How a Real Life Social Network Works
The Real Life Social Network v2
Paul Adams who does UX research for Google put together a few slides to explain to the rest of the company how to properly categorise the type of groups we make in real life. His presentation echoes my thoughts on social network problems, and then offers solutions to make it work.
So what is the problem with facebook? The ‘like’ button made subscribing easy for the masses, and they were the first to really make OpenID work with the ‘Connect to Facebook’ button. The problem with facebook is that we have different things to say to close friends than we do to other groups of friends. The same is true for different groups of interests. For example, some close friends like to discuss audio tech, and some have no interest in even seeing a link. But the message gets pushed to everyone, introducing a noise floor which simmers under our real interests.
Every casual comment made in a status update has a large audience. We don’t have the capacity to remember more than about 150 casual acquaintances, yet many facebook friend lists double that. Beyond that, other people could find your comments with a web search. People don’t even remember who they’re talking to when these casual comments are made. On twitter, the people following you are even less likely to be a close friend, and messages are sent to all of them in an instant. To compare with the traditional mobile phone, you statistically only call a handful of close friends regularly.
With a social web saturating itself, these kind of progressive plans (timed to near perfection with the private network Diaspora arriving in two weeks) might eventually allow us to socialise freely online.
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