There’s been some chit-chat in the blogosphere about how online social networks have “built-in self-destructs.” This was started when InformationWeek columnist Cory Doctorow wrote the article “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook“. In it, he coined the term, boyd’s Law (which is sort of a homage to danah boyd, a PhD student most known for her research on social networks):
Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.
This is best explained by an example cited by Doctorow, and taken from one of danah’s articles:
A young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa.
What Doctorow doesn’t cite (or maybe not realize?) is that there’s an easy solution to this. Online social networks need to add the ability to create groups of friends, then allow each group different viewing permissions of the information in your profile. For example, your Coworkers Group sees only your work information and professional associations, your Family Group sees only your family photos and family-oriented blog entries, and your S&M Group sees only your naughty photos and dominatrix blog entries.
So why haven’t online social networks implemented this yet? Technically, can be extremely complex. What they’d need to do is give every single piece of content multiple levels of permissions. That particular photo of your cats may allow “anyone” while that blog entry about your vacation allows both your “Coworkers” and “Family.” It’s not impossible to build, just highly complex. I know because I’ve worked with a team who tried to implement these features.
Some existing social networks already have the beginnings of friend groups and varying viewing permissions too. Let’s take a look:
| Social Network | Friend Group Features |
|---|---|
| Can create a Limited Profile for friends who aren’t really friends. Can limit pieces of profile info to be viewable only by certain networks. Can’t limit views of photos. | |
| MySpace | Can limit blog posts to friends or a preferred list. Can’t limit views of profile or photos. |
| Friendster | Can password-protect your blog (for a fee). Can’t limit views of profile or photos. |
| Bebo | Can limit some portions of profile info to direct friends. Can’t limit views of other some portions of profile, photos, and blog. |
| Yahoo! 360 | Can limit pieces of profile info and entire blog to be viewable only by degrees of friends. Can’t limit views of photos. |
| Orkut | Can limit pieces of profile info to be viewable only by degrees of friends. Can create friend groups, but doesn’t allow permissions to be set for them. Can’t limit views of photos. |
I’ve heard the idea of friend groups with varying levels of viewing permissions many, many times, since the early days of Friendster. So these social networks are no doubt aware of it. Perhaps it just hasn’t ranked very high on their priority list yet, or perhaps they’ve been building it, but, because of its complexity, it’s not ready for deployment yet. Either way, I wonder who’s going to be the first to implement it; it sure is a highly-sought after feature!
