5 posts tagged “social networking”

My half-brother Andy, who was a devoted  Facebook user back during his senior year of high school and freshman year at Stanford, just wrote an extremely interesting post on why he's decided to quit the site. Reading his post made me really think hard about the newsfeed and its implications for the design of social networking sites. It's an unchallenged assumption that newsfeed-like features are a good idea, but what if, in the long run, they're really not?

Daily Life at Leland Stanford, Jr. University: I'm back

http://andrewbhall.blogspot.com/2007/...

...if Facebook and the news feed has taught me anything, it's that humans can easily deceive themselves when given too much information. I know in my heart that I was a much happier facebook user before the news feed. And yet, while having the choice to...

in the form of a feature called "Notes," according to TechCrunch:

The best thing about the new notes tool may be that users can syndicate the full contents of other blogs elsewhere onto their Facebook page and individual imported entries can be commented on in Facebook. Blog posts, or notes as the company prefers they are called, can be tagged and commented on. When notes posts are tagged with another user’s name that entry is delivered to the user in question. This is how Facebook photos work as well. Notes can also be posted by mobile phone. Privacy options in notes appear typical of the rest of the site. Users can view their friends’ notes from inside their notes dashboard.

This sounds interesting, and somewhat competitive to Vox.

.tiff gave an excellent presentation on Facebook earlier this summer as part of 6aUS's tech talk series. Based on that, and also conversations with my half-brother Andy, who attends Stanford and is a fairly heavy Facebook user, I decided that blogging would not be hugely successful on Facebook, since its users view the service as a supplement/facilitator to their social lives, not an arena in which to conduct it. However, the "Notes" feature may work in this context, since Facebook users could use it as an easy means to tell each other about music, funny videos, links, etc-something which is cumbersome to do in realspace, and can also facilitate additional social interaction once realspace interaction occurs. So Facebook's positioning of this new feature as "Notes" instead of "blogging" may be a result of their understanding of what their users are likely to do. 

They were just awarded a patent on social networking, according to TechCrunch. You can see the actual patent here at the US Patent Office's site. This is the abstact:

A method and apparatus for calculating, displaying and acting upon relationships in a social network is described. A computer system collects descriptive data about various individuals and allows those individuals to indicate other individuals with whom they have a personal relationship. The descriptive data and the relationship data are integrated and processed to reveal the series of social relationships connecting any two individuals within a social network. The pathways connecting any two individuals can be displayed. Further, the social network itself can be displayed to any number of degrees of separation. A user of the system can determine the optimal relationship path (i.e., contact pathway) to reach desired individuals. A communications tool allows individuals in the system to be introduced (or introduce themselves) and initiate direct communication.

At the end of the patent it says:

While various embodiments of the present invention have been described above, it should be understood that they have been presented by way of example, and not limitation. It will be apparent to persons skilled in the relevant art(s) that various changes in form and detail can be made therein without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. Thus the present invention should not be limited by any of the above-described exemplary embodiments, but should be defined only in accordance with the following claims and their equivalents.

ie, not only do we own anything we talked about in here, we also own anything remotely similar.

No word yet on if and how Friendster plans to use this patent. An also-ran in the social networking space, this patent is probaby their only interesting asset left.

in Comet? Until recently I didn't realize that you could "connect" to someone in Comet, but not be their friend or family. I think this concept makes sense, but what does it actually do for me, the user? Making someone a friend or family means that I can make my posts visible only to them, which makes sense. But I can't make a post "contact" only. So if I make someone a "contact" all it really means is that they show up on my "Connect" page. I guess they would also show up in my "neighbhorhood" and I would see their recent posts on my My Comet page. The concept, and the nomenclature, are confusing to me, though. Friends and family seem like types of contacts to me, but really, contacts, friends and family are all types of people you can be connected to on Comet.

It seems like when you connect to someone on Comet, you should be asked to classify the connection as one of three possible things:

i) family
ii) friend
iii) contact (business associate or someone you've just met on Comet)

Right now the ui uses checkboxes, which is just wrong. Something I've always to try and just did, is to add someone as both a friend and a family member. You can do that, which makes no sense to me. The way it should work, IMHO, is to have a drop-down menu with the three options above. That seems much clearer. Dividing the world into family, friends and other people whom you have some connection to but are "close" with seems much closer to the way human beings actually classify people in their minds.

I'm going to rewrite this and submit it to "Feedback" too but I thought I would throw it out to the Comet community at large for discussion too, since Feedback tends to feel like a black box.

The new social networking site isolatr. Thx TechCrunch for the link.