6 ms·

Facebook seems ripe for disruption, or at the very least it shouldn't be that hard to compete with it as it was a while ago. Former early adopters and addicted

Facebook seems ripe for disruption, or at the very least it shouldn't be that hard to compete with it as it was a while ago. Former early adopters and addicted users are getting tired of it and want something new, better, less spammy. It's also in the nature of early adopters to move on by the time a product or service becomes too mainstream. They just need to see something else that is compelling first. But I think many of them are already using it much less than they used to. I think a true distributed P2P social network would be very interesting for them, but it would also need to get the execution right. I haven't heard much about Diaspora lately, but something interesting came out a few days ago with BitTorrent trying to make a P2P social network around torrents. I think that's an intriguing idea, and it's a bit similar to what Opera tried to do with Unite. As a side note, I think all social networks so far have had one major design flaw. I've joined other social networks before Facebook and they all seem to suffer from the "too many friends" problem, which does become a problem once you start having hundreds or thousands of friends. I think there needs to be 2 categories of "friends": true Friends and Followers. When you accept a request it should make that person a Follower by default, but it should give you the option to make him a Friend also. So many people add others on Facebook now, when it's just so they can see more info about them or their private pictures, with no real intention of "befriending" them later on. That's why I think most requests should become followers by default, and only choose to make them "Friends" when you really know the person. I think Twitter's model works a bit like that. You can have thousands of followers, but only a few "friends" where you basically follow each other. Just something to think about for whoever wants to build the next social network or whatever, so they don't repeat this huge mistake that almost every social network has made so far.

qjz 16y ago
In the real world, someone who follows you that is not a friend is a stalker. I suggest that the "too many friends" problem might better be described as the "too many stalkers" problem. How many is too many? One. The real problem is that we want to map our existing relationships to online tools without redefining them according to some nebulous model. Nobody has offered that capability yet. Friendship is intimacy. How can you achieve that in an environment where anyone can invade your privacy to some degree?
- shubble 16y ago
  No one want's to be a second tier friend. But it seems to me most people have up to 10 close friends, up to 100 sort of friends (the colleague you like and talk to daily, but wouldn't ask about your sexual problems), and then a large number of people they want to follow or not fall completely out of touch with (second tier friends who you no longer work with, but might ask a favor at some point). I've found that people get upset if you don't ad them on facebook. It marks them as unimportant to you. I doubt they'd like to be categorized as a second tier friend, or demoted to third tier. I'd say rather than creating categories, it would be better to allow users to make groups of friends, and select which group gets which news. That way you could say "Oh I'm sorry I didn't invite you to my party, I had you down under work people"...
  - ams6110 16y ago
    Are most people really so insecure that they would be bothered by not being a "top tier" friend to everyone they have ever known? Surely you can name a person with whom you have a cordial acquaintance, but are quite obviously not in their circle of "close" friends. I my case that's the big majority of people I know. So what?
    - dodo53 16y ago
      Well it's fine if it's a symmetrical both of you think each other as same tier; less so if you'd disagree (e.g. some bosses think all their subordinates are their friends and would want them at their parties).
- pnathan 16y ago
  www.dreamwidth has built a two-tier system. You can 'subscribe' to someone, in which case you are reading their public posts. They can subscribe to your public posts too. And, you can 'grant access' to someone, and now they can read your private posts. There is also an access control model for posts. I think that renaming the relationship from 'friend' is a good thing. 'friend' is getting semantically overloaded.
visava 16y ago
A good social network needs to build real life grouping like school friends, office colleagues, relatives, family etc. Sharing of photos, updates and read permissions by group needs to be built in. But the big question is can they compete at this time with FB. How many people will switch just for this reason.
- chopsueyar 16y ago
  ...and acquaintances, enemies, people you're mad at, ex-whatevers, businesses you refuse to do business with. And then when we start to admin all these relationships online, we will realize, "Why don't I just do this in-real-life?"
- dodo53 16y ago
  also would be nice to have overlapping tags instead of discrete lists. You could have your startup people / people interested in ${tech} / people you'd invite to your birthday / people you'd share photos with. Also, one thing I find annoying in Facebook newsfeed noise is for multilingual friends getting their non-English updates. Language groupings would be nice (or auto-tagging based on language detection (or autotranslations)).
  - nextparadigms 16y ago
    I like the tag idea. You could more easily group people under tags compared to lists, and when you'd post something you would just click on a few tags. It would at least be better than what they have now.
smackay 16y ago
Having a hierarchy of friends may be in your interest but it is certainly not in the interests of the people hosting the social network. They need the social graph to be single level either to make mining the data easier or to get to expose your information to as wide an audience as possible.
- chopsueyar 16y ago
  This is my main gripe with Facebook, the lack of proper entity modeling. Use Facebook and your only option is to consider somebody a "friend" entity. Modeling relationships with only a friend entity is pretty poor, IMHO.
impendia 16y ago
A nice idea, but I think it wouldn't work. I think people would be reluctant to add people to their second tier, and you'd see "friend inflation" where everyone was on the top tier.
- mgkimsal 16y ago
  The 'second tier' people don't need to be told what tier they're on, necessarily. There does need to be more thought put in to how relationships are categorized and info flow from those relationships displayed and managed. But all of that can be on one party's end - the other party just needs to know that I'm aware of and acknowledge the relationship - they don't need to know what I think of it.
toadstone 16y ago
Every single story about facebook has a post like this, and I'm so tired of reading them. First of all, why would you even consider competing with Facebook? You do realize that outside of the valley, there are companies not packed to the gills with ruthless nerd geniuses that would be much, much easier to disrupt? Facebook isn't even ossified like Google or Microsoft. They'd just reimplement your killer feature in one of their hackathons. P2P social network won't work because it's way too hard to do any analysis on the data of the system as a whole. How would you implement a newsfeed? It would be a nightmare. Regarding having two categories of friends, it's already doable with friends lists. You can do exactly what you are saying with a friends list for acquaintances/grannies/whatever. Or you could just not accept so many friend requests.

qjz 16y ago

In the real world, someone who follows you that is not a friend is a stalker. I suggest that the "too many friends" problem might better be described as the "too many stalkers" problem. How many is too many? One. The real problem is that we want to map our existing relationships to online tools without redefining them according to some nebulous model. Nobody has offered that capability yet. Friendship is intimacy. How can you achieve that in an environment where anyone can invade your privacy to some degree?

shubble 16y ago
No one want's to be a second tier friend. But it seems to me most people have up to 10 close friends, up to 100 sort of friends (the colleague you like and talk to daily, but wouldn't ask about your sexual problems), and then a large number of people they want to follow or not fall completely out of touch with (second tier friends who you no longer work with, but might ask a favor at some point). I've found that people get upset if you don't ad them on facebook. It marks them as unimportant to you. I doubt they'd like to be categorized as a second tier friend, or demoted to third tier. I'd say rather than creating categories, it would be better to allow users to make groups of friends, and select which group gets which news. That way you could say "Oh I'm sorry I didn't invite you to my party, I had you down under work people"...
- ams6110 16y ago
  Are most people really so insecure that they would be bothered by not being a "top tier" friend to everyone they have ever known? Surely you can name a person with whom you have a cordial acquaintance, but are quite obviously not in their circle of "close" friends. I my case that's the big majority of people I know. So what?
  - dodo53 16y ago
    Well it's fine if it's a symmetrical both of you think each other as same tier; less so if you'd disagree (e.g. some bosses think all their subordinates are their friends and would want them at their parties).
pnathan 16y ago
www.dreamwidth has built a two-tier system. You can 'subscribe' to someone, in which case you are reading their public posts. They can subscribe to your public posts too. And, you can 'grant access' to someone, and now they can read your private posts. There is also an access control model for posts. I think that renaming the relationship from 'friend' is a good thing. 'friend' is getting semantically overloaded.

visava 16y ago

A good social network needs to build real life grouping like school friends, office colleagues, relatives, family etc. Sharing of photos, updates and read permissions by group needs to be built in. But the big question is can they compete at this time with FB. How many people will switch just for this reason.

chopsueyar 16y ago
...and acquaintances, enemies, people you're mad at, ex-whatevers, businesses you refuse to do business with. And then when we start to admin all these relationships online, we will realize, "Why don't I just do this in-real-life?"
dodo53 16y ago
also would be nice to have overlapping tags instead of discrete lists. You could have your startup people / people interested in ${tech} / people you'd invite to your birthday / people you'd share photos with. Also, one thing I find annoying in Facebook newsfeed noise is for multilingual friends getting their non-English updates. Language groupings would be nice (or auto-tagging based on language detection (or autotranslations)).
- nextparadigms 16y ago
  I like the tag idea. You could more easily group people under tags compared to lists, and when you'd post something you would just click on a few tags. It would at least be better than what they have now.

smackay 16y ago

Having a hierarchy of friends may be in your interest but it is certainly not in the interests of the people hosting the social network. They need the social graph to be single level either to make mining the data easier or to get to expose your information to as wide an audience as possible.

chopsueyar 16y ago
This is my main gripe with Facebook, the lack of proper entity modeling. Use Facebook and your only option is to consider somebody a "friend" entity. Modeling relationships with only a friend entity is pretty poor, IMHO.

impendia 16y ago

A nice idea, but I think it wouldn't work. I think people would be reluctant to add people to their second tier, and you'd see "friend inflation" where everyone was on the top tier.

mgkimsal 16y ago
The 'second tier' people don't need to be told what tier they're on, necessarily. There does need to be more thought put in to how relationships are categorized and info flow from those relationships displayed and managed. But all of that can be on one party's end - the other party just needs to know that I'm aware of and acknowledge the relationship - they don't need to know what I think of it.

toadstone 16y ago

Every single story about facebook has a post like this, and I'm so tired of reading them. First of all, why would you even consider competing with Facebook? You do realize that outside of the valley, there are companies not packed to the gills with ruthless nerd geniuses that would be much, much easier to disrupt? Facebook isn't even ossified like Google or Microsoft. They'd just reimplement your killer feature in one of their hackathons. P2P social network won't work because it's way too hard to do any analysis on the data of the system as a whole. How would you implement a newsfeed? It would be a nightmare. Regarding having two categories of friends, it's already doable with friends lists. You can do exactly what you are saying with a friends list for acquaintances/grannies/whatever. Or you could just not accept so many friend requests.