

Path’s Playbook For Appealing To Normal People - kylebragger
http://robberbaronblog.com/2010/11/paths-playbook-for-appealing-to-normal-people/

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stcredzero
This is the route that Diaspora and those who want to be "the next Facebook"
should have taken. Just give ordinary users a mechanism for sharing things
with their closest friends that's easier yet just as flexible as email, and
you have a winner.

Idea: have an easy way of sharing stuff that's for "everyone except for the
parents." (Also have a way of tagging friends who are your parent's closest
friends.) Combine this with a way of tagging already-published stuff as "not
for the parents" which will revoke items which you've already sent. (Also
delay everything sent to parents and friends of parents by 30 minutes or so,
so you have time to change your mind without their ever knowing.)

EDIT: We're reaching the point where your computer/smartphone photo sharing
mechanism can detect your face in photos and detect scantily clad people. We
should be able to have the device detect these conditions and your parents on
the recipients list and pop up a dialog asking, "There's racy content in this
photo, do you want your parents to see it?"

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Jschwa
@tylerstalder left this in the comments of the post:

[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-
networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)

It's an excellent deck from a Google UX Engineer that describes the scenario
you are talking about with sharing with "everyone except for parents".

The problem that the deck illustrates is that the breakdown isn't just Parents
and Everyone else. Each person has 4-6 different groups, each with its own
level of appropriate or relevant content. The trick is designing to account
for each.

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stcredzero
I think the trick is to leave a path open for a person to discover that their
personal social Venn diagrams are this complex. There should be several
stages. At each stage, a user discovers some pain (I wish I could leave my
parents out of this) and then discovers an easy solution. (Ah ha! I can use
this "parent" tag and then it prompts me so I can choose to not let my parents
see this.) The user is pleased, until they discover their next pain. (I don't
always want _all_ of my friends to know about...) The end result is that
you've solved the user's pain several times over, and so they love your
product.

