Why does any part of this need to happen in public? Not in a text group? Random discord server? Is it just some sort of underlying exhibition drive that Myspace originally tapped into? To me, my friends are the 15-20 people I've grown to know and like. From reading what you said here, it seems as though to you the word friends captures your entire extended network, with friends of friends, old coworkers, etc. If your question is how do you show off to these people, if you're optimizing for the number of 'interactable interactions' or something, we've left friendship far behind and turned this into a 'numbers go up' game. I'm not less friendly with my best friend because I didn't see her latest comment on some random meme an acquaintance from school 10 years ago posted.
When MySpace first started getting big I remember people talking about how many friends you could have on it.
And I remember not understanding at all because these weren't friends and who the hell can handle having hundreds or thousands of friends?
I never understood MySpace and in many ways I still don't understand Facebook (I do on a rational level but not an emotional one).
I'd rather have 3-4 lifelong friends than thousands of online friends. And that doesn't mean you can't make real connections with people online, just that doing so takes years of effort just like offline friends, so doesn't scale, just like you said.
Another big draw would be to not publicize your friends or the number of friends you have. This encourages quantity over quality, but it's obvious why social networks desire higher numbers.
This concept is interesting.
Haven't tried it out yet but will be interested to see what kinda of activities I get on here.
If your friends aren't on there then you're basically showing your stuff to everyone? So these new people might become your friends... If they do become your friends, does that mean you filter them out as well?
A friend and I had a conversation related to this last night. We were speaking about how Facebook has seemed to become the dumping ground for acquaintances that you'd like to keep in contact with, but never will, and who you're not really comfortable texting. It's a problem I've had with Facebook for a while. They just don't differentiate the relationships I have with people enough. And because almost everyone is on the same level, I'm hesitant to share information and act as I would if it were just me and my close ring of friends. Often times, others will just post things to garner attention because they're posting to the world, and so my news feed is usually cluttered with garbage I'm not really interested in.
Anyway, I think adding points to relationships, or even people really, is a good way to go about differentiating friends. Come to think of it, I can see a Facebook app where you have 3 tokens to choose your top 3 friends to be pretty successful. Throw in an option to let people buy more tokens to add more best friends, and you'll have a bunch of teenagers buying tokens so as to not make the 4th and 5th best friends feel left out. :P
I guess there's a loss of context then. To me the main reason ppl join friendster and myspace is to meet new friends (who typically are only online) hence - "You already have tons of friends..." so what's the point in myspace? - here's something u can use
I guess we need to tweek it
well thanks for the feedback - if anyone has suggestions on this one please let us know
I think our grouping of friends is generally suppressed in our thinking. We have fine-grained distinctions among our friends, but we generally don't see it that way because they're not important re friendship.
Instead, we have different conversations with different friends. While this is normally private, that's only because of how we're interacting--in person, over chat, etc.--and not because of any desire to keep it secret. A social media site has analogs to a more general meet-up or party in that our conversations are often on the side: we're not talking to everyone but we don't mind people listening in.
The article's critique wouldn't have much intuitive appeal if it was possible to create "open" circles where conversations wouldn't appear in public, but a user who wished to see them could listen in and possibly comment, signaling their interest in joining that group.
I generally friend only people I'm, you know, friends with -- or at the very least met enough times to recognize. At some level of friends (300+?) I don't think the site is useful for actual personal communication -- which is more or less the only thing I find Facebook to be useful for.
I find those friend recommendations to be just that: recommendations. I likely know them through someone or they're in my local network: have I met them? Do I want to be friends with them? Or am I just shamelessly network-marketing myself here?
I'd love to see this on every login, even just for a day. The fallout would be hilarious.
It's because it forces you to pick. Outside of the discrete friendship groups online, there's an ever-shifting on-the-spot calculation about who's around you and how much you want to say. One day you might feel like telling friend X while you're in the coffee shop together with just one other friend, the next day you might not feel so open in the bar for a variety of reasons. Add in all the variables about who else is around, how much beer you've drunk, whether you've just been paid, if the relationship with a partner is going well etc. and every situation is different in a very nuanced way. I'm not on Facebook now, but when I was I rapidly gave up on the idea of administering my friendship groups because it felt like I was bureacratising my friendships in a very unnatural way.
people with many friends are overrepresented in social networks (because many people have them as friends) so people who are friends with you have more friends than the average.
In other words, everyone is friend with Tom from MySpace so you have a hugely popular friend, but you don't know any loner with no friend (because they're not your friend).
About 80-90% of the people that are my Facebook friends are what I'd consider real friends. As in, if I saw them on the street I'd come up to them and start a conversation without feeling awkward or mentioning when we last saw each other. Then again, I have ~180 friends, not like 500+ that some of my friends have.
I post things to the walls of close friends fairly often, because I know them well enough to know what they'll find interesting. Also, this completely breaks down if you include private messages.
I have a set of close friends that I share just about everything with. It's a somewhat large size. Some of them I am in fantasy sports leagues with, some of them are techie types, some of them are fans of the same sports teams I am. I don't necessarily want to flood the stream of people that I know aren't interested.
There's many cases where individual circles of friends have a intersections or just don't fully mesh. It'll be interesting to see how this proceeds. UI/UX is going to dictate how successful circles are.
I disagree with the author.
I see no point in making my conversations accessable for everyone, especially if they cant actively participate in them.
There is no need in grouping your friends in any way, just create a circle with all your friends and those will behave the same way facebook does,at least if I got it right (by the time I got my invite it was already full).
I think there is a difference in what I want my friends and family to know about me and what people I just know but have no deeper relationship with should know.
Posting something publicly would make it accessible for everyone, twitterlike.
I don't know when/why this became reality. On my facebook account, I only have people I know pretty well, many of them lifelong friends. It keeps my list short (Something like 40 I think) but it doesn't crowd it up. I guess that's not the norm
I guess I'm just a social leper or something, but I don't have this problem. Nor do most of the people I know who aren't professional networkers. I have something in the neighborhood of 150 "friends" on FB. Only about 30 or so of them post with any regularity.
If you are "friends" with ever person you ever meet, yeah, this will be a problem for you. On the other hand, if you limit your "friends" to people you would actually make a point to hang out with in person when you're in the same place, it doesn't seem to be an issue.
In other words, this isn't Facebook's problem, it's Cringely's problem.
I was out with friends for lunch and almost everyone was saying "Someone check us in on Facebook!!!"
It also removes the mystery in interactions and makes friendship cheap. I'll meet new people and one of us would say "Yeah, just add me on Facebook" and then both of you just become Facebook friends to each other, nothing more, nothing less.
reply