Facebook started with a profile and the profiles of others. People put thought into those profiles. Now we are moving to mindless spur of the moment noise of which .01% is something significant. I want to see a design that doesn't just pretend to foster relationships but actualy shows you who you are connecting with, how you are connecting with. Topic based filters, easy contact lists with push to call buttons with skype support, features like that...
OK read it. I'm not a fb heavy user, and I'm not on Twitter, so I missed some of the comments. Here are my thoughts:
1. I think fb should exactly filter interactions by relevancy of friends. And more specifically by relevancy of friends crossed with information categories. I have close friends, distant friends, soccer friends, inventor friends, tech friends, etc. Facebook does some categorization but it's not granular enough and not dynamic enough for me to lever it to make my interactions more valuable.
2. Privacy is my main issue on the cost of commenting and leaving 'likes'. I never do it b/c I only want to tell 5 ppl that I like a pic, and that blast is going to the world. You should try to define what 'privacy' actually means to people and break it down. I bet it's different for different people and you can add value by customizing the privacy product, and again, making it more dynamic.
3. I like the economic model for social interaction. Good first step. If you're actually going to study this you may want to decision-tree map users' interactions with the site and put some costs and values to each decision...
4. From the screen-shot I see how FB could become a social turret if designed well enough. This is very cool. Especially if you can develop a system to quantify and aggregate social interactions...the collective brain...
5. From an 'academic paper' perspective, using terms like 'triple-whammy' signal to me that this is a stream of thought paper, which takes away from the presentation of the model.
This is interesting stuff....the smart bar had me going into deep thought about how Facebook could eventually just turn into a social web browser. Anyone else see that?
Great example jayhawkbabe - part of why twitter has done so well is the easy by which awesome clients like tweetdeck multiply its power. Fb needs the same!
