You’re not my friend? by Jonas

Andrew Parker over at the Gong Show picked up on Scoble’s rant on how social networks use the term “friend”. Obviously all of your 1166 MySpace friends is not equally close to you. Have everyone been to your house, had beer with you or even talked to you? Didn’t think so.

Personally I think Twitter’s use of the term follower is a better way to communicate what it represents, being friends with someone in a social network is most often a symbol of your hierarchy in that specific community. A lot of “friends” symbolises that you’re somebody in that community and that you have a certain power of influence.

This abuse of using the term “friends” also makes it difficult to discover their individual hierarchy in your network, nothing differentiates them, your best friend and a distant contact is on the same level. Therefore Scoble’s suggestions of tagging friends is an interesting concept. Again, Twitter is doing a good job, separating friends and followers, communicating that all my contacts is not equally close to me.

As Parker puts it:

“Friend still means “close acquaintance?, but now it also means “edge in a network of people nodes? and this new definition now has nothing to do with the original definition.”

Obviously this shows that designing for social applications for the web is much more than wireframes and design, copywriting and terminology is just as important.

[tags]Friends, twitter, facebook, social network, scoble[/tags]

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June 20, 2007 / 5 Comments.

5 Comments

  1. Ex libris replied:

    The swedish youth community Helgon.net has a very wide spectrum of labels you can put on your contacts, everything from husband/wife to ex-lover or enemy.

    June 20th, 2007 at 10:25 pm. Permalink.

  2. Jonas replied:

    Sounds good, like the playfulness of such a solution.

    June 21st, 2007 at 7:36 am. Permalink.

  3. jonathan replied:

    I love it! Customized labels is a great idea… “my baby’s daddy” would come up every time Jonas sends me a message.

    And remove all the formal labels on LinkedIn. So, “colleague” could be replaced by “double-D Shelly in Accounting”

    June 21st, 2007 at 1:05 pm. Permalink.

  4. Jonas replied:

    Mistakes happen when you’re a true catholic like myself, abortion is not always an option.

    June 21st, 2007 at 9:36 pm. Permalink.

  5. Zifssulfict replied:

    Всегда думал, что такой пост обычный человек написать не сможет. Ведь чтобы запостить такое, надо быть настоящим специалистом, хорошо разбираться в предмете, иметь самое широкое представление о теме. Но вот, оказывается, я ошибался. Главное - уметь красиво писать, а там и пост получится интересным. Спасибо автору и респект ему!

    October 15th, 2009 at 2:09 am. Permalink.

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