
Google UX Researcher Explains the Social Networking Gay Bar Problem - lionhearted
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2
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csallen
_> > If your privacy practices aren't transparent, then you introduce doubt.
Doubt leads to lower usage._

So true. Too many apps and services don't understand that as users, when we
see "Connect to Facebook/Twitter", our minds are immediately filled with doubt
and mistrust. Why? Because we want control over what our friends see about us,
and we suspect your app doesn't give a shit and will shamelessly promote
itself at our expense. So be clear. If you're going to write on my wall, _say
you will._ And if you're not, then _say you won't._ Don't leave me guessing.

~~~
edanm
But is this true of most users? Or only people like us? (I'm really asking,
I'm not sure; all I know is that _I_ don't like using Facebook Connect.)

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netcan
I think its most users. Remember also that a lot of facebook users don't use
it much and don't understand all of what it does.

~~~
bad_user
<http://foursquare.com/>

<http://www.kingdomsatwar.com/>

<http://vimeo.com/>

<http://tripadvisor.com>

(just examples, on the top of my head, that are using Facebook Connect).

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awakeasleep
I really enjoyed this presentation.

Aside from all the interesting ways of defining privacy I never thought of
before, the implications of the presenter's goal (making everyone happy to use
social networking for almost all of their life) struck me the hardest.

Let's say some radical changes came about so that almost any reasonable person
would feel free to post all their personal data on facebook, knowing that
sensitive parts would be kept to specific groups. That still wouldn't take
care of what I see as the biggest lurking concern; how our data will be
handled in the future.

It's certainly paranoia, but we've all seen good companies turn to shit, and
people have even seen stable _countries_ turn bad. If a database of everyone's
un-self-censored private data existed, it would have untold implications. Even
now, it's staggering to think about. I don't know, I guess it's getting late
and I'm sleepy. But I think about FB's extremely high valuation and wonder if
something like that could be a seed of instability that would allow for
decision makers from unknown vectors to influence how FB uses its data and
stuff like that.

~~~
cmars232
I don't think it's paranoia at all. It doesn't even take bad motives, just a
lapse of judgment or faulty assumption to ruin privacy -- like Google Buzz
integration into GMail.

I think the solution requires more than feel-good policy statements and trust
building. And God forbid someone mention legislation.

Ultimately the users need full localized control (hosting, or decrypting) over
their private identities, content and social connections. Private groups
should be darknets. And it should be as easy as automatic to set up and use.
Zooko's Triangle be damned.

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lionhearted
This presentation is somewhat long, but extremely informative. If you're
designing any sort of application or content that includes sharing or privacy,
I'd consider it almost required reading. It's that informative - the best I've
seen on the topic.

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usaar333
Aside: Does anyone else have problems with left/right keys not going to the
next slide as normally happens on slideshare? I got a bit annoyed having to
use my mouse 223 times.

~~~
sundarurfriend
The entire UI was horrific for me. I _had_ to use full screen since the slide
didn't show up fully otherwise, and even in fullscreen Page up/down keys
didn't work, arrow up/down keys moved terribly slow (like 1 page/minute slow),
and the only way for me to navigate was to use the mouse scroll wheel (or the
scrollbar on the right). I'd really like to know if I missed something or it
was this way for everyone.

~~~
rasur
The flash slide viewer _is_ awful.

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WesleyJohnson
Incredibly informative presentation. It helped visualize and conceptualize
things I was already doing, like occasionally restricting my status updates to
certain people: e.g. when I complain about my living situation and don't want
those I'm living with to see it or when I hesitate to post a crude joke
because I don't want my mom to see it.

I would suspect that to build something that comes close to matching our
offline social networks you would have to start from the ground up, but I also
think Facebook is in a position to offer some of the benefits.

One thing I would love to see? When I write a status update, post a photo or
note, share a link, etc - I would like Facebook to tell me how many can see
it. Just as LinkedIN can tell me how many people are in my network, Facebook
could easily tell me that this photo marked "friends only" will be visible to
my 128 "friends", but this status update marked "friends of friends" will be
visible by ~15,000 people. Similarly, in Debbie's case, when viewing other
people's photos, Facebook could tell her: your friends can see this photo and
offer her tools to disallow that. Just because the Gay Bar employees allowed
"friends of friends" to see their photos and I'm friend, doesn't immediately
mean I want my friends to see them or see that I commented on them. I think
Facebook could tackle these scenarios given the structure they already have.

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three14
Has anyone made an effort yet to do the evident thing, and simply build a
social service that lets you have separate groups of friends for all features?

~~~
spiffworks
The problem is that nobody wants to present their users with a gigantic list
of contacts on first login and ask them to sort and organise them into groups.
Instead, everybody just lumps all the contacts together so that the user is
least inconvenienced at first, only to later experience problems. Google is in
a pretty good position to tackle this, since a fair number of people who
already have Google contacts probably also have their contacts sorted into
groups for email, and that's a good representation of their real-life social
network.

~~~
mattmanser
You sort your contacts in gmail? I honestly would never bother, really don't
see the point.

I very much doubt Google are, but Facebook might be in a good position to
figure this out themselves now anyway. If I'm friends with Em, Bob, Barry and
Jill, and Em and Bob are friends and Barry and Jill are friends, the
friendship groups are fairly obvious aren't they?

Obviously I've never seen their data so don't know, but I wouldn't be
surprised that they do have the information. Just looking at 'Mutual Friends'
of people I know on Facebook it seems to be fairly well defined.

~~~
Timothee
Facebook goes further than the mutual friendships and takes into account all
sorts of interactions like "Like"'s, comments, etc. and probably re-sharing of
contents, common events, common pictures, common places... I've been told they
use that to figure out what to show you in your feed, so pretty much to know
whom of your FB friends you're actually interested in.

But I'd be very surprised if they don't use that in a "group" perspective as
well. Which would be very interesting because groups evolve over time but you
going back to clean up your lists doesn't happen very often, if ever.

From a privacy standpoint, it is a bit scary. But it's very cool from a
tech/CS point-of-view.

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aarlo
Come for the "gay bar", stay for the slides

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JeremyBanks
For anyone else who can't stand SlideShare, here it is in Google Docs:
[https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=1vcckzZhBmWzGSalZV_yaJcQ...](https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=1vcckzZhBmWzGSalZV_yaJcQnf0NvxfPTRCbfkJjknbOEGT2o1xtDwC-
ojTeC&authkey=CKHk444H)

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tyng
That's why I keep three separate social networks: one on facebook (friends),
one on Twitter (colleagues and strangers) and one on LinkedIn (professional
contacts).

It's hard to keep them separated though, especially since now I feed my
twitter stream to the other two, seriously considering to remove the feed.

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goatforce5
It's also interesting to think about how to use social networks/networking if
you're the owner of a store or service that people may not want to promote
across all of the networks.

eg: Debbie probably wouldn't have any trouble recommending a new burger joint
she found (except if she was telling everyone she was on a diet, perhaps). But
now that Debbie has realised her contributions to social networks leak out
further than her intended audience, it's going to be really really hard to
convince her to 'Like' that gay bar were her friends work.

As someone involved with a few different 'gay bars' (ie, services people like
using, but in a lot of cases don't want all(/any!) of their friends/family to
know about) it's an interesting problem... And I have no idea what the
solution is.

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miguelpais
Debbie's problem is exactly what makes me use the Friend Lists feature of
Facebook. It might not protect your data that well, but at least it is able to
keep things semi-private from the (less tech-savvy) friends of yours from
other social circles.

But, of course, Facebook screws you in the end. Even you choose exactly what
friends see that photo of yours, and what friends see that wall post, you
happen to comment on a friend's photo and then everybody sees it.

And it also does nothing about friends of yours from some circle deliberately
accessing the profiles of the people from other circle and seeing everything
you didn't want them to see (like tagged photos of yours that they couldn't
see on your profile because you forbidden them to).

~~~
travisp
It's also surprisingly difficult and annoying to add and switch people around
to Friend Lists.

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FiddlerClamp
Strange. I figured that Facebook handled this by default. If I make a comment
on Friend A's status or post, and Friend B is my friend but not a friend of A,
I assumed that Friend B could see neither A's post or my comment. That's a
pretty big hole...

~~~
bkbleikamp
It depends on the privacy setting for the status/post.

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ugh
The good news of this presentation is that vast improvements in the social
network space are possible, improvements that might just be able to tumble the
incumbent. The hard part is finding them.

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sethg
Could the multiple-kinds-of-contacts issue be handled if social-networking
sites explicitly allowed one user to have multiple handles? E.g., a user could
be “Bess Smith” to her family members, “B. J. Smith” to her college friends,
and “Elizabeth Smith Jones” to her clients, and only her five closest friends
would have “friend”-level access to all three identities.

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ThomPete
Great presentation but his claims about IM are not solid IMO.

IM is personal messaging i.e. we communicate directly with people in the way
that's appropriate. Nothing get's broadcasted out. If anything IM is a perfect
list.

I have friends, groups of friends, colleagues, clients etc. on my list but
they don't bleed into each other.

Also in most IM you can decide to be invisible for selected people and not for
others.

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aufreak3
This talk raises some questions for me.

Email doesn't seem to have the kinds of grouping problems discussed in the
presentation. So what is it really that isn't in email that can then be solved
by something Facebook-like that doesn't do "social networking" like Facebook
does it? Is it just that the interface is simpler?

email = status update, social group = mailing list, contacts db = friends
network

what else?

~~~
moultano
Passive observation. I'm vaguely interested in what my acquaintances are up
to, but they would never impose so much as to email me.

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dchs
This is four months old:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479761>

~~~
ScottWhigham
So you are surprised that a title like, "Google UX Researcher Explains the
Social Networking Gay Bar Problem" gets more votes/views than one with this
title, "The Real Life Social Network v2"? And four months ago - wasn't that
around the time of the Facebook movie w/ a similar title?

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pjscott
I like how pseudonymity works: you go by one or more pseudonyms, on various
web sites. It lets you have multiple identities, and figuring out which
identities are the same person is non-trivial. It's an easy hack. You can post
your erotic furry artwork under one identity, use another professionally,
another with your friends, and everything will be more or less okay.

Alternately, maybe people will get used to lack of privacy, and acknowledge
that everyone has more than one group of acquaintances, and that information
on the web is permanent even if people themselves change. You'll know this is
happening when someone finds naked pictures of a female teacher on the
Internet and she _doesn't_ get fired. I'm not holding my breath, though.

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joe_the_user
I think he is simply wrong that web is only going to get more and more social.

I would posit that an opposite movement will also happen. Social networks
become more ubiquitous but that very ubiquity will teach people what _not_ to
share and raise the value of the "anonymous web".

For example, if a merchant can understand their customers exactly, it
introduces an _information asymmetry_ into the market game that the merchant
enjoys but I, as customer dislike. I don't want a merchant to know exactly
what I'd be willing to pay for X. I want the merchant offering prices
anonymously and then for me to be able to pick the best of those prices.

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MortenK
Social media will revolutionize everything, says man working in social media.

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colombian
This is effectively solved by the new Facebook groups.

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drivebyacct2
Oh, it's the presentation I read 4 months ago.

Facebook Groups and Friends Lists are a step in the right direction but they
haven't been implemented well in other aspects of Facebook.

If Google Me ever became a reality (and not in the limited "only existing
product enhancements" fashion) this would be an interesting discussion.
Facebook's model isn't friendly to the privacy oriented sharing schemes.

