The Cute Cat Theory, Activism and CommYou

[jducoeur]

Thanks to jikharra for the pointer to this very interesting article, adapted from a conference speech. It starts out making some fairly conventional observations, but the main thrust of the article is about the fact that the test of any good social tool is whether it gets used for political activism. (And that a useful tool needs to be useful for both banal *and* political purposes -- the banal ones provide cover for the political ones.)

It's fascinating food for thought, and I'm going to have to chew on its ramifications for CommYou. It may well push in some stories that had been relegated to the backlog. For example, viral invitation: conversations that are nominally hidden and private, but where invitees can invite others into the discussion. That one's been sitting in the list from the beginning, but I hadn't been paying much attention to it because I didn't see an important use case. But it's nicely suited to some activist scenarios, where you want to be able to get the word out without something actually being *public*.

It's things like this that make this project so much fun. I confess, I have no bloody idea how CommYou is actually going to get used, but I'm increasingly sure that, if I don't screw up, people are going to come up with all sorts of uses that I haven't yet imagined...

Comments

[loosecanon.livejournal.com]

Might I friend you so I can track what's up with this, and add thoughts?

Could I ask you to call connecting "to read" lists as something other than "friending"?

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.

I'd like to be able to set a connection at "read them", "let them read me" and so on types of levels of privacy, beyond what passes for filters here.

Thank you for considering my opinions.

[jducoeur]

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.)

Reading vs. friendship

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Yes, there should definitely be a "I want to read X" concept, distinct from "I consider X a friend". I'm not sure why LJ doesn't do it.

Re: Reading vs. friendship

[jducoeur]

I suspect they baked it into their schema and UI too early, and things got to the point where it was too traumatic to change it later. Inertia becomes ever-more-powerful in any system.

And to be fair, it's a convenient simplification. The tension between "easy" and "powerful" is omnipresent, and it's not unreasonable to forsake the power users to make things easier for the masses. I may disagree with the decision, but I can certainly argue that it's a decent compromise. I'm going to have to work pretty hard to make things more sophisticated without it being over-complex.

But this is why I want suggestions like that now: to have as much idea as possible now about where we might want things to go, so I have some idea of how it ought to fit into the overall plan and try to avoid cutting off desireable pathways...

Re: Reading vs. friendship

[mindways]

You've given me the image of a checkbox buried deep in the preferences, labelled "Drama-Free Nomenclature". ;)

Re: Reading vs. friendship

[metageek.livejournal.com]

The tension between "easy" and "powerful" is omnipresent,

True. You can probably come up with a decent UI that'll support the separation, but make it easy to mark someone as both.

Re: Reading vs. friendship

[jducoeur]

In fact, they're probably going to be fairly separated UIs. On the one hand, there is the question of "who can read me", which has much to do with the social network, so my only *initial* plan is to support all of the subgraphs that the social network provides. (Facebook now provides sufficiently fine-grained tools for this to be practical.) That may not suffice for the long run, and I may find that I need better integration for it, but I suspect it'll be a good start.

OTOH, there is the question of "who I am reading", which is all about CommYou, so that's a CommYou UI. It defaults to all of your social network, but anything in that (both friends and communities) can be trivially disabled. And the upshot of the above discussion is that I've added a story (probably a little ways down the line) that you can add any arbitrary person or community as well...

[loosecanon.livejournal.com]

Thanks very kindly. I appreciate the level of thought you are investing in the project.