In the past week or two, a few of my tweeps, Alex, @alexdc, and Sue, @dswaters, both from different circles (indeed, one in Miami the other in Perth), did a bit of soul-searching regarding their usage of Twitter. While I have had many discussion with folks regarding how they use their social networking tools, only Twitter seems to make people speak passionately. I think it’s due to the personal nature of Twitter.
Harriet, @hwakelam, also from Perth, wrote a nice exploration of her relationship with Twitter (see below). She points out what, to me, is a key struggle many of us have – how to keep it broad to include weak ties, yet keep it tight, to enrich the strong ties.
Link: Technology Twitter: Twitter love….:
We are cutting edge – modern and traditional simultaneously. We don’t want to limit our relationship only to me and mine. But nor do I want to obsess about Twitter’s other relationships…. Twitter and me, we want to listen to the world, but we are also exclusive – we want to revel in our individual relationship..
And, as these things seems to happen, coincidentally, Stefan made a great comment, on my previous post, that cuts right into this (see next).
Link: Lifeblog: Socialstream – a project on Unified Social Networks:
the thing is none of the social services out now offer the granularity that real life offers. i would love to add anyone i ever had a meaningful conversation with in my social network, but i’m not going to treat them the same way.
Comment by: Stefan Constantinescu | 27 December 2007 at 20:34
As gregarious creatures, we constantly make and break social connections, weak and strong. And, as humans, we have evolved to be able to handle not only a large number of different circles of social relations, but a large number of different strengths, too. Yet, our social network tools online make us cleave to a preset that usually makes it hard for us to manage this granularity.
Earlier this year, our concepting team had a very long running discussion about this. We sensed this need for granularity. We also saw that there had to be a way to let the software know what the ‘settings’ were just by our actions. Yet, automated relationship management just wasn’t our cup of tea. Also, to make that complexity visible was daunting – heck, even though humans are good at it, we don’t really know explicitly our parameters, nor would software make it easier, it’d just get in the way.
In the end, we felt most comfortable with Public-Friends-Family-Self (for example, Flickr’s model).
In the end, maybe it is better to handle these gradations of linkage by partitioning ourselves across many services (profiles?). Indeed, that’s what I’ve been trying to do, establishing a range of connections strengths for each of the social networking services I use, each playing to the strength of that service. And I have seen others do the same.
Hmm, this is a thought that is taking me back to the drawing board.
Why haven’t I seen a service that simply lets me tag my friends like I tag bookmarks in delicious?
You’re my friend, but if I end up getting into Nokia you are also my colleague. If I want to broadcast a message to my colleagues why should I have to add each and every one of them on an email list?
We tag pictures with locations, events and people. We tag data with data about the data. Why don’t we tag our friends?
“People I party with”
“People I work wih”
“People who I walk by and say hi to all the time but have no clue who the hell they are”
“People I don’t like, but have to work with.”
“People I love, but can’t share my feelings with.”
I don’t see tagging happening in the social space. Maybe it makes people feel uncomfortable to put a label on their friends, but isn’t that what we as humans do anyway? We know when meeting someone if we’re going to like them, how bad their breathe smells, their fashion sense, all these subliminal little things make us judge someone within microseconds of meeting them.
Why can’t we do the same online?