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[Lord Dullard]

Whatever implications social networks have on society, it's clear that they are here to stay.

Facebook has become HUGE. Many of us avoid it for various reasons. Others spend way too much time on it. Still others see it as a useful tool.

Lately I've gotten the idea that while Facebook has successfully captured the attention of an absolutely huge worldwide demographic, it's pretty limited in terms of functionality and professionalism. All of your friends are just that - 'friends'.  It's impossible to sort people by category, which (I would think, anyway) would be more or less essential for any sort of professional-level social network that wants people to take it seriously.

Facebook allows the quick dissemination of personal information, but it does not allow the user to control the manner in which it is disseminated very well. If you want to share something on Facebook, you (basically) have two options: make it public, or make it friends-only. Unless, that is, you want to painstakingly select which people can see it by designating them one by one.

This could all be cleared up by categorical social networking.

Sort your contacts into 'Casual Acquaintances', 'Business Contacts', 'Family', 'Close Friends', 'Fellow Students', 'Coworkers', 'Customers', 'Online Friends', ... et cetera. It seems almost unbelievable that Facebook doesn't already allow people to do this so that users can easily decide just who gets the messages they're sharing. More importantly, this sort of 'aimed sharing' would let the social network truly expand into the commercial world.

(Removing language like 'poke' wouldn't hurt, either.)

Additional levels of privacy amongst various categories should also be a priority for a next-gen social network. All of the people in my 'Casual Acquaintances' should not be able to know that I am best friends with User X, or that I am a business contact of User Y (if I don't want them to, that is). Facebook's open-book tendencies are a huge stumbling block to professional use of the network.

[Normandy]

Actually, Zuckerberg has already made statements about such features being in facebook, but as he put it: "People don't like making lists." In all honesty, it's very difficult for people to put their friends into categories - very rarely do they ever fit, and nobody likes maintaining those lists to make sure they are up to date. Instead, facebook and twitter go for a 'social graph', with those sorts of things implied through shared interests and friends, rather than any sort of arbitrary list.

The news feed already does this sort of aggregation. It takes into account all of these factors that hint at friendship and such (i.e. how often you talk to them over facebook, how many mutual friends between you two, other factors such as location, interest, and keywords) and shifts the burden of sorting through friends to facebook's servers and algorithms. Even if facebook had a feature to let me sort my friends into separate lists, I would not use it - I don't even sort my gmail contacts.

Really, I don't think that social networking needs to be so integrated. Why exactly is it necessary for me to be able to contact my employer and my childhood friend on the same network? Facebook is an "open book" because it was designed to be that way - an open place to socialize with friends.

[Thendash]

You already can make lists of friends and assign different privacy settings to each list. But like normandy said, I don't think many people use it, I know I don't.

[jplur]

Diaspora will let you do all that, and it's open source.

[Armok]

Yea, I've heard good things about that.  https://joindiaspora.com/

[Blank Expression]

Diaspora will let you do all that, and it's open source.

The Diaspora kids are very sharp, technologically; I've met Salzberg and Zhitomirskiy and I was very impressed by their grasp of the technological issues. (Not so impressed by the laughable security model they devised, but everyone makes mistakes.) The larger problem is that their project is ultimately useless. They have solved a technical problem that users don't care about. If you want a social network platform people will adopt, you don't start by crowing about how "free" and "open-source" it is, you start by showing how you can connect to your friends through it--wait, what? Your friends are all on Facebook? Well...shit. Let's get them on Diaspora instead, where they can join for free--wait, what? It's not free to join? Well, fuck that then, I'll just keep using Facebook!

(To forestall the inevitable conflation of open-source software and zero cost: it's not going to be free, unless you set up your own pod. The requirement of setting up your own pod means that you have just alienated 99.9% of the people who use social networks. Any "free" ones will be at the least ad-supported, and all the whining and crying about "information privacy" won't mean anything when you're connecting to somebody else's pod and your data's going through them.)


This entire thread is begging the question anyway. Until you establish that--and, more importantly, convince other people that--Facebook is indeed "outdated" (and you should probably be aware that Zuckerberg is actually a donor/investor in Diaspora) anything you say begins in irrelevance and gets worse from there.

[Flaming Dorf]

(Removing language like 'poke' wouldn't hurt, either.)

Facebook's largest demographic is a casual demographic that, frankly, enjoys virtual poking. It's not trying to be professional. I use it to share with friends - for business, there's always my website.

[Blank Expression]

(Removing language like 'poke' wouldn't hurt, either.)

Facebook's largest demographic is a casual demographic that, frankly, enjoys virtual poking. It's not trying to be professional. I use it to share with friends - for business, there's always my website.

Or just not poking your boss.

(I do FB development at work, and can't be bothered to have multiple Facebook accounts for it, so I have work people friended. No big deal--I actually know how to use their access controls so people see what I want them to see.)

[Flaming Dorf]

I actually know how to use their access controls so people see what I want them to see.

Exactly. Problem solved.