Facebook will sink under the weight of socially obligated "friendships" (2007)
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
I have been using such a feature for months now. It is called Facebook private groups,
https://www.facebook.com/groups
and I have told fellow HNers about this feature before.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319788
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398397
To expand on what I wrote last time, one good use case on Facebook is a group of friends with a defined commonality forming a "private group." The Help Center page about groups features
https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=414
is perhaps even more helpful than the main Facebook page introducing the concept of private groups. I have a THRIVING private group including a whole bunch of friends who are currently or were formerly subscribers to the national email list of a membership organization we have all been part of. The official email lists of the organization have gone increasingly quiet, as everyone moves over to Facebook, where the atmosphere is at once more fun (more light-hearted topics) and more serious (gut-wrenching intimate topics that are easier to share to a specific group of friends than to all subscribers to an email list).
I have had good success restricting status messages, links, and the like to subsets of my friends (friend lists) and even better success having many interesting conversations on the most active of the Facebook private groups that I am on. To me, the currently most frustrating aspect of the Facebook user interface is the hard limit of twenty recipients on a private message. Raising that to about thirty would fit my use cases a lot better some of the time. But so far Facebook's adaptations have worked well for me to keep up with a very diverse group of friends, relatives, co-workers, and former classmates met in two different countries on two continents.
Facebook has turned into the place I avoid my crazy family and embarrassing childhood friends, while Twitter still is decent for finding and building new friendships.
http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=...
Isn't this the driving force behind everyone trying to innovate in the social space? Providing segmented social groups that down have the implied obligations of "friendship."
Isn't this the impetus for why we spend all of our time on HN and Reddit?
After edit, having seen first reply:
Yes, I am quite intentional about building a network of smart friends who have worthwhile things to say (not screened in any way by native language, country of origin, religious opinions, political opinions, or occupation). One of the delights of middle age is accumulating a group of interesting friends. (And that brings me here to HN.) As I noted another time Facebook's level of interest came up here on HN, once when I asked "Does Facebook bore you?" (in response to a front-page post here on HN), one friend replied, "I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said, 'When a man is tired of Facebook, he is tired of life.'" That kind of literary allusion in a humorous comment is routine among my friends, and one of the reasons I like spending a lot of time on Facebook.
And after further edit, I'd be delighted to hear from other readers here why they think Facebook could or could not do the same for them. Meanwhile, I will ask my Facebook friends, having posted the original link that was referred to in this submission here on HN,
http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=...
what they think of the predicted problem. (And the first reply was, "I guess I'm just not avoiding that many people... it hasn't been a problem.")
Mine, and I think a lot of other people's is all drivel, and that's after taking the time to block people who I don't care to see.
I started using Facebook in College, when it was just for college students, and the use case was COMPLETELY different than I would want to use it now.
Now, I'm constantly searching to find an online equivalent of the high-level conversation which I get in the real world (similar to your humour literary allusions).
I'm much more protective of my real-world social connections.
HN is one of the means through which I escape the constraints of my real life social circles.
It's not pulling, because you are creating content. But its not shoving either, cuz the only people who would take the time to read it are people who are at least moderately interested.
Facebook for me now has just become a social rolodex, a collection of people I've met over the years.
Could I post about something funny that happens at a bar on a friday night out on town? Sure! Do I think twice? Yeah, how would colleagues view it / business acquaintances (as I tend to view everyone as a "friend" no matter how long I've known them for)
Something exclusive for just my grad class or those in my immediate or near immediate (weekend friends / friends to go on trips with) would be nice in a simplified, less feature filled site service.
Bottom line is I dont want status updates from many people. And if I do, I want it to be so important that they'll call and tell me.
Just hide the ones you don't want. I've got several hundred FB friends but only see updates from a couple of dozen at most.
I know a lot of people. I generally don't turn down friend requests from people I know, but then I don't necessarily have their updates in my FB stream. And I've set up a couple of family- and work-related lists, and will sometimes post only to one or another list.
The author just overestimated the impact of the issue but the issues still exists and is very real.
This basically creates a sub-Facebook in which my close friends and I operate. I still see stuff come in from other people in my main friends list, but they don't see anything I do (unless I explicitly post on someone else's public item).
It's working out very nicely.
In real life, when you hang out with a group of people, everyone else is aware of who you are hanging out with at that moment. Facebook shows this information only to the poster. I am uncomfortable posting a comment on a friend's update that would be embarrassing depending on who else could see it. In a group of friends hanging out this would never be an issue.
I suppose there is some asymmetry in real-life social networks, but nothing on the level which Facebook encourages.
Just like real life.
It wouldn't be easy and you're not going to make everyone happy. 90%.
When posting party photos, only show them to people that either
- also attended the party - attended previous parties with me - interacts/chats with me often and is not in my professional (or family) network ...
It would need to be a lot more subtle than that, but it should be possible with all the data they're collecting.