wanderingstan

“Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on.” from Sunscreen

Cory Doctorow recently wrote that Facebook will sink under the weight of socially obligated “friendships”.

It’s a real problem, but there’s a simple solution.

Friendships in any network should fade over time, but be renewed by interaction.

Current social networks differ from reality on where action is required: In the real world, friendships fade because of inaction: He slowly stops calling and emailing as much, you don’t think to invite him to your party. No one is to blame, it happens all the time.

But in the current online world, friendships can only end by action. Someone has to make the decision to actively de-friend the other. This feels intuitively slimy, and it’s a waste of effort and attention on someone who by definition you aren’t concerned with.

Don Dodge and Fred Wilson are on the right track when they say that email is the real social network, because your interaction with these people is a good indicator of who your friends really are. But any interaction should be included: throwing food, playing games together, going to events together, reading each others blogs…whatever.

In a perfect world, my “friends” in a network would gradually decay to being mere “contacts,” with a corresponding decay in access to my private information. Perhaps at the end the system would alert me that so-and-so is about to lose their friend status and give me an option to prevent it. But the important thing is that action be required to keep the relationship, not to end it.

When I talked to the Facebook guys in September, I was impressed with how much they wanted the friend list to be accurate. They were adamant in not wanting a MySpace-ish culture where people had thousands of “friends”. If they or any other network are to achieve this goal, friend decay is a necessary ingredient.

Tim Berners-Lee is talking about the Social Graph. This is good, but he and many others are conflating the age-old dream of the “Semantic Web” with the newfound value of the “Social Graph”.

“Social” has come to the web before “Meaning”, because people care more about “social” than “meaning”.

social > meaning

Who said something is infinitely more interesting than what has been said.

What does it benefit a user if the computer can understand the meaning of “Buy Viagra now for cheap! Enlarge your penis!“, but it doesn’t know who said it?

To put it in pictures:

Is it more important that meaning be derived so that the following RDF triplet can “understood” by a computer:

Or, is it more important that the computer realize that this message (no matter the “meaning” or how structured it is.) came from a person/company/source that you don’t know, don’t trust, and have no connection to? (e.g via your social graph)

This is why we have applications used by millions of people for throwing food and poo at friends, but no break-through semantic web applications.

(You might argue that people don’t care, that Wikipedia for example is not by any one person in particular. But as I said before, these sorts of facts are not the ones we care about most. You’d much rather get a pie in the face via a Facebook friend than a well-written and structured and meaning-laden bit of text that you have no relation to. (And to be more precise: Wikipedia is a trusted source/brand/company unto itself.))

Back to Berners-Lee, he sees the social graph as exciting because people are finally starting to map something and maybe now they’ll start to map everything else. My criticism is that he views social and trust relationships as only one example of relationships, no more or less important than other relationships. (Like the one in the Viagra-to-Cheap relationship above.) For example, he writes:

So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us.

But social/trust relations trump others. This is what I said 3 years ago when beginning Outfoxed, and I’m happy that Facebook and others are proving it true.

Here at Lijit (the company which grew out of Outfoxed), we surface this idea in Search. But it will eventually permeate every aspect of our online lives: message exchange, discovery, shopping, advertising, religion, and more.