Was struck by two recent interface changes, one on Orkut and one on Friendster, both in the direction of gathering more explicit meta-data.
Friendster first: they have added these two sets of preferences, to be used in the next rev of the service:
Friendster has a reputation for ham-handedness after the Fakester thing, but both of these permissions seem about right. Every social networking service risks selling size of network, because we're used to size being the metric of success for other online service, but
scale kills community. It looks like Friendster has finally figured out that 'friend of a friend of a friend' is pronounced 'stranger', especially on a service where the definition of friend is so debased already.
These are 'set once and forget' permissions, they will cut down on message spam, and they will allow a distinction between one's broadly and closely public persona. The only quibble is that by setting the default to 3 degrees of separation, most of the value of the change won't appear for users who leave the default settings.
Next is Orkut.
Stupid stupid stupid. But wait, there's more: stupid _and_ insulting. Bad enough their previous addition to this interface: "Please make sure this person is your friend." Please _make sure_? I have 30 million years of primate social experience wired between my ears -- I know instantly whether someone is a friend or not. There are times when I forget people's _names_ and I still remember whether they are friends or not. What Orkut means, of course, is "Please do the socially awkward thing of explicitly denying a social overture, to give us more accurate information about you."
That wasn't enough, however, so now they've added this linear scale of friendship that would be laughed out of a freshman sociology course, and then they say tell me the data is private. Of course it's not private -- that data isn't for me, it's for Orkut. I don't need it in the first place, because I am a monkey, descended from a long line of such monkeys, whose main talent consists of keeping track of relationships. Measured on the time scale of our social capacity, fire is a recent invention and agriculture is still a novelty.
The "how good a friend are they" data is useless or worse for me, but useful for Orkut, because they are desperate to represent social networks numerically, which is why they keep adding things to an interface they should be subtracting things from. The problem isn't the cost or refinement of accepting a friendship transaction, the problem is that _friendship isn't a transaction_, something almost no social networking service understands.
Only LiveJournal gets this right. (Those who do not understand LiveJournal are doomed to repeat it, badly.) I get to claim that anyone is a friend, just like the real world, but the people I say are my friends have to take no action to refuse that pointer, also like the real world. This creates social, not technological controls: if I say I'm a friend of Steve Ballmer's, but according to his profile, he's never heard of me, that's my problem. Over on Ballmer's Orkut page, however, my claiming him as a friend creates both work and awkwardness for him, and none for me, the opposite of what name-dropping should do.
The attempt to fit the roundish-but-with-weird-protuberances peg of human congress into the square hole of transactional connections and bi-directional links is the problem. Orkut's changes to the friend interface do nothing to address the underlying badness of fit between friendship as mutual feeling over time and their desire to make it transaction because transactions are easier to code.
1. christina on March 9, 2004 11:40 AM writes...
Please describe LiveJournal's feature to filter out non-friends. What are the tasks for end users to turn on this feature?
Permalink to Comment2. sneJ on March 9, 2004 12:23 PM writes...
Christina: Friendship on LJ is a directed graph, not an undirected one. If I friend someone, it creates a link from me to them, but it has no effect on them. (The only way they can find out, in fact, is to periodically check their friend-of list on their userinfo page, or use a tracking tool like Joule.)
If that person wants to acknowledge or reciprocate my friending, they can friend me back.
This is a very good feature, but its origin is somewhat serendipitous — it came about because friending on LJ is used for aggregation and for access control, not just for social networking.
Clay: I'm actually all in favor of being able to express the strength of a friend relation; all-or-nothing is just too awkward. I do agree that it's disengenuous to pretend that this is only for your own use, though: it should be visible by other people.
Permalink to Comment3. Evan Martin on March 9, 2004 12:50 PM writes...
I believe the "confirm this person is your friend" page was introduced on Orkut as a technical solution to people sending around URLs that added them as a friend in one click.
(We had the same problem on LiveJournal, and the same solution: pages that change status have an extra "confirm" step, the result of which can't be linked to directly.)
Permalink to Comment4. Stewart Butterfield on March 9, 2004 2:00 PM writes...
Clay, there are more than 6.6m on Friendster right now (determined by URL futzing) and this despite the fact that the site was unusable for 9 months or so.
Remember those sayings -- N million Xs can't be wrong? Do you think that they somehow all missed the badness of transactions-for-claims-of-friendship?
Permalink to Comment5. Gregory Narain on March 9, 2004 2:37 PM writes...
In fact, with a big enough frenzy, it's entirely possible that everyone is wrong :)
I tend to agree with Clay that relationships expressed as binary statements or otherwise mathematical expressions tend to fall down when held to the candle of ACTUAL social interaction.
In all these services, the notion of awareness is tightly coupled to the notion of friendship when, in reality, there is absolutely no correlation.
I've seen it happen on Friendster, Flickr, and everything in between. Lacking better alternatives, I "bookmark" people I want to meet/greet again into my Friend Corral so I don't have to remember to search for them later.
Is that real? Not for me, but I'll do what's convenient.. which is why the sound of 6 million chimps banging on keyboards in sync tends to seem like the "right" thing.
Permalink to Comment6. Stewart Butterfield on March 9, 2004 5:48 PM writes...
Well ... no shit :)
GIS, GPS, address fields and vCards and all the rest fall down when held up to the nuances of ACTUAL physical geography (let alone the social construction of spaces). No map, encyclopedia, simulation, model, etc., represents the world as it REALLY is (if there is even such a thing).
To me, all the talk about Friendster almost universally misses the point. The only person to have noticed what is going on is Justin Hall (article he was quoted in; exceprted here).
I suspect that most of the 600,000 Filipinos (or however many) who signed up when it swept through cared at all about social network modelling or any of the geek obsessions. For them it was a first chance to express their identity online, to project themselves into new space and get a reaction from other people.
They want pictures of their friends on their page and the testimonials because our relationships are to a great degree constitutive of who we are. The AzN iNteRcAP stylin' and the images say "this is me!". And for a lot of people who didn't have unique .sigs on Usenet, or ever try IRC, or have a blog, etc., this is their first taste. To you they are monkeys, but that is the *actual*, interesting social computing phenomenon, not the latest graphing techniques from academics.
(In other words, while the pundits care about the veracity of the model and geek out on networks and stuff, the people who are using the services are up to something completely different.)
(P.S. bookmarks are a great idea, and something that has been in the Flickr feature queue for a while -- should be done soon. And not just for people, but also for groups.)
Permalink to Comment7. Luke Francl on March 9, 2004 5:56 PM writes...
The Dean campaign's Friendster clone worked the way Clay describes. You could "friend" anyone you wanted, and they could either do it back, or not. Both relationships in and out would show up on your user page.
Permalink to Comment8. webby on March 9, 2004 6:06 PM writes...
IMHO the best way to handle this issue is the way Huminity handled it - if you know the persons email then you are a "friend" if not you cannot add them to your buddy list (if you don't know the person's email how close are you?).
Permalink to CommentTrying to describe relationships strength by a simplify mathematical algorithm is a bit insulting to human society. Fun for programmers but do people really need it? Ask yourself do you care if the connection between your second degrees and your third is a "good friend" or a "best friend"?
9. graydon on March 10, 2004 1:37 PM writes...
you're not a monkey, you're an ape. monkeys are small quadrupeds with tails, and aren't so clever. apes are much more trouble than monkeys.
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