Comments on: No clear alternative today to Facebook as a platform for friends

By: PaulSweeney

PaulSweeney — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:41:00 +0000

Good points from leafar above. One point that I might add to that comment is that even where “recommendations are very tight” (ie. amazon) I sometimes miss the serendipity of a more general browsing experience. Also, do we always want to be introduced to people “just like us”? That can become a pretty boring conversation! Back to Facebook: time-event based as is, is just not going to work. We are going to need to be alerted, or fed, through relevance. People are already complaining that they have a “mini feed” two pages long…

By: nic

nic — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:29:11 +0000

Thanks for the comments guys. It is clear that the notion of “friends” is far too simplistic and we need better tools to manage it.

It is actually MSFT who I have seen demonstrate the best understanding of this issue. Shame they can’t build a product we want to use.

By: leafar

leafar — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:10:11 +0000

“I need to think more about this, but my instinct is that I would rather identify a few experts amongst my group of friends with the same taste as me and look at their recommendations than try and draw insight from the flow.”

–> Micro Collaborative Filetring is clearly the next step in terms of algorithm. Shifting from the power of the masses to the power of like minded people.

For the list of pals, I’ll have one if there is a function that enables me to make the split on a very granular level between friends, relation, familly, intimate people, work pals, work relations … etc. Because I don’t want to mix messages.

By: Paul Sweeney

Paul Sweeney — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:07:03 +0000

Nic, as you point it out in the post there are a number of issues tied together here. One that genuinely does interest me is how to “signify” that a friend really is a friend, i.e. someone that I know, admire, and would stand up for. Do I have a “special secret room” for them, do I present them in a different manner when I go to my social network etc. etc. If someone comes up with a way of “digging your friends without offending people” they would be on to something. Some services are looking at tracking your interaction activity via email, IM, sharing etc, in order to figure out who you are contacting and how frequently, in that this is likely to be a fair indication of your closeness. Perhaps people will only feel comfortable doing this within an OpenID environment…. but google has a fair chance at this if it can get us to use their other apps…