Mike English's blog

In response to Michael Arrington‘s post, The Meaning Of Friendship.

Bucketing and “fake following” are good enough for now.

Why?

Most of this social data will be public soon because managing changing relationship is a huge time-sink, and the benefits of carefully managed privacy just aren’t worth the efforts. I already have to think of it this way – as if all my social data were potentially public – just because I can’t mentally juggle which bits of my data I’m give to whom. (The users most affected by increasingly public social data are the popular users who receive a lot of attention. But they’re also in the best position to deal with potential problems because they can call on their ‘tribe’ to self-manage aberrant behavior.)

There are a number of problems with trying to manage relationships online as if they were analog equivalents to real life relationships. One problem has to do with two things, presence, and the persistence of data.

In real life, as Arrington points out,
“when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them.”

This isn’t only true in a binary sense, but actually applies to how we manage all of our relationships. All relationships are constantly in a state of flux. You’re never just ‘friends’ or ‘not friends’ with anyone. The degree and nature of our relationships has a lot to do with how and when we spend time with people.

In the real world relationships are built up by when the two people spend quality time with each other and relationships can wane when people are apart. In the real world, these events are always symmetric. Online, this isn’t always the case.

Online, someone can read your profile data, or your blog, or your activity streams when you’re not there. Depending on what information you’re sharing, this could be like leaving a copy of your journal or diary at every single one of your friends houses.

Getting away from privacy paranoia, say we’ve already accepted that all of our social data may as well be public, one remaining problem is that this exchange is not equivalent to symmetric relationship building in the real world. It’s difficult to gauge online, without the subtleties of body language &c, the exact nature of our developing relationships. When the data exchange is inherently asymmetric, we may find a lot of people far more interested in us then we are in them. ( = problematic.)

In real life, for the most part, data about us is present when and where we are present. Outside of that it’s only present in our friends’ memories, and perhaps though gossip. Online, our social data is like everything else on the web, persistent. Every exchange is potentially immortalized in a log somewhere, and it’s quite acceptable to leave “wall posts” up forever. The social data is persistent, and this changes things.

Additionally, our relationships aren’t only determined by the amount of time we spend with other people, but how we spend it. Besides the quantitative aspect, there is a very important qualitative aspect to social interaction.

To put it in terms of data, we don’t exchange the same subset of our personal data with everyone. Every relationship is unique, because every person is unique and has slightly different interests. Within certain groups some general subset of data may be more relevant, but our relationship with one member of the group is still not identical with our relationship with every other member of the group; each relationship is unique, qualitatively and quantitatively. Even if the quantitative aspect is nearly identical (maybe you go bowling with the same group every Tuesday and you don’t see any of them outside of bowling,) still we couldn’t say that our relationship with every member of the group is identical. (You wouldn’t potentially ask Bob out on a date, but you might ask Mary out sometime.)

To mimic all of these nuances of relationships in both their quantitative and qualitative aspects would require extremely complex granular controls. It would be a huge time sink to manage manually, but I also wouldn’t begin to think I cold trust a computer to do it for me – at least any time soon.

Instead, I find it better to simply recognize that being “friended” on Facebook is not equivalent to being friends in real life. You can say that I’m “Facebook friends” with Robert Scoble, but that doesn’t tell you what our relationship is beyond the most basic level of trust. For example, I’d be out of place offering an intervention for his FriendFeed addiction – I don’t know him that well.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Following up on the FriendFeed discussion from Robert Scoble‘s post, some interesting questions were raised.

Susan mentioned that Robert was acting as “bionic human socnet filter” after which I asked if we were all becoming part of a social super brain. The discussion turned to the segmentation of the social web with George Smith commenting that:

“Birds of a feather flock together. And sometimes it’s people with polar opposite views arguing. But I don’t think one place really has a large enough spectrum of human discourse…yet. We have to remember there is still a large portion of the population that does not participate in these conversations.”

The web is often hailed as great boon for democracy and learning with freedom of information and global interconnectedness, but I think George makes a good point. The social web is, and tends to be segmented because that’s simply how people are tending to react to the capabilities of the Internet as a new communication medium.

So what brings people together?

Read the rest of this entry »

(Here come the questions…)

What are the essential elements of a profile page?

• your name
• your contact information
• a picture or avatar
• some kind of bio, or a few self-descriptive words
• what else?

What contact information should be included on a profile page?

• e-mail
• twitter
• instant messaging
• phone?

Eventually these questions become more about privacy than accessibility.

But what does privacy mean on the open web?

With the advent of social networking websites, and especially since the increased popularity of Facebook and Twitter we’ve grown accustomed to living publicly. We no longer think twice about updating Twitter or our Facebook status to let the entire world know where we are, or what we’re doing. Why?

Part of this has to do, I think, with knowing that this information is of interest to our own existing social groups. It’s nice to know what your friends are up to. On the other hand, are we at greater risk by exposing this information? By using services like brightkite or Dopplr are we simply asking to be kidnapped, or to have our houses looted in our absence?

In my personal experience, doubts about these new web-ventures have usually been dismissed as old-fashioned and out of place. There’s a new paradigm, we’re working toward a new reality, and these old fears need to be set aside on the frontier of innovation.

The new reality, as I see it, is one where technology works for people.  The new social web is one where our virtual interactions begin to mimic the subtleties of ‘real life‘ social interaction. But there are a lot of difficulties in manifesting this vision. At the forefront is the problem of privacy. In real life you don’t go to great lengths to hide information about yourself, but you don’t rattle off everything you’ve ever done the first second you meet someone either. In real life we get to know people gradually; we become acquainted with them over time and more intimate channels of communication may or may not be opened.

If you strike up a conversation with someone in a coffeehouse for example, you don’t give them your home phone, mobile phone, mailing address, weekly schedule, favorite books, favorite movies, and who knows what else in the first five minutes of conversation, and before you get to know them as a person. But this is how it works on the web right now, it’s usually all or nothing, because we treat profiles like business cards. Not that this isn’t useful, but for the average user, it becomes difficult to decide what information to share.

The other thing about real life information sharing is that it is almost always managed subconsiously on an individual basis. We think about our relationship with each person we interact with, and they often don’t fall into clear-cut categories. The categorical model of relationships assumption that most social websites with privacy controls make is inadequate.

Mimicking the safety of this individual and gradual sharing of information is difficult on the web. On the web, we like everything to be automatic and ready to go. We don’t want to spend our time managing our information, we want to spend it actually being social. It’s easier to build in levels of privacy to a closed, centralized network like Facebook. But on the open web, lack of universal standards makes managing privacy a dauntingly time-consuming task. Is it worth the effort? How badly do we need our privacy? How do we think about privacy on the open web? Are our models analogous to real world social interaction? Can they be?

EDIT:

Chris Saad points out that “traditional ideas of privacy are changing.” Are these changes a natural evolution, or are they sparked by the inability of the Internet’s global interconnectedness, the “global village” model, to mimic traditional social relations?  If the later, and if we treat this effect of technology on our lives as acceptable, the Internet potentially stands to have a larger cultural impact than I think anyone yet expects.