The Next Facebook — Musings About Text Boxes
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I grew up with the internet and played video games (semi-)professionally. This means that I met a metric ton of people from the internet in real life so, in many ways, became used to the idea. But check this out; not long ago, I saw a girl in class and she subsequently showed up on my "you may know..." list in FB. I added her (I add just about whomever) and it took her a while to accept. I didn't really care, and we actually ended up being really good real life friends, too!
Only later did I find out that she asked a couple of people who I was and she thought that it was (and I quote) "kind of creepy" that I added her. I'm a pretty good looking guy with a good job that goes to a great school. So why the fuck is adding someone on FB (that I happen to see in class!) creepy?
Is it any more creepy than me just walking up to someone and saying "hey, girl, put down that cellphone and have a conversation with me." Obviously not. There is something, however, that keeps us from engaging online in non-anonymous contexts due to this perceived (and I would argue Western/American) creepyness factor.
Like I said above, I'm sure someone much smarter than I will eventually figure out how to solve this very difficult problem. The solution will probably entail geolocation, semi-anonymity, and perhaps ephemeral (that is, non-persistent) IRC-like chatrooms.
People post personal info (pictures, status updates, etc.) on Facebook, and I think the expectation when you accept a friend request is that the requester will at least make a cursory glance through your profile. If you, out of the blue, request someone you've never spoken too, I'd say a reduction in the creepiness factor could be sending along a message with the request saying "Hey, I've seen you around in class, I'm dvt".
If there doesn't seem to a be any rhyme or reason to the out of the blue friend request, someone could just make the assumption you just want to look through their profile at their pictures and stuff.
So here is where FB's Achilles Heel may lie. On one hand, it's great that it stores pictures and stuff. But on the other .. do you really want your pictures and personal information out there? (Besides, even if your profile is private, pictures can still be linked/shared, if you get the raw .jpg url.) Maybe we (as tech nerds) are just more aware of these caveats whereas most people trust FB like they would trust a family photo album under the couch.
(Missed schmozz's comment below, I link we are trying to say somethig similar. Google Plus's major failing is discoverability.)
Google tried to address this with circles, which Facebook responded to and implemented a similar solution, but I think most people just don't like to classify their 'Friends' when first accepting a connection and are very unlikely to reclassify them later.
It may have something to do with the fact that most personal violations (criminal or not) are by people known to the victim. The media likes to play up stranger-danger, but I think people realize that's pretty much BS and know where the real danger lies. Couple this with the predilection of many on social networks to amass friendlists and make connections with anybody even remotely familiar or proximal (classmates, sports club, etc.), it's explainable as simple self-preservation.
Although it seems a bit paranoid to think that whenever someone talks to you in real life (or adds you FB for that matter), your thoughts instantly go to "will this person try to stalk/murder me?" But maybe it's not a bad thing to be vigilant.
One more thing, beauty is on the eye of the beholder and true beauty is within. It sounds cliche but as I've gotten older I've continued to be surprised that this is true. In reality is a combination of both that adds up to make a person truly beautiful.
I don't think this is a battle of the sexes kind of deal even though you're completely correct and I don't deny anything you said.
I cannot help but notice that it seems like there may be a trend in faster binning of folks into creepy/not creepy among my generation; I believe this also may be because social skills are not that great in this magical interconnected age. People are so used to being able to pull up relevant data about others, I theorize, that being faced with a new person without that data or connection makes the newcomer more alien.
And creepy is a strong word. It's just that it's tiring, having to fend off guys that may not be creepy but they're just not interested in. We really don't have any reference for what that's like (unless you're a celebrity, I suppose). But I've heard enough about it to have developed a strong bias against unsolicited/unwanted behavior.
Consider that, once upon a time, to successfully creep on somebody you actually had to show up in person, or send mail, or something like this. That took time, and resources.
Now, I have to spend ~30 seconds slinging out a fast message to attempt and reconnect, and if I hear no response, I may do the same thing in a few hours--note that my time spent is less than two minutes/day, which subjectively seems perfectly reasonable. To the receiving party, if communication isn't desired, this seems like a huge deal.
Moreover, limiting only to a certain class of stereotypical male (the hacker), it's very easy to get in a situation where you mistake lack of communication for a channel problem instead of an interested problem, and so you resend over and over--especially if you think that hey, maybe the message got lost or something.
Compound this now with the way people leak information online all the time, and the way that these companies (in order to foster connectedness/advertising) practically rub information and personal data in our faces. A message out of the blue (because it's so easy to send) about a person's shared interest in a common album (because my social network provider told me about it) is immediately tagged as creepy, even though the data and message were trivially put into motion.
(I say this having made and sometimes still making these mistakes.)
I think that a new sort of manners need to evolve that actually recognize just how easy it is to communicate nowadays. People need thicker skin, and they probably need much more explicit flow control ("Not interested, fuck off." instead of silence). On the other side, people need to appreciate when they might be making others uncomfortable by spamming too much or doing too much cyber-sleuthing (which is, again, something that once took real dedication; "I remember when being a stalker used to mean something" lol).
Well, both are true of course -- there are actually large numbers of guys whom I think it's fair to term "creepy," and there are many guys who are not really creepy, but because of the former group, they don't get the benefit of the doubt.
I try not to be creepy, but inevitability there are circumstance where something I do, even if well-meant, ends up looking kinda creepy, and I'm only too aware of it. Oh well, at least I try... TT
Twitter's a bit better. I've seen that you can slowly form connections there, but only through the internet-equivalent of small talk in the magazine aisle of a supermarket you both shop at.
Back in the days of MySpace it certainly didn't seem quite as closed off - friend requests and messages from strangers because they were cute weren't always creepy (nb. may be a more a symptom of being 14 rather than an intrinsic property of the interaction...). Also, sites like Grindr seemed to have solved one aspect of the meeting strangers problem - albeit only in the gay sex niche.
Facebook has zero context. Why is that guy trying to be my friend? I don't know. How do I approach him? What are we supposed to talk about? It's all incredibly awkward. If Facebook did the equivalent of putting a chessboard between us, everything would flow much easier.
Spot on!
Facebook's addition of games to the platform was obviously a way to address this issue, but a failed one, because the 3rd parties have to earn money themselves, and can't just benefit from the additional data that users may generate/reaveal when playing, that can be used for improving the advertisement platform.
I.e. if Facebook as you said, made a chess game or perhaps a social game, then it could involve friends of friends, and thus make a user expand his or hers friendship circle. Meanwhile, this new data about what connected them, etc, etc, could be very valueable to the ad platform because it would show what made the user give in to the uknown. My 0.2 $ (1.16 kr. DKK)
But Facebook might be hurting themselves in this regard by forcing real names, one account, etc. And the expectation that anything you do will spam all your friends newsfeeds. I mean, if my friends, coworkers and family all wanted to talk about hockey I wouldn't need to chat with strangers.
Not that I think that your friend request was creepy, but why would a judgment as to the creepiness of your actions depend on any of these things?
Or are you just accepting the reality that people are labeled 'creepy' based on their desirability and not the inherent creepiness of their actions.
(So, basically, my profile pic isn't this: http://www.kindofcreepy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/creep...)
An interest forum (sports site, gaming network, subreddit, etc) is not unlike a party in some ways in that it is not unreasonable for someone to overhear a topic being discussed and pick the right time to say "You guys talking about [x]? What did you think about [aspect of x]?"
Is Facebook a little more like separate dining tables at a restaurant? If you overheard a neighbouring table discussing a topic of interest, only in very particular circumstances would you jump in and participate.
Checkout chatimity.com (my startup). This part of your comment is spot on for us :) It is a geolocation based, pseudonymous IRC-style place with some behavioral tracking and modulation to keep the place clean and civilized.
Right now we automatically match users similar to Facebook Graph, but we do it specifically on things people care about - people nearby who share your interests, hometown, classes, industry, etc. Our app is also university-only at the moment to filter out the creeps. We've also recently experimented with a location-based group chat feature in order to promote local interaction.
I wouldn't categorize this issue in the same domain as Facebook though. Facebook is about two things -- sharing and friends. There's a mental divide between the friends and strangers, so users would never use it to meet new people. There's already platform to share things between strangers (reddit), but a platform to "interact" with strangers (which is what facebook used to do, but with friends) still has yet to emerge.
Fantastic idea, and good luck to you sir!
Basically, I told him I expected something like 4square to come along that tells you not specifically who (strangers) is at certain locations, but give a profile of the overall group that has checked into the location. The easiest example could be just showing what bars in an area are currently filled with liberals, and which ones currently filled with republicans. Maybe even a sliding color scale that shows just how political they are or how heavily the population of the bar swing ones way. However, I would imagine it to include a much wider list of attributes to include things like what type of movies and music I like etc. and point out what locations are filled with like minded individuals right now. Or even based on moods. Or even things like what I want out of the night (show what percentage of the population at a certain bar is looking to make new friends so you don't end up at a bar full of people who want to be left alone). There was more to it than this, but I haven't thought about it for awhile.
A second thing this reminded me of was the idea of an icebreaker app. You go to a bar, coffee shop etc., check in, and then the app asks you an icebreaker style question. You then type in your answer. After you give your answer, you get a list of every answer by everyone else at the bar (but not their identity). You then get to pick one of those answers as your favorite, and the author's identity (or maybe just picture, leaving you to still ask for the name) is revealed. Basically it reverses the introduction process. Rather than thinking of something clever to say and going around picking people to say it to, someone picks the clever comment and gets to approach that person.
Finally, what this article made me think of that hasn't occurred to me in the past is the value of these networks to connect me to people in IRC chats / forums etc. The basic thought is to create chats accessible only to people 2, 3 degrees of separation away from you etc. (or with x amount of common interests, or whatever FB thinks would be a good match). You then have an option to start a chat, and then anonymously chat with strangers that are reasonably close to your real life contacts. This means if you hit it off with a random person on the internet just based off random interests you share then you have an actual ability to reach out and get an introduction in a safe way.
If that's the case, why is FB inherently unsuitable for the kind of interaction he's talking about here?
There is a sort of social pressure regarding the number of friends on facebook vs the number of actual friends you have. Adding strangers on facebook is sort of taboo in that it looks like you're just adding random people to boost your stats. I think another reason why the stigma is there comes from the day when the social-casual games were popular (read: zynga). People would add all sorts of strangers to beef up their stats in Farmville or whatever the game du jour was, and it was generally frowned upon
I had the feature suspended before, and it even prevented me from sending messages to chat groups where at least one party was not my friend. (I believe one criterion for getting the feature suspended was the number of people who said that they haven't met you before in real life.)
[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=4008463...
SnapChat is exciting now, but will it still be interesting in a year? Or will there be a new novel interaction that everyone flocks to? Somehow Instagram and Pinterest have stayed relevant, but I think the article glosses over how hard it is to create something novel...and then not be discarded after the novelty wears off.
For every subreddit, once that community has reached about 150k users it starts to succumb to the "Reddit" effect - effectively becoming dowsed in memes, puns, gif reactions, etc.
I think it has to do with the fact that people are pandering for self affirmation through upvotes, which can lead to a decreased signal:noise ratio. Reddit recently made vote scores hidden for the first 24 hours, probably in an effort to stop some of this pandering.
(And I think hiding the scores is a per-subreddit moderator option. They are adding more and more of those to let moderators customize their communities.)
The key here is culture, and for now the best way to find people with a culture similar to yours is through friends of friends, which is exactly why house parties are so cool. If a service gets smart enough to find people completely removed from my social circles who do feel like they (should) belong to my social circles, that would be a wonderful use of collective intelligence, machine learning and whatnot. That we could finally have something like this amidst this wave up of big data seems plausible.
When you go to a house party, all you bring is yourself, and your social skills. You don't show people your baby pictures, grandma's birthday presents, or your relationship status. Other than name and face, you can be fairly anonymous. There is also the aspect of a host introducing you to others, or forcing some kind of mingling of different circles of friends.
That all seems like it would translate well into a social platform. Mutual friends, forcing some kinds of interactions between their acquaintances, where there is at least some anonymity, but not total anonymity.
> Other than name and face
Well some of my most amusing and memorable house parties were ones where I barely knew anyone (besides a friend who brought me over) and pretended that I was given a girl's name (being a guy.) Never gets old.
That said, you still need to build a LOT of stuff for every social app, so it would be nice if there were open source frameworks like Wordpress for blogs.
I make a lot of these points here: http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...
This is one of the insights that we have used at Chatimity (www.chatimity.com) - for building a place for making new friends online. It is like old style chat rooms but much more civilized due to a good amount of behind the scenes measures being put in place. We have had fair bit of adoption and continue to flesh this out more.
A guess regarding what the next social phenomena will be all about:
value proposition: interacting with cool people that you don’t knowYahoo Groups hosted email lists have allowed me to interact with cool people whom I've never met in person for years. I value them highly for that. But that has never allowed Yahoo to monetize Yahoo Groups very well.
Hands down, I've never seen a better longform & community site design.
Is my plumber a member of my social graph. Am I in the social graph of my clients. I doubt.
We’re just waiting for someone to step up and host the house party."
The above was the rationale for building this: [link redacted]
Eh, way to generalize from 18% smartphone market share.