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social networking and its discontents II Darren B writes in to ask "What is it people expect of networking websites that isn't being delivered?" Let's take an example of a real-world situation that I'd like to be able to use this sort of site for. Let's say a friend invites me to a party at her place. I don't know many of her friends, but I know she has a Friendster profile, so I think "maybe if I browse her friends via Friendster I'll be able to see who might be coming to this party, so that I can find someone who might share my interests, someone who I might be interested in talking to." So I go check out her profile. There are 50 friends listed there (commonly more). I click on the first one, oops, that's someone from Maine. I click on the second one, that person's from Somerville, MA. I click on the third one, that's a fakester profile for "Beer." Suddenly clicking through the other 47 is seeming less appealing. At this juncture there are three things I'd like to do that Friendster won't let me do: 1. Arrange the list. In this case I'd like to put the people who live closest to me at the top. Sorting it so that people who shared multiple connections to me might be interesting; I can also see wanting to sort the list by gender, or by who's single. But I can't do any of these things. 2. Search within the list. Within this group of people, who lives in Chicago? Who shares my interests? Who's single? Is there a way to find out without having to click 50 times? 3. Barring a way to arrange the list or perform a sub-search, I'd like to be able to at least quickly browse all the friends linked to my friend's page for some useful basic information. Which of them live in Chicago? A little blurb under the photo with just their location would at least enable me to know more-or-less at a glance which of these people I have a realistic opportunity to get to know. But all I can see are their names and, in some cases, their faces: information that holds no meaning given what I am trying to do. I think Friendster has lost sight of the fact that the information that's most useful to us when looking for friends or people to date is local information. Friendster should be continually sifting by geographic proximity as well as degrees-of-separation proximity. Not "here's a random person in your network" but "here's someone in your network who lives next door." Internet networking makes it easy to connect to people all over the globe, but unless I'm looking for correspondents, knowing that I'm two degrees of separation from someone who shares my interests but lives in Wyoming does me very little good. What I want Friendster to tell me is that I'm two degrees of separation from someone who shares my interests and lives two subway stops away. And the really frustrating thing is that Friendster has that information, but its interface isn't smart enough to let me ask for it. To be continued (when Friendster repairs its broken search feature). Labels: internet, networks, rants

Tuesday, January 27, 2004 3:39 PM   Comments: Post a Comment