Facebook, the response, with qualifications

In response to Doug’s great facebook post, I thought I’d hash out some of my ideas on the subject. One of the reasons I like facebook is its superficiality; I get many of the rewards of staying in touch with people, but I have to give little in the way of communication or commitment. It formalizes empty social gestures that I require as a busy, semi-anti-social yet still social animal, and makes them virtual enough to be bearable. Yes—the ultra poke features can be annoying, but the fact that there is a fun and creative way to say “hi” without actually engaging or inconveniencing someone is something I cherish. Also, facebook has done wonders for dating. Too shy or cowardly to send a message? Facebook, because it’s full of slight communicative gestures that teeter on meaning nothing, supplies us with tiny bits of romantic currency (small tokens of affection) for those who fear anteing up too soon or at all. Befriend, poke, tag your crush in a picture--all are safe measures that don't reveal your intentions.



But while facebook is great at letting us stay friends with people we barely want to be friendly with, it is terrible at distinguishing between types of friends. Of course, broadcasting friend “levels” to the parties involved would be absurd and even hurtful, but letting the user set what information (profile lists, party RSVPS, relationship status) goes out to what types of friends—with those recipients being none the wiser—seems like a route facebook should go in the future. One-size (or in this case, two: public and private profiles) fits-all-profiles are sadly limited. For example, I want my boss as a friend, but not the kind of friend who gets to see my weekend pictures.

For such a feature to be useful, though, I guess it would have to be semi-automated or initiated by system generated defaults That is, would users even know what bins of friends to create? Would they bother sorting through all of them? Maybe it could start as a “these 6 people are my “work” friends, so they should never see my pictures” kind of deal. Or facebook could guess, and the user could approve? I’m sure some people are thinking that an outside application could do this, but that can’t be the case, for it would have to utilize too much extant garden (if Doug’s walled-in garden metaphor is still apt) functionality, such as security settings--stuff which wouldnt be opened up to a developer.



But back to public personas--as you mention in your discussion of list-making, the way in which you choose to represent yourself is quite important. Even our unintentional signals connect us in interesting ways. Such as an ironic misspelling of a movie title linking two sarcastic types ( I actually can't think of an example here). Indeed, the social utility of facebook might decrease if it gave users much choice in the matter. But more on the topic of list-making. The lists can be interesting, if really pretentious, but they obviously lack any authority file of sorts: if enough users wrote “brothers Karamazov” in their profiles, why can’t one of those involuntary pull down tabs emerge to tells users what everyone else put in their profile (brothers mcmullen, o brother where art thou) or at least to tell them how to spell it right?