The Future of Social Networks | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Social Networks

mmoorejones.com

13 pointsbookmadgirl13 comments

There's a great presentation about the issues of current online social networks (namely facebook): http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

One key point he makes is that your social groups are usually disjoint sets of people and you may not want to share the same information across multiple groups. For example, you don't want your family to see pictures of you at a wild party that your college friend tagged you in.

After criticizing Facebook for overlapping social circles, Paul Adams joined Facebook last year. He was a Google employee before. And Facebook launched "Facebook Groups" to tackle this very problem.

"Facebook says that all my friends and contacts are of equal importance to me. They know this isn’t true, but there is no way for me to distinguish between friends I am truly close with or contacts that I met at a conference and felt obliged to accept on Facebook."

Facebook tackles this problem with EdgeRank algorithm that controls the updates that appear in Newsfeeds. EdgeRank takes into consideration the people you interact with the most on Facebook. And I guess, a person interacts a lot with close friends only.

Thats not at all useful though.

Because there are things that you want to share only with some people (your girlfriend) or close family.

Interestingly enough there are things I wouldn't care if the entire world except my family knew so the circles aren't enclosed within one and other.

Ya, Facebook has answer for this- "Facebook GROUPS". It lets you separate people based on the connection you have with them. For ex, you could have groups like Family, Friends, Collegeus etc. So that an update is restricted within than circle.

Well I haven't had success in getting my old girlfriends to join my "psycho exes" group, so I'm not sure how effective Facebook's system currently is ;)

He's referring to Friend Lists (https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=768). If you use Twitter, it's like Twitter's lists.

Facebook's privacy settings are now pretty good. You can make things visible or invisible to everyone, networks, friends of friends, friends, friend lists or individuals and any combination of these things, e.g. a status update visible only to family except my mother.

Will it allow me to split my friends into separate lists, and then have separate news feeds for each of those lists? I can see that I am able to post a status update and specify a list when I do it, but it ends up getting mixed into my normal news feed and doesn't have any indication of who can see it. This just feels dangerous to me.

I'll start using Facebook lists when they implement it properly. I want my lists of friends to be 100% completely separate. Separate walls, separate news feeds, and I want it to be very obvious which group I am currently working with at any time. If they can't give me that, I'm not interested.

That's exactly my take on these features.

Some of this functionality may be there, but the UI and UX is so horrible that there is little way to predict the output of the system.

In fact, Facebook allows to differentiate between friends and connections using friends lists. It's even possible to restrict certain content to some of these lists.

What Facebook does not do - and I believe for a good reason - is to make these lists public. It's awkward enough when friends drift apart (which is something that I guess has happened to everyone), but nobody would want to be the first to reset a friend to a connection. So the system just would not work.

I think everyone is aware of these issues and can clearly express the problem based on the real life social network presentation, but its about execution. How do you create this system that works for users ? Even if you built it, would users even care or care enough to leave facebook ? Describing the problem is the easy part.

Maybe not model all your entities as "friends"?

I just avoid Facebook all-together. am content with IRC and HN-style sites. when i really need to chat, I use Gmail's Chat or use Skype.

For me, anonymity and control are the reasons

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