Comments on: Does This Mean We’re Not Friends Anymore? http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/ because technology is just another ecosystem Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:48:16 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: tecosystems » P.S. The Comments Feed is Fixed http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/comment-page-1/#comment-115212 tecosystems » P.S. The Comments Feed is Fixed Mon, 02 Jul 2007 03:49:50 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/#comment-115212 [...] comments around here are generally of greater value than my humble offerings. Witness Joel’s comment on the nuances of social networking, Bill’s comment on distributed source code management [...] [...] comments around here are generally of greater value than my humble offerings. Witness Joel’s comment on the nuances of social networking, Bill’s comment on distributed source code management [...]

]]> By: What I don’t like about Facebook..and a geographic diversion « Vendorprisey http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/comment-page-1/#comment-112735 What I don’t like about Facebook..and a geographic diversion « Vendorprisey Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:32:15 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/#comment-112735 [...] A more general challenge I find with social media is the glib use of the word friend. Perhaps I’ve been living in Germany too long where the German equivalent is used sparingly, and the terms colleague and acquaintance don’t have the same pejorative sense that they can do in English. There are a number of people I would like to have in my network, but I’m not sure that I would classify them as friends (or they me!). Stephen O’Grady has a thoughtful post- “does this mean we are friends anymore?” [...] [...] A more general challenge I find with social media is the glib use of the word friend. Perhaps I’ve been living in Germany too long where the German equivalent is used sparingly, and the terms colleague and acquaintance don’t have the same pejorative sense that they can do in English. There are a number of people I would like to have in my network, but I’m not sure that I would classify them as friends (or they me!). Stephen O’Grady has a thoughtful post- “does this mean we are friends anymore?” [...]

]]> By: Steve George http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/comment-page-1/#comment-108678 Steve George Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:32:19 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/#comment-108678 One of the problems with most of these sites is their assumption that the strength of a link is binary. Take LinkedIN as an example, if you link with someone you are specifying a level of trust between the two entities. Of course in a business context there are varieties of trust and levels of connection. But LinkedIN provides no way to deal with this. You should be able to have multiple levels of connection. Of course that introduces the problem that we don't obviously define a level of connection in our normal social interactions. Although it's implied. One of the problems with most of these sites is their assumption that the strength of a link is binary. Take LinkedIN as an example, if you link with someone you are specifying a level of trust between the two entities. Of course in a business context there are varieties of trust and levels of connection. But LinkedIN provides no way to deal with this.

You should be able to have multiple levels of connection. Of course that introduces the problem that we don’t obviously define a level of connection in our normal social interactions. Although it’s implied.

]]> By: Joel http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/comment-page-1/#comment-108256 Joel Thu, 21 Jun 2007 19:53:20 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/06/21/why_not_friends/#comment-108256 When I was working at Xanga one of the projects I spent a lot of time on was the social-networking aspect of the site (http://profile.xanga.com/friends.aspx?user=Joel). We had long discussions about how to phrase the various actions that are part of a social network - do you 'friend' someone? do you connect with them? etc. Is it your 'friends' page or your 'connections' page or is it your network? Personally, I think saying "you are no longer connected to [user]" sounds a lot better than "you are no longer [user]'s friend" because much less of a judgement about that person is implied. Also, when declining invites we gave users the option to choose from humorous ("It's not you, it's me..."), more polite ("I'm sorry, I don't know you well enough."), or custom replies. On top of that, after X number of days the invite would silently expire and disappear, allowing you a way out if you really didn't want to decline directly. The proliferation of social networks leads to a whole new class of social interaction and the norms are not yet well defined. When I was working at Xanga one of the projects I spent a lot of time on was the social-networking aspect of the site (http://profile.xanga.com/friends.aspx?user=Joel). We had long discussions about how to phrase the various actions that are part of a social network – do you ‘friend’ someone? do you connect with them? etc. Is it your ‘friends’ page or your ‘connections’ page or is it your network? Personally, I think saying “you are no longer connected to [user]” sounds a lot better than “you are no longer [user]’s friend” because much less of a judgement about that person is implied. Also, when declining invites we gave users the option to choose from humorous (“It’s not you, it’s me…”), more polite (“I’m sorry, I don’t know you well enough.”), or custom replies. On top of that, after X number of days the invite would silently expire and disappear, allowing you a way out if you really didn’t want to decline directly. The proliferation of social networks leads to a whole new class of social interaction and the norms are not yet well defined.

]]>