Thursday, November 08, 2007

Sociable

Taking time off (or perhaps he sent it using in-flight wireless?) from soaring, Robert leaves a comment on my 'Ethical Offsets?' post.
Perhaps there could be a service where you could connect to people you "hate" ? So whenever you get an unwanted invite you would (perhaps automatically) send an invite for that person to join your network of people-who-are-not-my-friends.

Way ahead of you my Dutch friend.

Robert goes on
If nothing else such a network would provide material for dozens of Ph.D. students... Inevitably there will be lots of interesting conflicts between the friend and not-friend networks! Yes it is really time to step up to richer notions of the edges of those "social" graphs. Just "is-a-friend-of" or "knows" is no longer cool.

Agreed. Subtleties such as 'enjoyed hot tubs with in foreign lands' need to be captured.

I also suggest there is a dissertation waiting to be written on the phenomenon of 'social network amnesia' - that confused feeling you experience when, in looking through any one of your friends lists, you ask yourself why half of its members are on it.

1 comment:

Robert said...

Sorry! I must have missed your post of 4 Oct 2007. I guess I was busy flying or so ;).
Anyway, obviously I agree. It is time for "anti-social" networks. Or rather as I suggested networks that allows "labeled" edges, so that we can have richer notions then just "is-a-friend-of". This then leads to the possibility to have multiple connections/edges between 2 persons/ids. In a sense some of that data is already there and could be aggregated. For example I'm linked to you professionally (as at e.g. LinkedIn), through this blog (what would the label for that edge be?), on facebook. But simple aggregation would still not show the "hot-tubbing-foreign-countries" edge, etc.
Negations like "is-not-a-friend-of" are supposed to be tricky and e.g. not allowed in RDF, but these are only tricky because the nerds overvalue consistency and logical soundness. We probably should put those people on our "is-not-a-friend" list!

Vaguely related: you probably find this really interesting:

http://owela.vtt.fi/owela/uploads/2007/11/making-sense-of-social-media-vtt-r-04539-07.pdf

I only ran into it today. I have not read it completely myself yet. Nevertheless browse at least the Conclusions chapter. It contains a nice metaphor about "digits" (which used to mean "fingers") and argues that the core aspects of social media are: Identity, Recognition, Trust, Belonging and Creativity.