“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.
Definitely! And I would add that if one is going to build such a “passive decay” friendship system, that it allow the user to define for themselves what that decay looks like, rather than normalizing it. For some, 3 days with no contact = end of friendship. For others, three years.
But then this begs another question: why have a social network site it all? If it requires constant maintenance to keep one’s network afloat, how is it any different than exchanging emails with fellow bloggers? This, I think, is why LinkedIn is such a good idea: it’s a network of contacts, not friends. Once you build that online rolodex, you need not click and poke around to maintain it.
Definitely a great idea overall though, nice post. Again.
right on man, something like this needs to be implemented.
It’s easier to tell who your friends are on story voting sites than on social profile sites.
I found out who my “real” friends were on Digg when they changed up the interface back in September. They tweaked things so that it requires a lot more time and mouse clicks to vote on stories from your friends list, making it more difficult for the various Digg crews to do automatic reciprocal voting. The people who actually enjoyed my content have kept voting on it, and the friends of convenience have mostly faded way.
I occasionally prune my friends list on social sites to exclude people who have drifted away, people whose values have changed from mine, people whose blogs or tweets get on my nerves, and people who no longer participate.
But yes, I like really your idea and I think that building a more intelligent “passive friendship decay” and more intelligent “People You Have Things in Common With” algorithms could make the social media experience a lot more fluid, organic and …legit.
A further note:
The problem of trusted sources in a pure RDF Semantic Web model was addressed in 2004 by Nobuhisa Shiraishi. See his slideshow on “The RDF Trust Model using RDF bookmark and its Application”/
It’s an interesting concept, renewal by interaction, and hopefully something they will explore further. How that impacts the existing infrastructure, however, I’m not sure.
Either way, enjoyable read.
The practical demonstration through the facts is that, even being able to argue that the mechanisms that are in Facebook aims to develop an embryonic stage, advertising when we receive walk by this social network is pure rotation general completely generic, lacking context, for anything based on personalized information or preferences of any kind, and with potential for conversion close to absolute zero. If you sell through metric CPC (cost per click), you will come across some very low clickthrough ratios, because users are not going to Facebook in search mode, but to socialize and display information about their friends, acquaintances and contacts. What remains, clearly, is what we all know: CPM (cost per thousand impressions), with a price much lower and metric well known long ago. To not insignificant, but unable to justify the unjustifiable: an assessment of Facebook as that discussed lately. Yes, things are worth what someone is not mentally alienated willing to pay for them, but from there to fifteen billion dollars justified by the alleged advertising revenues, goes a step very, very long. I like Facebook, use it, I think it has established new and interesting ways to compete with models based on openness, but neither has become (as it actually happened to me with other services) in an important part of my life online, or I feel much less an alleged valuation based on the amount that a third party with an interest very different from the acquisition, to ensure the exclusivity of a contract advertising, it could pay for a small percentage of the company.
Bye
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