Meme Menagerie

What good would a city map be if all it showed were buildings, and not the streets between those buildings? 

What if a road map gave a ton of information about each destination, but did not distinguish between dirt paths, one-way streets or superhighways? 

Well, that wouldn’t be a very useful map, would it?  While many online social networks (especially LinkedIn) are very good at allowing users to accumulate large number of connections with other users, these sites often lack a way for users to QUALIFY those connections.  By forcing the user to make a binary, black-or-white decision about who to call a “Friend,” these systems lose what is (IMO) a non-trivial distinction in mapping social networks. This distinction is not just an academic concern, but rather, a distinction that inhibits better and more productive web-based functionality.Speaking of circles of friends, the folks at TrustPlus are onto this idea, with their TrustCircle™ concept: 

Facebook’s expandable “How Do You Know This Person?” option window is a start, although other than displaying the information alongside your network connections, it doesn’t appear to be tied to any functional processes (yet!).

The next generation of successful online social network tools will be the ones that not only qualify the people/contacts as primary nodes in the data structure, but which also qualify the connection types (or even connection history!) between those people. These sites will also use that connection information to allow users to better navigate and manage the relationships in their wider network. The pieces of this are starting to come together.   The first and simplest example is in the profile display controls that Friedster gives you (allowing/denying people from different geographic regions to view certain fields). On Facebook, there are extensive privacy settings including the “limited view of my profile” option, but that doesn’t overlap with the notion of connection types and categories of “friends.”   

		Inner Circle	people closest to you, such as your most trusted family members and closest friends
		Friends, Family & Colleagues	people you know well
		Acquaintances	people you know, but perhaps only casually

This simple three-tier structure offered by TrustPlus is very useful, and I expect to see it adopted/copied by Facebook and others in the future. Sure, each relationship between two people is unique… and sometimes a casual acquaintance can, in some respects, be part of one’s inner circle (and vice versa). However, this basic three-tier approach is an orders-of-magnitude improvement over the current state of affairs which essentially says “all friends/connections are equal.” 

Of course, none of this is really new is it?  There are many well established cultural traditions, going back to ancient times, that include the concept of concentric circles of friends. Some of these systems include many layers (the family, the clan, the tribe, the nation, etc.) and in many there are even intricate rules of conduct and levels of responsibility accorded each layer of the “relationship onion.” Again, it’s true that all relationships are unique, and we certainly live in post-structural  times with concentric, overlapping and non-overlapping circles or all shapes, colors and sizes. Fine.  Then design a system where users can assign n-number of relationship spheres and categorize their connections accordingly (with a few handy templates for those with more “average” social network topologies).  In the meantime, while you’re designing that system and trying to get people to adopt it, let’s take the millions of users with simple 1-tier connections and migrate them up to TrustPlus’ 3-tier connection system.  (By the way, I should probably add as a disclaimer that I’m acquainted with the folks at TrustPlus. But that just means I vouch for ‘em.)

  This problem of “simple connections” has been bugging me since I first starting using online social networks.  In fact, there is a similar thing that’s been bugging me for years in the world of mainstream CRM / contact management software. One of things that sucks about most out-of-the-box CRM systems is the lack of an ability to qualify (or even create) connections between contacts. I don’t just want to keep records of the people I know (or who are my potential clients, or who are my non-profit’s donors, etc)… I want to map the relationships between those people.  Now, once we’re starting to add an reference table in our database (PERSON_ID , CONNECTIONTYPE_ID,  PERSON_ID ) we don’t need to stop at linking people. We can link people with organizations and map out the various changing affiliations between them.

I have confidence in a company like Facebook, which appears to be incrementally adding this kind of functionality to their system, thereby reinforcing their position as a market leaders.  Compare that to Microsoft Outlook… a piece of software that enjoys even more widespread use and “platform” status than Facebook, and yet, their latest releases consist primarily a new visual interface and no substantial improvement to functionality, underlaying structure or capability. As for LinkedIn, I still like ‘em, but Facebook has made some serious inroads into the business world already…. if they want to be more than a glorified phone directory, they’ll need to start catching up faster on this kind of thing.

Filed under: CRM, LinkedIn, Social Media