I state the known: The strength of the Web today comes from the aggregate actions of millions of stragers. Google’s impersonal robots have captured a lot of this background noise of activity and made it accessible in agreggate. Del.icio.us’ rise to fame was driven by the users, turning it into the Yahoo directory of the current Web.
But, I’m not so sure if that’s the whole story.
I’m more interested in how we do things and scale things with immediate social networks.
I’m amazed at how many folks are adding me as a fellow traveller in Dopplr. As with any service, I have to ask myself what is the value _to me_ of adding one more person to this network. Where do I draw the line and say that someone is a weak link that will not add value to my activities on a particular service, say Twitter, Dopplr, Flickr, or (gasp) LinkedIn.
I’ve been seeing a lot of studies that show that folks are being more careful when adding folks to their social networks. There are public social networks and private social networks, with different sizes and activities.
My question is not only how to help users manage various degrees of a social network (public, loose, tight), but how do we have public aggregate actions and private connected actions both inform and guide each other.
Yeah, mixed up thoughts, but part of a thread in my head.
Just follow your heart. Don’t try to manage it .. 😉
The way I do it is: if the person has interesting content (photos, videos, blog posts) I add them as a contact, if the person is a friend already or I have met them physically I add them as a friend, and if the person is family then I add them as family.
So in this way if somebody adds me as a contact I check their contributions to the site, if I don’t find anything interesting I don’t add them as a contact.
Contacts can become friends over time and friends can be ‘downgraded’ to contact if we fall out of touch but they’re still kept in my social network on the site. If there is a situation where one of my contacts or friends does something negative towards me, then I remove them from my social site and possibly block them.
With this type of network I can filter based on content (photos, blog entries, etc.) from my family, content from my friends, or content from my contacts. Sites such as Flickr and Vox have this 3 layers of separation that I think is a good implementation for a social network.
my approach is pretty much the same as Kevin’s…. What always bothers me is the whole dynamic of *not* adding someone… I always wonder what happens when you actively decline someone.
On Dopplr, say, if you get a request and you don’t act on it, it doesn’t stay ‘in your face’ and the person can just always think that the request got lost amongst all your email or something. On FaceBook, I’m getting a build up of friend requests from people I don’t know from Adam because I have to actively *do* something about the request like, reject it – and I don’t know if FaceBook are going to tell them I rejected them! Which is, somehow, completely different to just ignoring them.
which is also a complete tangent to your post but something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – the dynamics of not reciprocating. Tricky human stuff 🙂
Does anyone besides me try to make some separation between our personal and work activities on the Web? I think the criteria for accepting contacts and revealing personal information are different in the two spheres, even if it’s easy for anyone to see both sides of our Web presence.
For example, I have two Flickr accounts, one for personal photos, and another for work-related images. LinkedIn is a purely professional network, so I’m careful with who I admit as a contact. Facebook? Hard to say, but it’s at least partly professional, and so needs some caution. Scoble uses Facebook as his “new business card collection”, and likes that he can learn all about his contacts: “Oh, heck, let’s go look at Jason’s Facebook. I see his religious views. Jason has put his mobile number there. His educational experience. And more…”
“Religious views”? Not the right thing for a professional profile, IMHO.
Oren,
Quite right.
Humans are quite capable of determining relationships and communications channels. We need to make our tools work with our capabilities rather than enforce new ways of determining relationships.
Facebook is interesting in their granularity. But, then again, overabundance of settings can be confusing rather than helpful.
Tchau,
Charlie