Subscribe,follow,befriend,connect ... Quest for a different type of relationship | Hacker News Reader

Subscribe,follow,befriend,connect ... Quest for a different type of relationship

3 pointsgrease2 comments

Every once a week, I meet a person who is reasonably interesting. Almost everyday, I find a interesting person/site online (many of them through hackernews). I don't know these people. They'll not be my (facebook) friends. They are not my professional (linkedin) connections. I don't really care about following their day-to-day (twitter) lives. Yet, in some way, I'd like to make a note of the guy. I'd like to do this manner that is non intrusive to both - the person (so no fb, linkedin invites) and me (so no subscribing to their blog, twitter). Just some way to "bookmark" the guy, and maybe refer back if required in future.

First question - are there others who feel this need?

Now, imagine there was a way to do this. What would be a good descriptor for this act of "bookmarking"? To elaborate, twitter describes their primary action as "follow". Its simple, clear and precise. Everyone gets it. Its better than "subscribe". Likewise, is there a better way to say "bookmark/note this guy"?

I have thought about a problem that is somewhat related: You want to communicate with an entity that you do not personally know or have on your contacts list, but you share some semantic aspect with this person - e.g. same commute to work, or same day care center for your kids and theirs. The solutions I'd thought of for this problem was to employ an entity that exists at a higher hierarchical level - say the mobile phone company, that can 'see' the common aspect and can allow you to contact this person on a need-to-contact basis. I call this 'semantic social links' for lack of a better term. The idea is slippery though because it must be balanced with privacy properly.

The problem you have described is different because an actual meeting has occurred between the two parties, and yet perhaps it has a simple (orthodox?) solution -- giving/taking business cards. You are asking for some way of digitally bookmarking this business card.

-Suhas

I come across the same situation often. In networks that support it, I just do the equivalent of "follow" (or "add friend" or "subscribe" or whatever it is called).

In networks that don't, I simply create a bookmark in 'Interesting People' folder using the comments/submission urls for that person - eg. http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=grease or http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=grease

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