Social Media

I can’t believe I’m just now discovering the Netflix Community Blog, but I’m glad I did. It’s fascinating. This blog is particularly interesting, where the Netflix team is actually asking the community to help them name a button:

Let’s say there is a big button by their avatar image, and if you clicked it, you’d be able to keep an eye on them (but not in a creepy way). What’s the button say on it?

Are you Subscribing to this person? If you saw that would you understand what that meant? What about Bookmarking them? That’s often understood to mean ‘holding’ onto this page, although that misses the passive nature of this. You could be Adding them to your Favorites list. Like being a Friend, there could be another class — a Favorite. Is Adding a Favorite better than Subscribing? And then there is a simple Save this Reviewer.

Can any of you propose a label for this button that is immediately understandable, clearly describes what this activity is, and doesn’t require a paragraph explanation.

I have several gut reactions to this…part of me wants to think it’s cool, but most of me thinks, why can’t they figure this out themselves? Can’t they afford user research? It also makes the process seem so…trial and error. My guess is that most of their users don’t read this blog, and the ones that do are probably also designers and engineers - in which case it’s part free research and part free labor. And for some reason it seems inappropriate. Asking the community for feedback is one thing…asking them to help you name a button? Weird.

Well, at least we can all take advantage of the free ideas.

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Reading through the many recent articles about users’ undesired friend requests from moms and dads on Facebook and MySpace [Great post here], I’m reminded of my two favorite Seinfeld characters, “Independent George” and “Relationship George”. If you were a fan of the show, you’ll remember that Independent George is the true George, while Relationship George is the personality he has to adopt within the context of his romantic relationship with Susan.

From Wikipedia:
Independent George is nearly killed in the episode, “The Pool Guy”. When Elaine begins hanging out with Susan, George panics because he feels his “worlds are colliding” George says that “if Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George! A George divided against itself cannot stand!”

This problem of Independent George and Relationship George seems very related to how people deal with their profiles being discovered by unintended audiences. George himself is ok with having two distinct masks to wear in his social life, but he knows that wearing both at the same time is impossible. These days, with the ability to make a profile and express a distinct identity on almost any site, we’ve all become schizophrenic freaks jumping from one psyche to the next in the span of an hour. Maybe that’s just me. Still, if you put each of your profiles side by side and compared them, you might be amused with your multi-faceted personality. But if, all of a sudden, your Mom wandered onto MySpace and came threateningly close to viewing your profile, you might also fear for the death of Independent… Whoever You Are.

It’s the same with my co-workers here at Yahoo who have been using Facebook for several years, but now suddenly have to deal with friend requests from their bosses. With co-workers lurking around, the atmosphere has shifted. What was once a fun hangout is now a place where they just can’t be themselves anymore. Or, at least that “self” they were to their college peers. Even worse, they now have to watch what they’re friends are writing on their Walls - so not only does it change their behavior, it also alters the interaction they have with their friends. If we think about how it works in the real world, it isn’t much different. The fact is, you probably are different at home with your parents than you are when you’re out with your co-workers, than you are with your college buddies. A niche social network like LinkedIn doesn’t really have to deal with this issue, because there’s a built-in mask of professionalism and really no room to express yourself any other way. But a network like Facebook or MySpace, that promises to truly mirror your social life, certainly does.

Facebook seems to be aware of this issue, having built in one of the more sophisticated “profile privacy” tools I’ve seen. When you receive a request from a friend, you can choose to let him/her only have access to your “limited” profile, which is a user-defined subset of items displayed on your regular profile. Although this is more sophisticated than the public or private profile that MySpace offers, it still makes the assumption that there’s only the regular you and the buttoned-up you. In fact, your real life network is made up of many unique relationships, some more similar than others, and some even more different. It isn’t as simple as just wanting to hide pictures of you being wasted at a party, it also has to do with how you relate to and choose to express yourself with each of your contacts. It’s these subtle nuances of real life interactions that no social network has really been able to address.

I’ve been playing around with some ideas concerning these issues, specifically as they relate to a network like Facebook. The essential problem lies is giving users enough flexibility without overloading them with functionality to the point that they want to kill themselves. The Facebook method could essentially be described like this, where users configure an alternate view of their profile for a specified audience:

But as I said before, this still only allows for two versions of your profile. So, instead of doing a profile-based privacy system, I could envision a module-based privacy system, which would allow me to specify which networks or contacts had access to each module:

This allows much greater flexibility over how your profile is displayed and could be pretty seamlessly implemented as an inline tool within the edit settings for each module (instead of having to navigate to a whole other section called “Privacy”). Taking this a step further (and perhaps too far) another system might allow users to create different versions of each module for different audiences:

So here I could have a “Star Trek Wall” for my Star Trek Fan Club* buddies, and a “Yahoo Wall” for my coworkers, and a “Family Wall” for my Mom and Dad.

Man, life is complicated! But if we do expect to create the holy grail of the Web 2.0 world, one social network to rule them all, we have to figure out how to deal with the complicated…or else we’ll have to keep jumping from one site to the next like schizophrenic freaks.

*I am not actually a member of the Star Trek Fan Club

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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.

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A few days ago I read an interesting blog by Josh Porter at bokardo.com, on Facebook and Circles of Relationships. In it, he discusses how trust affects the relevance of the pieces of information we receive - honing in on the idea that information we receive from people we know has more inherent relevance than information we receive from strangers. I think “trust” is probably not the best word to describe what is being judged here - let’s face it, you probably trust a writer from the New York Times more than you trust your stoner roommate for certain things, especially factual information. But context, however, is a word that works well for describing what we need to judge the information we receive, especially for qualitative information, such as opinions.

Context
When we receive information from people we know, we have a lot more context for framing that information, than we do from someone we don’t know. I can temper any opinions I receive from people I know with my knowledge of their perspective, which is obviously harder to do when you don’t know the person sharing the opinion - see my post about user reviews on Yelp. At the same time, just because you know someone, doesn’t mean you share the same tastes in everything, in fact it simply means you are more aware of the ways in which you are similar and dissimilar from that person.

Josh’s post contained Ben Schneiderman’s Circles of Relationships, which illustrates a way to think about the groups of people in our network, relative to ourselves. Alex Mather’s answer to this, as it specifically relates to social networks, highlights an important segment, “People like us,” as well as showing how family and businesses have no place in the inner circles.

I think what is interesting here is not in the similarities between these two graphics, but in the differences - and the ultimate fact that each person’s social network is unique. The people we seek information from depends on what we know about them and what kind of information we’re looking for.

My Recommendation System
My way of thinking about the people in my network would look (and behave) something like this: (Click on “Movies,” “Clothing,” or “Concerts”)

With regard to receiving recommendations from people I know, the fact is that I have friends, family, colleagues, etc., who are nothing like me when it comes to certain things. It doesn’t mean that I don’t still want to be connected to them, and learn about what they’re interested in, but it does mean that I should be able to control how they’re likes and dislikes affects the recommendations I receive. I think the ideal recommendation system would be able to take into account my own understanding of how similar or dissimilar I am from the people in my network. A system like this, which is able to predict what I would like based on the likes and dislikes of people I know, might be called “collaborative micro-filtering.”

From Wikipedia: Collaborative filtering systems usually take two steps:
1. Look for users who share the same rating patterns with the active user (the user whom the prediction is for).
2. Use the ratings from those like-minded users found in step 1 to calculate a prediction for the active user

Collaborative micro-filtering would take four steps:
1. Identify people I know
2. Allow me to judge my similarity to each person, for a variety of topics
3. Make recommendations based on first and second order relationships between me and the people I know
4. Continually refine this similarity index for each person I know, based on our rating patterns over time

A specific example:
1. I know Jim, Joel and Christi
2. When it comes to movies, Jim and I always agree, Joel and I sometimes agree, and Christi and I never agree
3. Jim really liked Babel, *and* Christi really hated Babel, therefore, I will probably like Babel
4. Through continual data collection, maybe it turns out I’m more similar to Joel than I initially thought

A recommendation system like this would give me opinions of people I know, but within the context of how similar or dissimilar our tastes are. But this system could still factor the opinions of people who I don’t know in a relevant way. Perhaps if Jim and Christi had not yet rated Babel, I could still receive the recommendation, because users similar to Jim had rated it highly and users similar to Christi had rated it poorly. Additionally, it would still let me see clothing recommendations from Christi and people like Christi, because even though she sucks at movie recommendations*, I think her fashion sense is great.

*No feelings were harmed in the making of this post

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Am I the only one who feels completely awkward watching Mark Zuckerberg speak?

No. No I’m not.

I’m actually on Facebook but I hardly ever use it. And if I had to make a list of all the things I really wish I was excited about but I’m not, Facebook would probably be like #3. That being said, the Facebook Platform seems sort of interesting. Mashable has a great list of all the applications that are now available. The two that seem the most interesting to me:

SideStep
Providing travel-planning tools for Facebook users, you can share your experiences with others using SideStep’s Trips application. This lets you list upcoming trips and future travel interests, which can then be displayed on your profile. You can also search for other Facebook users with similar travel interests to get more information from them.

The Washington Post
The Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive is offering two political applications built on the Facebook platform, giving Facebook users more access to current political affairs. It’s “Compass” feature allows users to answer questions that determine where their views fall along the political spectrum, and these results are then shared with their Facebook friends, which are invited to answer as well. The network of friends gets a map displaying how their answers compare to each other.

I logged on and tried to start using these two apps, but they don’t seem to be publicly available yet…

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The first time I saw the “Live Community” module on my TurboTax screens I was a little annoyed. It caused the page to load slower, and I just didn’t see the value. Oh, and also I’m really cynical. But by the time I’d finished doing my taxes I’d used the module 5 times and I was completely sold.

I’m not a big user of Yahoo! Answers, although I have played around with it a little. When I first moved to San Francisco, I posed the question, “What is that loud horn out in the San Francisco marina that’s been going on for two hours?.” It was great - I got the answer back in three minutes and I could finally get some sleep (it was a foghorn). Since then though, I’ve only used it sporadically. I’m not even remotely motivated by getting points or elevating my reputation in the community, I’m pretty good at searching the web if I need a piece of information, and I’m not really into just browsing through questions and answers. So why am I such a big fan of the community Q&A on TurboTax? I think the key is its amazing relevance - to both the person seeking knowledge and the knowledge providers. The module existed on each step of my tax process, and it became clear that the questions being asked were directly related the particular step that I was on. For example, at the point in my taxes when I was being told to “Fill in the fair market value of your rental property on the date it was ready and available to rent,” the Live Community module was showcasing questions such as, “Is the assessed value the same as the fair market value of my property?”

There’s a big difference between visiting a catch-all site for community knowledge, and having that community knowledge accessible at just the right time and the right place. The implementation of Answers on TurboTax is the longest of the long tails – these questions are so highly specific that I’d never think to go to Yahoo Answers to ask them, but having a module like this here was extremely helpful. These were questions being asked and answered by people who had gone through just what I was going through. I think there is incredible value to be gained when a site can identify and connect groups of people all looking for the same thing at the same time - especially at such a granular level.

Another great side-effect of this level of granularity was the fact that there was no searching involved. In every case where I got stuck and looked to the community for help, I was able to quickly find exactly what I was looking for. There weren’t 20 or 30 questions I had to wade through, there were usually 3 or 4. And there weren’t hundreds of answers, there were usually 1 or 2 and they were usually very helpful. It might be because this is the first year for Live Community on TurboTax and they don’t have a lot of questions and answers yet – but it might also be that because the task is so specific, once two or three answers are submitted, the right one is usually there and easy to find, so there isn’t as much need for a system of checks and balances.

Of course, I can’t discount the type of content that’s being dealt with here, which gave the application a sense of purity. Although it does seem like they’re trying to form some kind of community, with a “Leaderboard” and “My Q&A” profiles, I doubt there’s any real need for it. This module isn’t about forming a community and connecting to people who are passionate about taxes – most people just want to get the whole process over with. So there wasn’t a need for me to socialize with the users who were asking or answering these questions, it was simply about the knowledge.

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Ok I’ll admit it, I have been completely addicted to The Bachelor: Officer and a Gentleman, on ABC. It’s a ridiculous show that’s entirely entertaining to watch, and even more fun to torture my boyfriend with. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s basically a reality show where one man gets to date 25 women, all at the same time, and week by week, he whittles them down, to ultimately find and propose to his one true love. And TONIGHT, in the season finale, the bachelor will have to make his final decision! I can’t wait. (One sidenote: Wouldn’t it be cool to have a reality show with one man dating 25 women, where the women thought they were vying to be his one true love, but really the show was about seeing how long the man could go on dating 25 women at once without pissing them off? It would be called, “The Player.”)

The online component to this show is pretty much non-existent, but I think there’s a huge opportunity here to integrate with a personals site, such as Yahoo! Personals or Match.com. The Bachelor, as well as all of the female contestants, would create profiles. Users could then log on to see who matched up the best with the Bachelor, based on the site’s matching system. Users (mostly females) could then see how well their profiles matched up with the bachelor, and then access profiles of local bachelors who are similar to the one on the show. There could also be an ongoing component which is actually used to select the next star of the reality show by polling women about who their favorite local bachelors are, as well as letting women throw their own profiles in the ring to be a contestant on the show. And then, of course, as each woman gets kicked off, her profile is featured prominently on the site so she can immediately continue her own search for true love.

I don’t get addicted to television shows too often, but in these rare circumstances it would be really great to see an online component that took advantage of the micro-community of loyal watchers in a way that was more engaging and interesting than a message board.

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Last week, we launched a redesign of Yahoo! Travel’s front page. This was an exciting project to work on, both because of it’s high visibility, and because the old design was desperately in need of some love and attention. Although it’s been written about in several blogs around the web, I think that the coolest aspects of the design aren’t all that apparent to the casual observer. So, as a member of the team, here are my thoughts about the new front page from an insider designer perspective.

Personalization
The heart of the redesign is the “Today’s Picks” module, which features personalized destination recommendations. This module uses a pretty fancy magical algorithym (a magicalgorithym) that determines quite accurately the types of places you’d be interested in going. Although something like this would ideally be combined with explicit personalization (such as being able to tell the system your likes and dislikes) I think on its own, it’s a great example of implicit personalization – using your current location, your browsing history, and some collaborative filtering to provide highly targetted content without asking for a single piece of information.

Here, the unique design challenge was in combining the richness of editorial content with the power of personalization. We made several design decisions in order to help clue the user in on the fact that these destinations are just for them. This includes inserting the user’s name into the module title if the user is logged in, showing the user’s location and allowing them to change it, as well as just referring to the destinations as recommendations in a couple different places.

So why is this so cool? More and more, online media sites are devoting a lot of space to rich, compelling photography - it’s great eye candy. But personalization takes that eye candy and turns it into something that’s actually useful. Why take up all that space with something that’s trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator? I think front pages like those on Amazon, NetFlix, and (now) Yahoo! Travel, are showing the way toward personalized experiences, and soon, generic featured content will be a thing of the past.

In addition to personalization, this module has a lot of cool functionality, including being able to mouseover each photo and access community, travel guide and weather content, without ever having to click a button. Users can also get to theme-based destination recommendations by using the “Show Me” dropdown, which updates the destinations in the module. My favorite category is the “Near Me” category, which shows great ideas for weekend trips and has a neat side-effect: if you change your location to somewhere that you plan on going but isn’t actually your home, you will get cities nearby to that location. So, if I’m planning a trip to France and want to explore cities around Paris, I could use this module to get some great ideas.

Community
The community features of this page don’t exist just for the sake of having a community. Instead, they are woven throughout, in places that make the most sense and offer the most value to the user. The flight and hotel prices in the “Today’s Picks” module are sourced from the crowd - prices that other users found on FareChase within the last 24 hours. The lists of destinations below the map are also user-generated, showing the top overall cities, the top cities this week, and - another great local aspect – the most popular cities among people in your location.

Content created by the community, including trip plans, journals and reviews, are always associated with a destination, and accessible both through the “Today’s Picks” module, as well as the “Where do you want to go” module. There, a user can enter any destination to see the lowest cached flight and hotel prices, as well content from users who have been there. This module is both personalized and configurable, which adds to its relevance. Users understand the usefulness of being able to quickly check flight and hotel prices for any destination, as well as gaining access to a community that can provide valuable, qualitative information about that destination.

Finally…
All of this, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg for what truly amazing travel site can be. The good thing is, we know that! Expect more great things from Yahoo! Travel in coming months…

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The vast majority of people who submit user reviews are motivated by an experience they loved, or one that they hated. That’s why when I go to Yelp, or Amazon, I’m usually either looking at very positive reviews or very negative ones, to the point that sometimes it’s hard to believe that each review is about the same place or product. As a user, this actually complicates my ability to make a decision.

What do you do when you have a lot of biased people submitting their opinons? How do you manage a bunch of random comments and meaningless rants in order to make the content useful to others?

Yelp is quickly becoming the go-to place for online reviews. But the bigger it becomes, the harder it is to use. Here are three reviews that I recently had to compare. In browse-mode, I’m skimming a couple keywords and glancing at the star ratings. Then I start to get confused and wonder why one person hated it and the other loved it. Who are these people and why should I trust them? Does knowing how many reviews they’ve written make me trust them? Not really. Users who’ve written over 200 reviews are long-time Yelp users, and perhaps restaurant afficiandos who really like sharing their opinions - but, if I wanted an expert review, I’d be using a different site. What really matters is finding the opinions of people with similar tastes, similar interests…people who are most like me.

This isn’t a new idea. At Yahoo! Travel, we talk about surfacing the opinions of “travelers like you” - people who also enjoy skydiving, or beaches, or luxury hotels. But this idea applies to all opinions. When someone you know gives you an opinion, you can temper that opinion with what you know about that person, and how similiar that person is to you. I always like to give the example of movies: A movie that is rated very highly by someone who I know has awful taste in movies actually means that I will avoid that movie at all costs.

Instead of how many reviews the reveiwer has written, it would be more useful to see snippets showing what other restaurants the reviewer really liked and really hated. Ideally, however, Yelp would match my profile up with similar profiles (similar ratings for the same restaurant, similar interests listed, etc.) and then prominently surface the opinions of those people as I browsed the site. Taking this a step further, of course, I’d want easiest access to opinions of people I know.

Sites that host user reviews will continue to struggle with this problem as the sheer number of submitted opinions begins to kill the usefulness of aggregate ratings. If you take the average of a bunch of 1-star ratings and a bunch of 5-star ratings, you get a 3-star rating, and that doesn’t say much. At the same time, a user who has to spend a lot of time reading and evaluating several opposing reviews isn’t getting a great experience either. The essential problem lies in allowing the user to quickly identify the reviews that matter the most to them, for that particular place or product.

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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.

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