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When building out Appleseed, I decided on a principle early on that's important for a sense of social... well, not privacy, that's not the right word. Segmenta

When building out Appleseed, I decided on a principle early on that's important for a sense of social... well, not privacy, that's not the right word. Segmentation, more like it. But first, humans rely on segmentation. I want to know that if I'm hanging out in a bar with a bunch of friends, I can talk a certain way that I would never talk around my parents or my extended family. If a member of that social group walks into the bar, it's awkward, but on some level, they opened that pandora's box, by encroaching on my social space. Facebook doesn't seem to understand that, preferring instead to just dump everything into one box labelled "Social!" and forgetting that you interact with your friends different from your family, your coworkers, etc. So for Appleseed, the principle I'm focusing on is that, when you report to your friends, you report on contexts, not actions. So, when you upload a photo, or post a journal entry, or a status update, you're creating context, and the appropriate friends are notified of that context. However, when you comment on that context, you are taking an action. The recipients of that context are notified, but your friends are not (unless they're already mutual friends of the context owner). In other words, Alice posts a journal entry to her College Buddies friends circle. Bob comments on that journal entry. Alice's College Buddies friends circle is notified of Bob's comment, but Bob's friends are not notified unless they are also one of Alice's College Buddies. This isn't perfect, someone so inclined can still search for your comments and find them, provided the privacy settings are open enough. But let's as least make stalking require an extra action, instead of doing it for the user.

bjtitus 16y ago
I agree 100% with your statements except that I think Facebook does understand this. After all, isn't this exactly what the Lists/Groups feature does (albeit, un-intuitively)? I believe that Facebook knows this is a concern and this is why they relaunched the Groups feature recently. It's a hard problem to solve from a UX perspective. Most normal users would be confused by segregating things out even if there was an easy UI solution for creating/publishing to these groups. Look to their recent acquisition of Beluga to get a sense of where this is going. They are obviously interested in moving into the group messaging space. Lets not fool ourselves, though. Facebook has some vested interest in making things more public so that advertisers and media outlets can use them without issue.
- joebadmo 16y ago
  There's an inherent tension between people's desire for granular control and their resistance to exercising that control, ie I want robust lists, but I don't want to have to manage them. I kind of feel like once list/group data is portable between services/networks, it won't be as big of a problem, since you'd only have to do it once, and management after that can be at the time of contact creation/connection. I also think using the physical place metaphors more explicitly could be interesting. Like you could make a "bar" place, where your bar friends gather. Functionally I suppose it would be identical to Facebook groups. What I'm really hoping for, though is that in the future once identity data is portable, the existing social networks will be more akin to places. Facebook will be the place for shallow, bland, regulated, cursory interaction. Twitter will be the place for shouting loud and pithy aphorisms in public. You could create private places for different purposes as the needs arise.
  - bjtitus 16y ago
    I don't know that I agree that data portability is the problem. Nearly everyone (college aged kids) I know use Facebook exclusively for social networking. I don't think they care if their groups are portable. I think the root problem is encouraging people to make them. I think this is why Groups became shareable but a better UX or automatic algorithm for creating them would help tremendously. Some kind of incentive for creating groups would help as well. I think the group messaging features could do this (group text, especially).
    - joebadmo 16y ago
      You're probably right, and I'm speaking mostly from my place of aversion to Facebook. But anecdotally I feel like there is a slow shift away from Facebook happening. Dave Winer talks about the cyclical nature of these things, and I think I agree that while we're in a closed part of the cycle right now, we're heading toward a more open one.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  I was added to a Facebook group. It's something I'm only peripherally interested in. It generates way to much content. It seems like a step toward Facebook becoming more spammy than it was. I agree that Facebook understands the need to segment and the need to not be spammy. But suspect Facebook is still going to be drawn down that road because it has only a limited amount of things it can do make/keep the site interesting - aside from the impetus for public-for-advertising stuff.

bjtitus 16y ago

I agree 100% with your statements except that I think Facebook does understand this. After all, isn't this exactly what the Lists/Groups feature does (albeit, un-intuitively)? I believe that Facebook knows this is a concern and this is why they relaunched the Groups feature recently. It's a hard problem to solve from a UX perspective. Most normal users would be confused by segregating things out even if there was an easy UI solution for creating/publishing to these groups. Look to their recent acquisition of Beluga to get a sense of where this is going. They are obviously interested in moving into the group messaging space. Lets not fool ourselves, though. Facebook has some vested interest in making things more public so that advertisers and media outlets can use them without issue.

joebadmo 16y ago
There's an inherent tension between people's desire for granular control and their resistance to exercising that control, ie I want robust lists, but I don't want to have to manage them. I kind of feel like once list/group data is portable between services/networks, it won't be as big of a problem, since you'd only have to do it once, and management after that can be at the time of contact creation/connection. I also think using the physical place metaphors more explicitly could be interesting. Like you could make a "bar" place, where your bar friends gather. Functionally I suppose it would be identical to Facebook groups. What I'm really hoping for, though is that in the future once identity data is portable, the existing social networks will be more akin to places. Facebook will be the place for shallow, bland, regulated, cursory interaction. Twitter will be the place for shouting loud and pithy aphorisms in public. You could create private places for different purposes as the needs arise.
- bjtitus 16y ago
  I don't know that I agree that data portability is the problem. Nearly everyone (college aged kids) I know use Facebook exclusively for social networking. I don't think they care if their groups are portable. I think the root problem is encouraging people to make them. I think this is why Groups became shareable but a better UX or automatic algorithm for creating them would help tremendously. Some kind of incentive for creating groups would help as well. I think the group messaging features could do this (group text, especially).
  - joebadmo 16y ago
    You're probably right, and I'm speaking mostly from my place of aversion to Facebook. But anecdotally I feel like there is a slow shift away from Facebook happening. Dave Winer talks about the cyclical nature of these things, and I think I agree that while we're in a closed part of the cycle right now, we're heading toward a more open one.
joe_the_user 16y ago
I was added to a Facebook group. It's something I'm only peripherally interested in. It generates way to much content. It seems like a step toward Facebook becoming more spammy than it was. I agree that Facebook understands the need to segment and the need to not be spammy. But suspect Facebook is still going to be drawn down that road because it has only a limited amount of things it can do make/keep the site interesting - aside from the impetus for public-for-advertising stuff.