
Facebook will sink under the weight of socially obligated "friendships" (2007) - _pius
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/26/facebook-will-sink-u.html
======
budu3
Facebook needs a way for you to form groups of friends that mimic real life
social groupings so that you can share info with the appropriate group(s) with
the added complexity of this being done with as less effort from the user as
possible. I don't think their current implementation of friend lists is
working.

~~~
tokenadult
_Facebook needs a way for you to form groups of friends that mimic real life
social groupings_

I have been using such a feature for months now. It is called Facebook private
groups,

<https://www.facebook.com/groups>

and I have told fellow HNers about this feature before.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319788>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398397>

To expand on what I wrote last time, one good use case on Facebook is a group
of friends with a defined commonality forming a "private group." The Help
Center page about groups features

<https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=414>

is perhaps even more helpful than the main Facebook page introducing the
concept of private groups. I have a THRIVING private group including a whole
bunch of friends who are currently or were formerly subscribers to the
national email list of a membership organization we have all been part of. The
official email lists of the organization have gone increasingly quiet, as
everyone moves over to Facebook, where the atmosphere is at once more fun
(more light-hearted topics) and more serious (gut-wrenching intimate topics
that are easier to share to a specific group of friends than to all
subscribers to an email list).

I have had good success restricting status messages, links, and the like to
subsets of my friends (friend lists) and even better success having many
interesting conversations on the most active of the Facebook private groups
that I am on. To me, the currently most frustrating aspect of the Facebook
user interface is the hard limit of twenty recipients on a private message.
Raising that to about thirty would fit my use cases a lot better some of the
time. But so far Facebook's adaptations have worked well for me to keep up
with a very diverse group of friends, relatives, co-workers, and former
classmates met in two different countries on two continents.

------
kariatx
I don't know if this is specific to where I live (Austin), but the most
interesting people I've been meeting lately have very little to no Facebook
presence. Everyone is on Twitter though.

Facebook has turned into the place I avoid my crazy family and embarrassing
childhood friends, while Twitter still is decent for finding and building new
friendships.

~~~
crikli
Yup. Facebook is people I used to know, Twitter is people I'd like to.

------
jfr
The boingboing article is just a link and excerpt for the actual article on
InformationWeek. You could have linked directly:

[http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=...](http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573)

------
chrmaury
Was this re-posted to say that they were prescient? or that they were dead
wrong?

Isn't this the driving force behind everyone trying to innovate in the social
space? Providing segmented social groups that down have the implied
obligations of "friendship."

Isn't this the impetus for why we spend all of our time on HN and Reddit?

~~~
kreek
I spend more time on HN than Facebook because I prefer to pull to push.

~~~
tokenadult
I spend more time on Facebook than on HN because Facebook's topic restrictions
(implicit in what my friends choose to discuss and recommend as links) are
very nearly exactly the union of all of my various interests, being defined
solely by my friends' interests. I still "pull" links or messages from what
Facebook displays to me, just as I don't open absolutely every thread here on
HN. I like HN a lot, and appreciate its openness in principle to the whole
world combined with its high aspirations for community and civility, but
Facebook feeds me links and thus interesting conversations that I would never
see on HN.

After edit, having seen first reply:

Yes, I am quite intentional about building a network of smart friends who have
worthwhile things to say (not screened in any way by native language, country
of origin, religious opinions, political opinions, or occupation). One of the
delights of middle age is accumulating a group of interesting friends. (And
that brings me here to HN.) As I noted another time Facebook's level of
interest came up here on HN, once when I asked "Does Facebook bore you?" (in
response to a front-page post here on HN), one friend replied, "I believe it
was Samuel Johnson who said, 'When a man is tired of Facebook, he is tired of
life.'" That kind of literary allusion in a humorous comment is routine among
my friends, and one of the reasons I like spending a lot of time on Facebook.

And after further edit, I'd be delighted to hear from other readers here why
they think Facebook could or could not do the same for them. Meanwhile, I will
ask my Facebook friends, having posted the original link that was referred to
in this submission here on HN,

[http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=...](http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573)

what they think of the predicted problem. (And the first reply was, "I guess
I'm just not avoiding that many people... it hasn't been a problem.")

~~~
chrmaury
You are a lucky, lucky person if your facebook feed is has that high a signal
to noise ratio.

Mine, and I think a lot of other people's is all drivel, and that's after
taking the time to block people who I don't care to see.

------
MikeHo
Ive noticed as my friends list grew from 100 to over 1000 over the years.. I
update my status less and less specially the more personal they are.. as my
facebook friends list consist of acquaintances and friends of all backgrounds
--

Facebook for me now has just become a social rolodex, a collection of people
I've met over the years.

Could I post about something funny that happens at a bar on a friday night out
on town? Sure! Do I think twice? Yeah, how would colleagues view it / business
acquaintances (as I tend to view everyone as a "friend" no matter how long
I've known them for)

Something exclusive for just my grad class or those in my immediate or near
immediate (weekend friends / friends to go on trips with) would be nice in a
simplified, less feature filled site service.

------
warmfuzzykitten
Nonsense. As @1adam12 said, just say no. And when you're no longer socially
obligated, unfriend them.

------
jcnnghm
I stopped using Facebook a while ago for this reason. Family, personal, and
professional are better off separate. Incidentally, at every family event I go
to now I'm asked if my sister is a lesbian because "she is in a relationship
with a girl on facebook, she must be a lesbian". My dad got several calls from
relatives asking.

Bottom line is I dont want status updates from many people. And if I do, I
want it to be so important that they'll call and tell me.

~~~
dctoedt
> _Bottom line is I dont want status updates from many people._

Just hide the ones you don't want. I've got several hundred FB friends but
only see updates from a couple of dozen at most.

~~~
anonymous246
Why do you have the others as friends?

~~~
dctoedt
> _Why do you have the others as friends?_

I know a lot of people. I generally don't turn down friend requests from
people I know, but then I don't necessarily have their updates in my FB
stream. And I've set up a couple of family- and work-related lists, and will
sometimes post only to one or another list.

------
barista
Facebook hasn't sunk really but this is certainly their achille's heel. What
FB badly needs is a concept of social circles or a better implemented groups
and an intelligent way to restrict shared stuff from being more public than it
needs to be.

The author just overestimated the impact of the issue but the issues still
exists and is very real.

~~~
nopal
I recently created a list of friends that is a subset of my friends and
changed the default level of sharing on everything I post to only be
accessible by this list.

This basically creates a sub-Facebook in which my close friends and I operate.
I still see stuff come in from other people in my main friends list, but they
don't see anything I do (unless I explicitly post on someone else's public
item).

It's working out very nicely.

~~~
theli0nheart
The problem is that lists don't work both ways. People in cliques are
generally aware of who is in the clique and who is not. Friend lists are one-
sided; only one person (you) knows who is in the list and who is not. There
are no checks in place to ensure that interaction in one group doesn't spill
over into another group.

In real life, when you hang out with a group of people, everyone else is aware
of who you are hanging out with at that moment. Facebook shows this
information only to the poster. I am uncomfortable posting a comment on a
friend's update that would be embarrassing depending on who else could see it.
In a group of friends hanging out this would never be an issue.

I suppose there is some asymmetry in real-life social networks, but nothing on
the level which Facebook encourages.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Right, so basically they need to create "rooms" on Facebook.

Just like real life.

