It is safe to say that whatever constitutes a friend on the web has lost its emotional and functional meaning. Short messages, coupled with the model of asymmetric follow, a way to subscribe to another person’s activity feeds, gives us “ambient awareness” of what is happening. Buzz words galore. The point is that it has become popular to say when two people follow each other, that they become friends. Really?
The question, “what is the purpose of online social networking,” is a good place to start. Most folks would say that the purpose is to make connections, with current and historical contacts. Human groups are generally limited to 150 members – Dunbar’s number. If the purpose is to establish real world connections, social networking has done a good job of this, as a Facebook user averages 120 friends. The Economist recently ran an interesting story about these findings among others. They also found that people directly message and share with only a handful of core friends, but we’ll get back to that.
Social networking tools have achieved their goal. However, people do not stop connecting with each other, even after their hard-wired social limitations. The limiting factor is the ability to maintain each connection, and maintenance is possible through information (and wishing each other a happy birthday). This only works because people are making personal information available at astounding rates, recently investigated by the New York Times and regularly espoused by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Therefore, we have augmented ourselves with the ability to maintain ambient awareness of far more than 150 others’ lives. Does that constitute friendship with each of them? No. We can probably agree that friendship is regular conversation and companionship.
These are follows: when a person follows another’s activity feed. The model provides new ways to consume information, also coined as continuous partial attention or ambient intimacy. Brian Solis notes that a follows network has its own authenticity, ethics, and reciprocal interactions. To succeed, it provides simpler ways to reinforce relationships. For example, you can publicly acknowledge each other in replies, or “like” a status update as a compliment to its author. The gesture reverberates through your follows network. Not only does this maintain the health of the follows network, it creates a real-time credibility currency. It is pretty interesting stuff, and the upper bounds are still out of sight.
Back to core friends. They don’t increase. Some of this “friends” and “follows” is semantics, but it also implies that friendship innovation stopped with instant messaging and e-cards. Web 2.0 was a discovery of what the web is uniquely capable. The next iteration will integrate those things, but focus on your personal interests and people you care about.
If instant messaging is a model of core friendship, any effort to augment that must be real-time and interactive. This is our focus at Streamy, and the reason we have worked hard to build the right system. Since our initial prototypes, we have designed for core networks. Not for a popularity contest or amassing a huge list of contacts. We want to offer you the ambient awareness of follows but a focus on friends. Sounds refreshing, doesn’t it?
These social enhancements are the first half of the picture; the ways machines and recommendations play into this is important. We will talk more about that later… we have a launch to work on!
Hello!
See you!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
Your, Raiul Baztepo
[...] I previously wrote about what it means to have friends on the web these days, and I think by now that it’s nothing new. In the post I mentioned that we’d like to serve an under-served network: your core friends. It is the handful of people you interact with regularly and meaningfully. [...]