I guess I’m not the only one in The Valley to have received a flurry of FaceBook invitations in the last week or so. Both Dave Winer and Michael Arrington have made recent posts about the “connecting” process, more specifically, this awful step: (and click to see how much worse it can get)
There are so many things wrong with this process, many of which are commented on in the TechCrunch blog. The most obvious one to me is not the fact that most relationships cannot be described in complicated check-box/drop-down form, but that most meaningful relationships should not be reduced to this level of cold over-simplification. The irony here is that, in attempting to help people categorize their relationships, FaceBook has stumped many of its newest users.
These screens actually reminded me of another, more global effort to get us to describe our connections in some universal way, The XHTML Friends Network:
Yes, more of the same. As creators of these systems, I can sort of understand why we’d want a quantitative method of categorizing these relationships. It would allow us to create neat visualizations that describe all the relationships on the web, as well as reflect back to the user these details about their network. But it’s a little ridiculous to think we could capture the complexity of each of these relationships with radio buttons, and it’s a painful step for the user to have to take. Why is it so painful? Because it doesn’t reflect how we really think about our relationships. If I am asked how I met my friend Joel, I am more prone to telling a short story, than to say we were co-resident friends who once dated. I think people do actually want to share stories about how they met, and social networks should take advantage of this, but in a more qualitatitve way. It could be a great way for users to reconnect by co-reminiscing about how they connected initially.
For example, what if both Joel and I could each submit stories of how we met, and other users could view these two accounts side by side:
This could even be a collaborative excercise between the two individuals - perhaps Joel and I could co-edit the account of how we met. Either way, a more free-form expression of our relationship seems more appropriate than a lengthy form.
June 5th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
I certainly agree with your assessment on the painful “how we met” process and LOVE your idea of “stories”. but there’s also a lighter-weight structured solution of free-entry tags, which i think is still valuable.
love the stories on many different levels… will comment more soon.
June 6th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Agreed. In addition to being able to share stories like this, it would still be nice to collect quick pieces of more quantitative information, such as how long you’ve known the person, and even what city you met in, etc. All of these pieces can come together nicely to describe your relationship with someone.
July 4th, 2007 at 8:15 am
*Love* your paired stories idea. Fantastic thinking, and a lovely mock-up! Optional extra quantitative info is nice, too.
Thanks.
February 18th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
This comment drifts sideways from your article…. but is one of encouragement.
Your thinking is spot on, after all, we are visual foremost - and such bouncy snippets and arrangement of words between couples paints a very rich & colourful picture, impressionistic and semantic verse - third party, detached listings mapped by luddite’s. Everything in your simple statements, along with there clever arrangement, and relevance, points to being intuitively right, this ‘feels reasonable’, it is sophisticated and you should explore the application further.
Thinking it through: Story telling has stood the test of time, memorable bites are easy to carry once a picture is conjured up, possibly the most hardy analogue format we have had. In New Zealand written word only surfaced in the last 200 years, it was a world of oral culture - myth, song, legend were passed on in the artefact’s of carvings,song and storytelling - the relationships were one of the bonds formed with the land, the extended family, and of past ancestors, - all full of meaning, it is well known the Maori people could recant back many generations, with all their links and relationships intact with uncanny precision - maybe we should all be looking back, at oral cultures, in order to step forward into the new cloud that is forming?
The Moari name for New Zealand is Aeoteroa ” Land of the long white cloud”. Living here the word ‘Aeoteroa’ immediately brings a warm rush of beauty to mind, wouldn’t it be great if the web “cloud” were to transpose itself and leave us all with a similar feeling …. and not one of plucking & sorting, crude lists, or trudging through frustrating meaningless stuff! We have a long way to go,… but you are on the right path….