25uhr

There is a basic conflict in socially networked media. Facebook wants to have everyone using their service. It allows you to share party pics with your friends, but you don’t want to have your mother see them. If your mother uses Facebook it would be very impolite not to be connected with her.
Same for Twitter, Skype status message, Flickr private pictures and the like.
They want you to connect to all the people you know. But you don’t want to communicate the same things to everyone you know.

For me, it looks about this currently:

The black words are the clusters and the blue words are topics for communication.

Obviously my family would not be much interested in an article about the next big thing in the world of personal startpages, and my professional network is not supposed to read about my family chitchat.

So if I had only one medium of communication in my network, I would probably end up only with quotes and truisms. Harmless stuff that is not very much related to myself.

Of course there are several media. Let’s map them to my network:

As you can see, most of my professional communication is in english, while most of my private communication is in german. That is good, because it helps me keep the stuff a bit seperate. If I write my Skype status message in German, then it is more directed at my friends, although colleages will read it too.

There are a few dedicated channels for groups: The family wiki (yes, it is a family of nerds…), and mailing lists for my former co-students and for the Netvibes team. These channels are very helpful and I would love to have that for other clusters too.
(For Munich, I could probably use the social network www.lokalisten.de, which is/was dedicated to Munich. But I don’t like it. Also my munich friends don’t use it much as far as I know.)

So with the Facebook example:

• Allow people to cluster their friends in a fuzzy way. Keep the clustering private.
• For communications like status, widgets, pokes, pictures etc give people the opportunity to choose a cluster or general direction, in which to send the message.
• On the recipient side, read messages in higher probability if you are in the center of the targeted cluster. (For subscription-based messaging.)

And for everyone else: Just think about it please. The more targeted communication you allow, the more meaningful will it be. If you allow to send stuff to several people at once, you will make all the lazy people happy.

In: obervations | #