NEWS: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Friends?

GEEK: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Friends?

Recently I was talking with a new-to-social-networks friend of mine about what the hell we're doing with all these online communities. I pointed out that while a benefit of these systems is collecting your friends in one place, it's still fairly difficult to differentiate between loose and strong ties. That is, what's the difference between someone you've known for 10 years vs. someone you just met at a party? In your head you know that the long time friend is a different kind of a connection, but the SNS haven't been able to figure that out yet. There are probably things you'd tell one friend that you aren't sure yet about telling the person you just met, but when your only option is friend or not friend, how do you control what info goes to what people?

Facebook has an option of friending someone while only allowing them to see your "limited profile" which is a step in the right direction, but honestly adding in one more level hardly solves the issue of classifying what is probably hundreds of different kinds of friends. In efforts to continue filing people into handy little categories there is now a "Top Friends" application that, similar to the "Top 8" on [ULR=http://myspace]MySpace, allows you to highlight people who are really your friends, or at least you really want people to think they are your friends. Not surprisingly these two steps actually cause more problems than they solve. In fact these actually take what are supposed to be comfortable social interactions and make them awkward and drama filled.

In the case of a limited profile, people know you've chosen this option the moment they click to your profile and only see half the info they can see on their other friends pages. In the case of a set of "Top" friends, more often than not there are people who think they should be in that list and will take it personally when they aren't included. Or worse, people you don't even know will ask you to put them in there and then you are forced to either do it, which negates the value of the list all together, or tell them "no" which puts you in an uncomfortable situation. Software and services designed to help facilitate social behavior should never create uncomfortable situations, but unfortunately it's all too common.



And this doesn't only apply to friends. Here on SuicideGirls we have the option of picking favorite girls. I'm fairly certain this feature was put in so members could highlight the sets and photos of the girls they really liked, but quickly it became a status issue with "favorite" spots on certain members pages becoming coveted achievements. Recently I actually deleted all of my favorites because I was sick of getting messages from girls asking to be added to my list. Not responding, or saying no totally sucked, but I didn't want to just add them to a list that was supposed to be something I hand picked so rather than keep stressing about I just killed that list all together.



While my take-my-ball-and-go-home solution works for some people, others are resorting to a different form of not playing. Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing responded to a question asked on twitter about these friends lists creating awkward situations by saying, "I recently changed all my 'top friends' on MySpace to non-human entities (blogs, tv shows, dead cultural icons) for that VERY reason." If there's no way to tell your real friends from your casual acquaintances, and very special lists of very special friends have to be deleted to stacked with things other than actual friends so as not to hurt any feelings -- doesn't that kind of defeat the point? Have you ever felt obligated to put someone in a list you really didn't think they belonged in? How did you deal with it?

Its pretty annoying when people act like that. Makes we want to take a big shit on their head.

Hold on, people actually put that much thought into this stuff?

The answer is an obvious 'yes,' cause hey, the 'society' we live in today is just 'ridiculous.'

How about we just don't get worked up over some HTML?

People generally suck.

Never found it an issue. I consider Facebook an address book, more or less. It doesn't matter who on there is "more" my friend. They're there so I can contact them if I want to. My friends know they're my friends through my interactions with them.

amen to that

That's only one of many social networking quirks I've been thinking about lately, and was even going to post about.

Another is how shallow the text messaging features are on these sites. Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, none allow you to send different messages to different groups of friends. Pownce is close, but doesn't have SMS support. It would be nice if I could do something as trivial as send a text message to everyone in the SGPDX group that I'm going to the movies tonight, and who would like to join me.

Yet another is how dated (literally) journal entries are on these sites. In natural conversation you don't discuss anecdotes in chronological order, why should you do so in real life? Why can't I blog about something that happened 5 or 10 years ago, or sort my entries by where it happened or the mood I was in? Why are tag clouds limited to quantity of key words? Why not sort entries by their level of influence to my life; bigger words for ones that deeply affected me and smaller ones that were no big deal?

I find even the most innovative social networking sites (like Facebook) barely scratch the surface in what can be done to catalog your life, and the rest are just playing catch up and adopting "me too!" features.

Yes. This may come as a shock to you, but it's some people's job to put this much thought into this stuff. And this may come as a bigger shock, they make billions of dollars doing it. So, it's kind of relevant, wether you think so or not.

Getting "worked up" over this stuff is how innovation happens. You can feel free to allow companies to keep delivering the status quo, I prefer progress.

Why shouldn't people put thought into these things? There are constantly media reports on identity theft and people being sacked for comments they've made on-line - in these cases people clearly haven't put enough thought into what status their friends have/what info they're giving out. A bit like on SG - you can make your journal friends only, but there's no distinction between, for example, someone who you exchange occasional messages with and someone you regularly meet up with in real life.

With friends like you, who needs friends?

Agreed.

If they're such good friends, why is it so hard to remember for yourself how much you like them? Why would you need a computer telling you that they're your 'top friends'?
Surely if they're 'top friends' then you have pretty regular and meaningful offline contact with these people and can figure it out for yourself.

heh seriously, its the internet. get over it....*

*not aimed at anyone just my thoughts

Social networks have run out of compelling features so they keep hashing over clever variations of the old ones...I hate the unoriginal, uninspired, bloated puss-bags of corporate money making schemes that populate the majority of social networks available these days.

I've had worse problems then constant harassment from beautiful women.

The way i tell my really good friends from the not-so-good ones because I don't need a website to talk to them.

With Friends Like These, Who Needs COINTELPRO?

Amen to that.

Should I now feel bad cause nobody's asked me to add them to my top friend's list?

I also find this amazing. If an SG sent me a message like that I would never stop laughing.

I haven't the time to think about human social-networking site problems. I'm busy building the social-networking site of the future, catering strictly to robots.


"Hey guys, check out my new blog, LOL!"

I made all my top 8 bands at one point but then they made the top 12 or 24 or whatever and I had exactly enough hoo-mahn friend/acquaintances that it worked out.

I had a couple friends stop talking to each other over a myspace demotion...honestly how crap is that.

and I've also had people notify me of their relationship status over facebook...how hard is it to just say, "Whoa there Tiger, I'm seeing someone, but thanks for the interest...can I introduce you to my ka-wai japanese international student roommate?"

What's wrong with just telling people the shit you want them to know?