New Google Research On Social Networks

mantis2009 writes "Paul Adams, a senior user experience researcher at Google, has posted a slideshow from a recent presentation that shows insightful research into how people use social networking technologies. The presentation describes several shortcomings of existing technology, and it highlights specific modalities that current technology (ahem, Facebook) gets wrong. Adams concludes that social networking applications are a 'crude approximation' of real-life social networks. 'People don't have one group of friends,' Adams research in several different countries shows that in reality, most people have between four to six groups of friends. He argues that social networking applications need to be built with that reality in mind."

Comments

Just to point out...

[Traegorn]

Facebook DOES support multiple groups of friend -- you can create separate friend lists and subdivide what permissions different sets get.

Re:Just to point out...

[mantis2009]

Separating friend lists on Facebook as you describe doesn't support all of the functions mentioned in the slideshow. For example, posting comments on Facebook photos goes out to all people with permission to see your comments on photos. The slideshow suggests allowing different comments to be seen by different groups of friends. In the current Facebook implementation, your friends either have permission to see all your comments on all photos, or none.

More than one...

[Itninja]

I use multiple SN's. For professional contacts I use LinkedIn. For personal contacts I use Google Buzz (or at least did until recently). For imaginary contacts I use WoW.

For example ...

[PPH]

... girlfriends, wives.

The construction of persona

[freejung]

It goes beyond the problem of having different groups of friends. The problem is that in real life most people have many different personae. You would say and do things with your friends from college that you would never say or do in front of your boss, as the most obvious example.

IRL we put a lot of work into constructing and maintaining these different personae, and we do a lot of work to keep them separate.

With social networking as it is, that's all over. Even if you never participate in Facebook, you are probably tagged in dozens or even hundreds of photos, and the odds are pretty good that some of them show you doing things you wouldn't do in front of your boss.

So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?

I think many of us, particuarly the younger generation, are already doing the latter. In order to adapt to this, we have to adjust our expectations of people. Maybe as an employer, you just have to get used to being able to see pictures of your employees smoking weed at parties and so forth, and not let it bother you. However, until we adapt, it creates the problem that suddenly everything you say and do is potentially public (whether you participate in social media or not).

Re:One thing missing...

[Chapter80]

The tool doesn't need to prompt you for "closeness level". It could just track who you post to, and then when you post a message or a photo, give you a list of contacts, and ask which ones you want to send to. It could sort the list based on frequency, and the people you are close to will filter to the top.



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