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Facebook isn't flat. It has friend lists. The problem isn't the product; it's the people. It's not always easy to mentally categorize new people you meet becaus

by natrius 16y ago

Facebook isn't flat. It has friend lists. The problem isn't the product; it's the people. It's not always easy to mentally categorize new people you meet because you don't know what bucket they're ultimately going to end up in. Pruning and adding to lists is work. Worst of all, creating lists to begin with requires sifting through all of your friends and bucketing them. Facebook has tried to address this by automatically filtering your feed to show you the people it thinks you care about. I don't know how well this works because I'm too much of an information glutton to allow things to be hidden from me, so I turned the filtering off.

mortenjorck 16y ago
The problem isn't the product; it's the people. I think Don Norman would probably disagree with you. I maintain that this is a design problem. We meet people in a variety of different contexts in real life: These contexts vary by geography, time, and purpose, but they're discrete entities that should be as translatable to an application's design patterns as our person-to-person relationships already are. How to do this smoothly, of course, is a bit trickier than just making a buddy list, hence the fact that it's not being done very well right now. But that's no reason to give up and blame the users! The funny thing is, Facebook actually got this mostly right at the beginning. The "networks" were exactly the kind of construct that a non-flat social network needs; their downfall was that they started out too big to be useful and only bloated from there until they were retired. Networks the size of your immediate family, a group close friends, your team at the office, would have worked. And, with proper design, they still can.
- natrius 16y ago
  Some problems are just hard. No one blames calculators for the difficulty of calculus. Classifying relationships is something we don't normally do consciously. People use email and Facebook messages for the small groups you've mentioned. Attempting to shoehorn that use case into the news feed and the post workflow would complicate things. Most things that people share outside of work don't need to be limited to few people. Cringely is basically saying, "I wish Facebook solved this problem that I have, but few of its other users probably have as well." It makes no sense.

by natrius 16y ago

mortenjorck 16y ago

The problem isn't the product; it's the people. I think Don Norman would probably disagree with you. I maintain that this is a design problem. We meet people in a variety of different contexts in real life: These contexts vary by geography, time, and purpose, but they're discrete entities that should be as translatable to an application's design patterns as our person-to-person relationships already are. How to do this smoothly, of course, is a bit trickier than just making a buddy list, hence the fact that it's not being done very well right now. But that's no reason to give up and blame the users! The funny thing is, Facebook actually got this mostly right at the beginning. The "networks" were exactly the kind of construct that a non-flat social network needs; their downfall was that they started out too big to be useful and only bloated from there until they were retired. Networks the size of your immediate family, a group close friends, your team at the office, would have worked. And, with proper design, they still can.

natrius 16y ago
Some problems are just hard. No one blames calculators for the difficulty of calculus. Classifying relationships is something we don't normally do consciously. People use email and Facebook messages for the small groups you've mentioned. Attempting to shoehorn that use case into the news feed and the post workflow would complicate things. Most things that people share outside of work don't need to be limited to few people. Cringely is basically saying, "I wish Facebook solved this problem that I have, but few of its other users probably have as well." It makes no sense.