Browsing through the profile pages MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn and Facebook (to name a few), you’ll begin to see a trend in how a user’s friends are displayed. I like to refer to it as…. “The Bin of Friends.” This now ubiquitous display, filled with photos of your 356 dearest friends, has been quickly developed and adopted and is now the trademark feature of most online social networks. Each friend, whether it’s the girl I’ve known since childhood, or the guy I haven’t even met face to face yet, is treated the same: a single thumbnail photo and a screen name linked to their profile. I see each characteristic of this social network display as a conscious design decision. Whether or not significant thought went into these decisions is unclear to me; but what is clear is that this display makes a lot of incorrect assumptions – about how we connect to our friends, how we display those connections, and how important each connection is on its own.
Breadth Over Depth
It’s relatively obvious that the “friend bin” seems to value the sheer number of friends you have, over how deep any of those friendships might be. Part of this dynamic comes from the design, which features the friend bin very prominently, as well as titling it with a grand tally. Somehow “Karen has 105 friends” is just more appealing than “Karen has 11 friends”. As a result of that, the network has devolved into a race to see how many friends you can make, and thus the meaning of friendship is diminished. It’s diminished to the point where I can become friends with my brother as easily as I can become friends with an advertisement for a movie. But that’s only one problem.
Relationships Between Friends
I have 58 friends on MySpace. They have never all been in a room together, and I doubt they ever will be. In fact, very few of them have ever even met each other. Putting them all together like this insinuates some kind of bond between them that doesn’t exist. And treating them all in the same way insinuates that I think about all of them in the same way, when nothing could be farther from the truth. MySpace got a little bit closer to letting you “treat” your friends differently, by enabling ranking. But, when you think about it, this is just plain silly and immature. And I think that’s why 13 year olds go for it. How am I supposed to rank my mother against my boyfriend?
Uniqueness of Each Relationship
The “friend bin” completely ignores the fact that each relationship is unique, and oftentimes can only be qualitatively compared. When I say “Each relationship is unique,” I mean this way beyond Flickr’s ability to let you categorize family versus friends, or even seeing how many degrees there are bewteen you and your friends, as in Friendster’s model. What everyone seems to have forgotten about the Kevin Bacon Game is the fun is not in simply saying how many degrees there are, but actually exploring the connections from movie to movie. I should not only be able to come up with unique categories/tags to place my friends under (“People I need to by Xmas Gifts For”), I should also have the ability to explicitly show the world how my connections are different. I should be able to label my boyfriend “Sweetie” and my roommate from freshman year in college, “Roommate from Freshman Year in College”. FaceBook does allow you to specify how you know someone, but again, it’s an unnecessarily convoluted radio button system that doesn’t work for everyone. It could be as easy as some sort of personal message you can attach to each friend:
With something like this, my friends won’t have to go searching through comments to figure out that Matt is my cousin. Not only does this let my public profile tell others more about who my friends are, it also strengthens my ability to connect with and tell a story about the people in my life. One day you could be labeled, “Cool guy from the bar,” the next you could be, “Jerk who won’t call me back.” Now, if you have a “friend” and you can’t come up with a good label….well that’s saying something.
But the amount of metadata and types on information you could learn about your friends, and your friends’ friends, is endless. I want to see which of my friends actually know each other, I want to sort my friends by how long I’ve known each one, which ones I’ve had the most email contact with, where they’re geographically located, or even create interesting image clouds based on how much I have in common with them, and even how much they have in common with each other.
The Private View
Without the ability to identify each relationship as unique, most online social networks can do nothing to strengthen these connections. I should not only be able to share information about my connections publicly, I should also have a private view of my friends that gives me insight into each relationship. This is where I think NetFlix hits the ball out of the park.
When I look at my friends (ok, friend) on NetFlix, it doesn’t just show his picture and a link. It tells me what movies he’s watched, what movies he’s about to watch, what he thinks about all those movies, but most importantly, it tells me what he and I have in common. It evens offers a little quiz about a movie that I liked, but he hated. We can leave notes for each other that are contextual based on each movie. It gives me a percentage rating of how similar our tastes are. I know more about Tim because of NetFlix, but more importantly, I now know more about the relationship I have with him. At least when it comes to movies. StumbleUpon does something a little similar to this, but not quite as well. If you view a stumbler’s profile, you can see sites you’ve both liked. I still have to navigate to that user’s profile to find this information, but it’s a step in the right direction.
By enabling (and sometimes enforcing) the democratic treatment of our friends, online social networks disregard the unique one to one relationships that exist in real life. I think that’s part of the reason online networking has gotten a bad reputation. Adding a friend on myspace is a whimsical click of a button. Building a meaningful friendship is not. I’m not saying we need to make adding friends harder - but we all have relationships that mean more to us than some others. Online social networks should let us work on and develop those relationships in a way that mirrors their real-life meaninfulness and give us ways to strengthen them at the same time.