In my first post in this series, I suggested that current social networks are hobbled by their oversimplified underlying social model. So what can we do to improve this?
In my research, I proposed five categories of friends:
- a close friend whom you see regularly
- a friend who was close but whom you now don’t see or contact regularly
- family
- a new friend whom you see regularly but don’t know much about
- somebody you don’t know well or meet regularly (face-to-face), but publishes good news
Although they seemed like sensible categories, the respondents to my survey only succeeded in categorising an average of 41% of their friends. In retrospect, I was probably rather naïve in assuming that people’s Facebook friends were people they’d with whom they’d had some meaningful relationship at some point in time. In any case, when asked how interested they were in seeing news about each of these categories, there was significantly lower interest in those not covered by these categories, suggesting that I’d not missed out anyone important.
So perhaps these categories have some value in helping people find the news that’s most interesting to them, but they have a key flaw. Not only is it tedious to try to categorise all your friends (the average respondent has 212), but friends will inevitably move between categories.
Facebook takes a different approach – when you add a new friend, they ask instead how you met. This comes back to the idea of friends existing within a social context, something which can actually be quite successfully inferred automatically by simply grouping people according to shared friendships and co-appearance in photographs.
I suggest that there’s probably a link between how much news you’d like to see about a given person and the social context into which those people fit. For instance, you might be quite interested in what your university friends are up to whilst you whilst you’re at university together, but when you graduate you might prefer just to hear about them occasionally – the 21st-century equivalent of the “christmas letter” some of my parents’ friends write.
Trouble is, online social networks such as Facebook don’t do anything useful with this information. Social context is ignored and all your “friends” news is presented you in one big heap. In my next post, I’ll suggest some ways in which the user interface might be re-designed to help you find the news that’s important to you.
For more survey results and discussion of how the social models underlying social networks might be improved, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).
