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Pretty much what ycombinator funded "the fridge" tries to achieve. The problem is the best tool is probably a hybrid between full segregation and full connected

by robryan 16y ago

Pretty much what ycombinator funded "the fridge" tries to achieve. The problem is the best tool is probably a hybrid between full segregation and full connectedness. Problem is that in this kind of territory your application becomes harder for the user who has to think more about who is going to see which piece of content.

grandalf 16y ago
Is it really that hard? Why not just let me check the box near "high school" and uncheck the box near "parents' friends"... Anyone who isn't naive about the implications of a "like" or a comment or a photo in everyone else's news feed will think twice about whether to post at all, which I'd argue uses more cognitive energy than simply opting in the correct group of friends to receive the information.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  I have to say that any application intended to allow people to manage, say, four intersecting sets of items of any sort is going to back rather hard to use, unless someone has come with some incredibly clever UI metaphors I don't know about. Will there be four (or five) checkboxes next to every normal action? It would seem to complicate things by a few orders of magnitude. Remember adding elements is often a multiplicative rather than an additive affair - just adding a few extra checkboxes to a given page can take it from clear to "head-spinning".
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Is it really that hard? Actually it is. Think about how few people actually categorize people in their IM client, or bookmarks, or virtually any other service. There are a couple of ways to try to deal with this: 1) Put the onus on the contactor to specify the relationship. This is what LinkedIn does. 2) Actually have several different mechanisms that users can use. I really like free form tagging. I'd like to be able to send status and then have a tag field where I just list the tags of the various groups I want to send this status update to. The oddly nice thing about how Facebook does it today though is that since everyone is so used to getting random weird status updates, no one cares. Imagine if you got an email from a friend that said, "Eating pie, watching Glee. Bored, might go to sleep early." You'd be like, "WFT? Is this guy gonna kill himself or something? Why did he send me this?" But on Facebook, you don't even notice. Heck you might even say, "Yeah, Glee is kind of weak in season 2". I don't know. How people interact on the internet is weird.

by robryan 16y ago

grandalf 16y ago

Is it really that hard? Why not just let me check the box near "high school" and uncheck the box near "parents' friends"... Anyone who isn't naive about the implications of a "like" or a comment or a photo in everyone else's news feed will think twice about whether to post at all, which I'd argue uses more cognitive energy than simply opting in the correct group of friends to receive the information.

joe_the_user 16y ago
I have to say that any application intended to allow people to manage, say, four intersecting sets of items of any sort is going to back rather hard to use, unless someone has come with some incredibly clever UI metaphors I don't know about. Will there be four (or five) checkboxes next to every normal action? It would seem to complicate things by a few orders of magnitude. Remember adding elements is often a multiplicative rather than an additive affair - just adding a few extra checkboxes to a given page can take it from clear to "head-spinning".
kenjackson 16y ago
Is it really that hard? Actually it is. Think about how few people actually categorize people in their IM client, or bookmarks, or virtually any other service. There are a couple of ways to try to deal with this: 1) Put the onus on the contactor to specify the relationship. This is what LinkedIn does. 2) Actually have several different mechanisms that users can use. I really like free form tagging. I'd like to be able to send status and then have a tag field where I just list the tags of the various groups I want to send this status update to. The oddly nice thing about how Facebook does it today though is that since everyone is so used to getting random weird status updates, no one cares. Imagine if you got an email from a friend that said, "Eating pie, watching Glee. Bored, might go to sleep early." You'd be like, "WFT? Is this guy gonna kill himself or something? Why did he send me this?" But on Facebook, you don't even notice. Heck you might even say, "Yeah, Glee is kind of weak in season 2". I don't know. How people interact on the internet is weird.