My all-time favorite has been LinkedIn because it’s clean & to-the-point. Little spam and it’s a great way to stay in touch professionally with that group of people that you want to maintain contact with. But…as networks expand I definitely agree that it becomes important to differentiate one group of contacts from the next (who you’ve met and where & the extent of your relationship). It sounds silly, but these things are important!

Though FB is nice because you can interact informally, it’s difficult to keep up with everyone! Sure you can mass mail everyone an update or a greeting, but where’s the personal interaction in that?

I hesitate to try other social applications like Naymz but hey, if this will get your organized, why not give it a shot?

Chris, right on. Today we have what seems like a million different social media tools, yet each treats all of my contacts as the SAME pool of friends. You, my mom, my blog readers, my boss, my wife, my clients, my college friends are all on one mass level.

What I really want is fewer social media tools, and for each to allow me to segment friends. Sure, I’d like a handful of tools with discrete functionality, say text (Twitter), email, funk (Facebook), publishing (Blogger), and distribution (Digg). But there is no way that you should be in the same mass pool with my high school buddy … at least, not yet man.

The deep irony is that with all this social media innovation, we are still treating everybody the same. Feels a bit like mass media.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how normal social interactions might be defined with regard to information sharing between people. Off course how social networks handle this is of great interest to me.

Relationship types (and the mutual sharing of profile data) seems like a recurring theme in social network applications. Differentiation and ‘definition’ of the relationships you have is a basic social phenomenon. However, in my opinion most social web applications (even the ones allowing you to create different groups) have treated the concept of ‘friends’ exactly the wrong way around.

Most sites allow you to designate a relation (usually just ‘friend’, ‘co-worker’, ‘family’ etc) and based on that those people get to see more or less of your profile. This is exactly the opposite of what happens in our daily lives.

In real life, you start out with an initial level of disclosure towards some person, usually just your name and profession maybe. After that, the relationship might grow, and more (two way) disclosure follows. If all goes wel and neither of you causes a trust problem, then at some point you have a friend relationship. With other people such as colleagues, the (again two way) sharing of information doesn’t move beyond a certain point (i.e. no details about private personal things are shared).

So, to sum up; it’s not the relation ‘tag’ that determines what you share, but it’s what you share that determines the relation you have.

For social applications it follows that there is actually no need to explicitly name relationship types (friend, co-worker etc), but granular profile sharing should be implemented. Off course grouping your contacts every which way you want is still very useful, but it’s not strictly based on relationship types. (I could decide to group my contacts on an entirely different basis). Moreover, when grouping is based on predefined relationship types, a person can be only in one group at the time. Not likely in real life either.

Chris,

What about a concept of not having friends at all… but defining trust based on groups… and having dual profile personas (social & professional) that you display depending on the nature of the group that you’re communicating, sharing and networking with?

Yes.. this is a plug.. I’ve just described what CollectiveX does. I felt the need to mention it based on this post. Social networks are very friend-centric… and not very group-centric. CollectiveX-powered Groupsites are 100% group-centric, so defining levels of friendship isn’t necessary. The group defines the context and you decided how much of yourself you want to share based on that context and your level of trust in the group.

Try it and let me know what you think. So far it seems to be working… over 14,000 groups of all types and sizes have setup Groupsites powered by the CollectiveX platform. Not a single friend has been defined ;-)

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