Lehrblogger

Paul Adams, a member of the user experience team at Google and the user research lead for social, recently gave the below presentation at the Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference:

It’s worth reading through the entire thing, but there were a few groups of slides I found particularly clear/insightful/interesting (you can jump to a particular slide from the bottom toolbar) –

• social contexts: 15, 58, 71, 83, 181, 212
• evolution of the web: 19
• status updates: 145, 179
• memory and information: 150, 152
• influence: 158, 159, 171, 172
• privacy: 193, 198, 199, 204

There are lots of other useful ideas in there, but there’s one in particular on which I want to expand. Adams discusses the categorization of our relationships into strong ties and weak ties, saying that, “Strong ties are the people you care about most. Your best friends. Your family. People often refer to strong ties as their “circle of trust.’ [...] Weak ties are people you know, but don’t care much about. Your friends’ friends. Some people you met recently. Typically, we communicate with weak ties infrequently.” Adams then goes on to define a new type of relationship online, the temporary tie, for “people that you have no recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with,” such as strangers in public online social spaces.

He also discusses the cognitive limitations of the human brain that make us unable to stay up-to-date with more than 150 weak ties at a time (see Dunbar’s number). Given that we now have social tools for keeping track of many more people than that – Facebook ‘friendship’ seems to be for “everyone I know and don’t actively dislike”* – I wanted one additional term to help me think about the portion of my 859 Facebook friends with whom I wasn’t keeping up at all and had some sort of tie that was weaker than a weak tie.

Latent ties seems to work nicely here, for those people with whom I’m not at all in touch but also have not forgotten, and who could potentially become a bigger part of my life and replace one of my weak ties. This is a new type of tie – it used to be possible to have no way to contact someone I once knew but hadn’t heard from in years, and these new tools will prevent this from ever again being the case. I think it’s especially important to design for these latent relationships on Facebook/other websites where there are social stigmas around friending and unfriending that make it difficult for the user to keep her ‘friends list’ as an accurate representation of only her current strong and/or weak ties.

* Who was it that first said this? Please let me know if you have a source for that quote.

A couple weeks ago I presented Wanderli.st during Thesis Week at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The list of all of the presentations is here, and ITP has a copy of the video hosted here, but I’ve also embedded it below. Some of the slides are difficult to read in the video, so they are embedded as well. If you’re in a hurry and think you can read faster than I was talking (hah!), the notes on which the talk was based are below each slide.

I’ve been thinking a lot the best way to continue this work now that I am free from academia, and about how Wanderli.st fits with other proposals such as Diaspora (which has gotten incredible support). I’ll continue to publish updates here, and let me know if you have any ideas you’d like to discuss!

Note: I had originally wanted to synchronize the PDF of the slides with the video, but I couldn’t find a good tool to help me with this – Omnisio has disabled the ability to create new presentations since they were acquired by Google, and the Zentation player was simply too ugly (despite their much prettier main website). Let me know if you can recommend something!

I gave this five-minute presentation at ITP on Saturday as part of the Startup Talk/Pitch Fest organized by faculty member Nancy Hechinger. Ron Conway and his partners at SV Angel, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Tom Cohen, and other members of the ITP community were in the audience. I got some good feedback and people were interested in the idea.

A PDF of the one-page handout I passed around is here. I’ve included the notes that I followed roughly during the presentation below the fold, since Google makes it hard to find them otherwise. The presentation can be conveniently accessed at http://bit.ly/wanderlist-20100327.

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Update: there’s an improved version of this presentation in this more recent post.

http://wanderli.st – wander the internet, bring your friends

I propose to design and build Wanderli.st, a new tool that will enable people to manage their contacts across social web services. Wanderli.st will be a web-based contact management application that synchronizes a user’s friend lists on both new and familiar web sites. It will serve as a layer between currently-unconnected applications on the social web, linking existing online contact management tools (such as Google Contacts) with the myriad sites on which people share content (such as Twitter, Vimeo, Foursquare, and GitHub).

Wanderli.st will provide users with an improved interface for organizing their existing contacts (which can number in the hundreds or thousands) into a set of manageable, custom groups. Google Contacts currently provides only a rudimentary user interface for those wishing to organize their contacts in this way, so I will create improved tools to make this initial set-up step as fast and easy as possible.

Once a user has organized her contacts into groups, the user will then authenticate her Wanderli.st account with those third-party web services on which she wants to manage her contacts. The user will make selections from her custom groups and assign them to the different services using basic set operations; Foursquare, for example, might be assigned everyone who is in either the ‘school’ or ‘family’ groups except those people who are also in either the ‘coworkers’ or ‘ex-boyfriend’ groups. Wanderli.st will then search for user accounts on each of those web services using the names and/or email addresses of only that set of contacts that they’ve been assigned, and it will then automatically send friend requests to (or, on sites with asymmetric social networks, simply follow) those users.

Later, if the user makes a change to one of her groups, either by adding a new person she recently met or moving someone from one group to another, Wanderli.st will automatically synchronize that change on each service to which that group has been assigned. In this way Wanderli.st will both lower the barrier to entry that a user faces when trying out a new web service, and will decrease the thought and effort required to keep one’s social graph up-to-date across services.

By making it easy for the user to understand and manage her contacts, Wanderli.st will enable the user to share content that is either very private or simply not “for” everyone with comfort and certainty about which of the people she knows can see each different piece of content. It will also benefit the third-party web services themselves because their users will more actively share content with the users’ more complete and easily-managed list of friends.

I plan to write Wanderli.st in Scala using the Lift web framework, and I’ll host it on the Stax Networks elastic application platform.

Note: I acknowledge that Facebook offers some of this functionality with Facebook Connect, and that in the future it might allow users to leverage Facebook’s Friend Lists to selectively export their social network to other sites; Wanderli.st, however, will differ in several critical ways. First, third-party services will only be required to provide a read/write API for users to add and remove contacts, and they will not need to write custom code as they would for Facebook Connect. Second, Wanderli.st will actually duplicate (and then synchronize) the user’s social graph on the third-party service, and this is to the advantage of those services because they will then own their social data, rather than rely on Facebook for continued access to the social graph. Finally, because Wanderli.st will only be a collection of spokes (social connections) without a hub (personal profile data, photos, and other content), users can feel confident about connecting Wanderli.st to third party sites, as there will be no private data that users will risk exposing.