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This sounds good on paper but in practice I think this could be problematic. There is some value in ambiguity. Segregating friends into a hierarchy feels like

This sounds good on paper but in practice I think this could be problematic. There is some value in ambiguity. Segregating friends into a hierarchy feels like partly a social problem. Sure internally you may maintain such a hierarchy but what use is there in making it public? Don't you risk hurting peoples' feelings? What happens if they start off as a work contact and you become closer? Do you have to move them in a timely fashion or risk being offended? Seems to raise more issues than it actually solves. Seems like increasing the complexity of the interface for the social web has never worked out if the change did not also bring tremendous value e.g. newsfeed gives you updates on all you friends in one place - more complex but also very useful. More privacy controls was more complicated but didn't bring nearly as much value as fb thought it would.

lftl 16y ago
I think Facebook has basically gotten the visibility of the hierarchy correct with their setup of friend lists. I assign my friends to different groups, but they don't know what groups I've assigned them to. The biggest things FB needs to change in my opinion are to make it simpler to post updates to different groups (it's there now but it's clunky), and allow me to segregate access to my information by group. So for example I can set it up so that my college friends can see what my college friends write on my wall, but not what work friends write. I think there might also be some value in having a somewhat public hierarchy, like you initially mentioned, but I think that makes more sense on Twitter than FB. It'd be nice if Twitter let me have explicit topic-based channels for me to publish to, and for people to subscribe to. So I could subscribe to some people's programming related tweets without hearing about what they ate for breakfast.

lftl 16y ago

I think Facebook has basically gotten the visibility of the hierarchy correct with their setup of friend lists. I assign my friends to different groups, but they don't know what groups I've assigned them to. The biggest things FB needs to change in my opinion are to make it simpler to post updates to different groups (it's there now but it's clunky), and allow me to segregate access to my information by group. So for example I can set it up so that my college friends can see what my college friends write on my wall, but not what work friends write. I think there might also be some value in having a somewhat public hierarchy, like you initially mentioned, but I think that makes more sense on Twitter than FB. It'd be nice if Twitter let me have explicit topic-based channels for me to publish to, and for people to subscribe to. So I could subscribe to some people's programming related tweets without hearing about what they ate for breakfast.