Facebook -- In The Works: Groupings, I Hope, Not Groups

Facebook has 'groups' in the works:

[from Facebook | What's New]

In the Works

Sort out your friends.

We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.

Please don't do this the wrong way: subdividing into discrete collections, where someone is either a Work friend or a Play friend, but can't be both. Those are 'Groups'.

What we want is 'Groupings" where we can tag our friends with as many associations as we like, such as 'work', 'play', 'bowling league', and 'san francisco'. That way we can share things in the most flexible ways possible.

Comments

[Bob Warfield]

This is such an important issue, and one not to be taken lightly. All of the efforts to manage the "Social Network" on its own and look at it as a first class citizen have to understand that this means that it has to be able to mean different things to different people in different use cases.

Part of the problem is that its just so much trouble to maintain a Social Network. No sooner do you get one pretty far along that another wants to play. It's great to think I can just transfer the old one over, but that doesn't work for the same reasons you need groupings not groups and a whole lot more.

If I'm doing something for business that's one mode. If I'm doing something for family that's another. Close friends versus casual acquaintances versus total strangers I'm trying to strike up a conversation with. All of these need to afford the Social Network owner with the capacity to govern the degree of visibility, overlap, and many other arbitrary attributes are present.

It gets even more complex when the Social Network becomes a shared responsibility. A network you've built on behalf of a business or other entity demands a different Trust Fabric than one you own yourself and use for social purposes:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/business-web-20-demands-a-different-trust-fabric-than-social-web-20/

The list goes on, but it seems to me we're far from understanding these things well enough to encapsulate a single Social Network that is reusable for all these purposes and does everything we want to do.

Best,

BW

[Hashim]

Agreed! I hope Facebook has either thought of this already, or is reading this posting.