Might I friend you so I can track what's up with this, and add thoughts?
Sher, happy to. I'm actually pretty loose on the whole friending thing, which I think often gets rather over-dramatized on LJ. I rarely post f'locked, and I'm always happy to have conversants who are interested in productive conversation.
Could I ask you to call connecting "to read" lists as something other than "friending"?
Sadly, that's mostly out of my control. (Although I certainly understand the objection, and agree that it was an unfortunate choice for LJ.) Remember, CommYou exists inside the context of social networks, and damned near all of them use the term "friend". (Indeed, for most of them, the term is more appropriate than it is on LJ.) I specifically don't want to be in the business of managing the social graph, which is a complex enough problem unto itself and already an enormously crowded space. I'm just providing conversational mechanisms that sit on top of that graph.
That said, this is a good reminder that there's nothing inherent about that term for this concept, and I should think about how that relates to my own UI. I'll be using it in places where the social networks themselves use it (since it is the term that the members of those networks are used to), but we can see about avoiding it when it's not necessary. This will likely involve having the UI become smart about which social network(s) you're on, and using the appropriate terminology. In the long run, it's going to have to be network-smart anyway, since the available filtering options are going to be very network-specific.
And who knows? If CommYou winds up popular enough, it won't totally astonish me if we start seeing one or two social networks that are specifically tuned for it, with LJ-style non-bidirectional associations and avoiding the term "friend". I'm going to be as network-neutral as I can be, so I'd certainly welcome that. (Once the project is far enough along to deal with it, anyway.) But for the moment, I need to work with the contexts I have, and those all use "friend" very heavily.
On LJ, if I friend someone, they can read my personal thoughts by clicking on my blog, and I can read their public thoughts on my friends list. If they friend me back, it's mutual. That's poor design, to my thoughts.
Hmm. Good reminder of something I'd forgotten about. CommYou *somewhat* separates these principles already -- in particular, there is a "Who You're Reading" settings screen that is different from the friends list, and controls who you're paying attention to; that's separate from the setting of who gets to read a given conversation.
That said, that settings screen is currently viewed as a *filter* on the friends list (an assumption that I picked up from LJ), and this is a good reminder that that's not necessarily appropriate. To make it more logically appropriate, you should be able to add people to your reading list who aren't friends in the social network -- you might only be able to read their public posts, but that's okay.
There are some interesting corollaries to this -- for example, should there be a "Who's Reading You" screen, which I could argue both for and against -- and it may be a bit technically challenging to do efficiently. But it's well worth thinking about, and right now is the time to be pondering it. Thanks for the suggestion -- I'll put that into the story list.
Beyond that, there are certainly additional subtleties possible, but I'm going to have to be careful about diminishing returns and UI complexity: it's often hard to give every possible lever without making the system hard to use. So I'm mainly interested in getting the basic principles right at this stage of the game, and we can fiddle with details as we go. This was well-timed, though: I should look at the DB schema, and make sure there won't be anything too hard about adding non-friends to your reading list. (The actual feature will be a little ways off -- I know where it belongs in the UI, and that screen won't exist for a little while yet. But I'll put the story in so we don't forget about it.)
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Date: 2008-03-22 03:12 pm (UTC)Sher, happy to. I'm actually pretty loose on the whole friending thing, which I think often gets rather over-dramatized on LJ. I rarely post f'locked, and I'm always happy to have conversants who are interested in productive conversation.
Could I ask you to call connecting "to read" lists as something other than "friending"?
Sadly, that's mostly out of my control. (Although I certainly understand the objection, and agree that it was an unfortunate choice for LJ.) Remember, CommYou exists inside the context of social networks, and damned near all of them use the term "friend". (Indeed, for most of them, the term is more appropriate than it is on LJ.) I specifically don't want to be in the business of managing the social graph, which is a complex enough problem unto itself and already an enormously crowded space. I'm just providing conversational mechanisms that sit on top of that graph.
That said, this is a good reminder that there's nothing inherent about that term for this concept, and I should think about how that relates to my own UI. I'll be using it in places where the social networks themselves use it (since it is the term that the members of those networks are used to), but we can see about avoiding it when it's not necessary. This will likely involve having the UI become smart about which social network(s) you're on, and using the appropriate terminology. In the long run, it's going to have to be network-smart anyway, since the available filtering options are going to be very network-specific.
And who knows? If CommYou winds up popular enough, it won't totally astonish me if we start seeing one or two social networks that are specifically tuned for it, with LJ-style non-bidirectional associations and avoiding the term "friend". I'm going to be as network-neutral as I can be, so I'd certainly welcome that. (Once the project is far enough along to deal with it, anyway.) But for the moment, I need to work with the contexts I have, and those all use "friend" very heavily.
On LJ, if I friend someone, they can read my personal thoughts by clicking on my blog, and I can read their public thoughts on my friends list.
If they friend me back, it's mutual. That's poor design, to my thoughts.
Hmm. Good reminder of something I'd forgotten about. CommYou *somewhat* separates these principles already -- in particular, there is a "Who You're Reading" settings screen that is different from the friends list, and controls who you're paying attention to; that's separate from the setting of who gets to read a given conversation.
That said, that settings screen is currently viewed as a *filter* on the friends list (an assumption that I picked up from LJ), and this is a good reminder that that's not necessarily appropriate. To make it more logically appropriate, you should be able to add people to your reading list who aren't friends in the social network -- you might only be able to read their public posts, but that's okay.
There are some interesting corollaries to this -- for example, should there be a "Who's Reading You" screen, which I could argue both for and against -- and it may be a bit technically challenging to do efficiently. But it's well worth thinking about, and right now is the time to be pondering it. Thanks for the suggestion -- I'll put that into the story list.
Beyond that, there are certainly additional subtleties possible, but I'm going to have to be careful about diminishing returns and UI complexity: it's often hard to give every possible lever without making the system hard to use. So I'm mainly interested in getting the basic principles right at this stage of the game, and we can fiddle with details as we go. This was well-timed, though: I should look at the DB schema, and make sure there won't be anything too hard about adding non-friends to your reading list. (The actual feature will be a little ways off -- I know where it belongs in the UI, and that screen won't exist for a little while yet. But I'll put the story in so we don't forget about it.)