In 2004 Lawrence Lessig declared email bankruptcy and I think at some stage people will start to declare friend bankruptcy.
There’s a reason you are friends with someone and a reason you lose touch. I remember when friends reunited launched a few years ago. I joined, paid my fiver and it resulted in a flurry of emails & meetups shortly afterwards. Then we never met again and I went back to my runnings, to quote Mike Skinner.
Some of my facebook contacts have 200+ friends. I spoke to one the other day and he admitted that he isn’t friends with most of his facebook friends. Facebook used to have a limit of 5000 friends which they have recently abolished. I do not know why. Folks, nobody has 5000 friends. Nobody.
My arbitrary definition of a friend is someone you have contact with outside work at least every month or so. You can be friends with someone at work, but only if you voluntarily spend time with them on a semi-regular basis. In my case that means 20 or 30 people at most. I think what is needed on a social network is a way to differentiate friends from contacts. To avoid giving offence it wouldn’t have to be apparent to the other person but it would be a good way to change privacy settings so people you know less well did not have complete access to all your information. I would also cap it at 50.
The new AltaVista
The problem for facebook is that it has no way to discern the importance of connections between people so its value as a database is diminished. I have wondered whether facebook is the new Google or not. Maybe we are still in the early days of social networks and facebook is AltaVista, the current leader but nothing that makes it truly outstanding in the way Google was. Yes facebook has a nice simple design but there is nothing inherently superior about it beyond that in the way Google was. And yes switching social network is harder than switching search engine, nevertheless the rapid adoption of Twitter (which is essentially a mobile version of facebook’s newsfeed) shows it is possible. My own feeling is that someone will design another SN with that Googlesque special sauce and, like Google, they will have learnt from the mistakes of existing networks like FB et al.
So it made me think that perhaps facebook’s vulnerability lies in its departure from its original simplicity. What are the functions people really need in a social network? I would say:
- Photo sharing
- IM
- News feed
- Favourite books/tv/movies
- Event organising
I can’t think of much more than that. Write your minimalist social network feature manifesto in the comments. All you need to do is give a list of the features you actually use, I’ll be interested to see what you think.
Read more:
On useful advertising
On the future of social networks
Pic: Crazy Talk
Some interesting points here. As you mention, ‘friends’ are people that you maintain regular contact with either through regular physical or electronic interactions. I think that the hundreds of ‘friends’ people have listed on their facebook account also include people that they have known at some point in their lives (at least that is the case for me and most people i know). There are of course those out there that randomly connect to people as ‘poke buddies’ and for other marketing purposes – but let’s keep them aside. One of the benefits that FB has provided people is the ability to narrowcast updates of themselves to their whole network – making it simple and effortless to send bite sized information updates to their friends. These updates not only help keep friends informed about what you’re up to but also build bases for further discussions and relationship building. The problem of course is the whole privacy issue…
Another important point you mention – Facebook doesn’t have the ability to discern the importance of connections. This is somewhat closely knit with the privacy issue. Relationships, much like communications, have a context. We know people in a particular context. We begin to know them in one context and after time they might change into another context with a different level of importance. For example, a person can be a family relative and then possibly become a colleague. In this case he may be very important in the family context, but in the work context he may have less importance or relevance. In networking sites, it should be critical to properly organize your connections so that the right levels of context and importance are maintained, thus being able to easily control privacy.
Regarding your third point about minimalist functions in a social network – This definitely is the first stage of social networking and one of the reasons why facebook became so popular. However, as you reach a broader target of people with varying interest and objectives, these features become quite mundane. One of the problems with social networks is that there are simply too many of them with varying objectives. Some people prefer deeply targeted networks for specific purposes, and some prefer more generic ones for general communications, and many people like them all, resulting in membership of numerous networks. Consequentially people create various contextual identities on the net depending on what the network is for, what value they want to get out of these networks (professional, social, etc.), and also who is on the network. These basically end up being different facets of your identity. If people were able to maintain multiple contexts of identity, corresponding to relationships, communications and functions I think that would be ideal. There is a presentation on http://blog.facetplay.com which talks more about this. Would love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks man, I looked at your slideshow and left my comments over there. It is an interesting concept you are pursuing – it looks like tagging for friends to me.
what do you mean? most of the things on your list could be accomplised by google account (mail, docs, calendar). okay, google sucks on sharing the pictures …
Favourite books/tv/movies = you could write about these on your blog or email
News feed = just email interesting items (it works for 99% of people) or share your opml (for 1% tech-freakos)
Yes, but I’m lazy and want to see it all in one place. Hence the magic of facebook which it seems to have got away from with all the vampires and spangly glitterballs etc.
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