yesterday, which is effectively the same thing.
With regard to simplicity, it’s interesting - I don’t think social networks are perceived as simple by many people. Many people struggle to understand how they work, who can see what content, what social etiquette applies etc. I also think we’ll see an increased awareness amongst people of the lack of privacy in places, as they suffer from or are witness to the online fauz pas. I see so many of these occur while doing research.
Nice examples Johnny - you’re not alone, many people self-censor.
on Oct 7th, 2009 at 6:47 am
Would that be the new social networks coming out?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10367736-36.html
I agree with you when you say social networks aren’t yet so smart.