You know what happens when the party gets too big? People leave for the next gig. Eventually the rest of the party goers left behind realize it just isn’t that happening anymore. Then they hear that a bunch of happening folks are hanging at this funky, little spot, tucked away on a quiet street on the other side of town. They head on over and sure enough, the party gets too crowded.
But sometimes the cool cats hang around. The host makes the difference. He sets up a fire pit in the back yard. In the basement, party goers play table tennis or bowl on the Wii. People hang out in the kitchen. A few leave but then new guests arrive. It’s a healthy mix of people, mingling from room to room, outside around the fire. Everyone feels good about their place at the party. Groups of people get to know each other. Old friends hang out, laugh and get the chance to meet, perhaps even someone who later becomes a special person in their life. You do not know everyone but there is that sense of an extended community, fostered by the host.
I thought of the party analogy after reading an excellent interview that Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped did with Kevin Fox. Kevin works for FriendFeed. He formerly worked at Google as a user experience designer, designing GMail, Google Calendar and the second version of Google Reader.
In the interview, Kevin talked about why people migrate to different social networks. It’s a bit more complex than why people move from party to party but the premise goes that at some point social networks become too overwhelming. They are built on a “friends” economy. The idea is to encourage users to have as many friends as possible. Your total number of friends is promoted on the social network. At a certain point, friends become commodities and the social networks loses its utility. Your inbox fills with friend requests. You suddenly have all these people who are constantly part of your online presence on a social network. You then “unfriend,” or “block,” people. Finally, it becomes too much and it’s on to the next social network.
Kevin goes on to say:
The most important thing is to acknowledge that friendship isn’t binary, and that there are people who aren’t your friends that you still want to interact with, and people who are your friends that you wish you could ignore online. Users need these controls to tailor their experiences to what’s useful to them, and abstract these controls from ones that indicate to your friends ’how much you like them’.
So what does Kevin say that social networks need to do? For example, FriendFeed does not promote how many “friends” a user has. More so, the idea is to let people create a well-balanced community of people, who can be friends according to different levels of abstraction. That means give the users different ways to interact with people.
FriendFeed has just started going down this path by allowing people to create rooms. You may create a public room, a private room or a semi-public room, which they announced yesterday. A private room maybe for your family. A public room could be for a professional group and a semi-public room is run by an administrator who sets the topics for discussion. Anyone may participate but the administrator sets the topics and can delete entries or comments
Has FriendFeed made an advancement that will keep people from leaving the party to find something new? I think so, mostly because they have realized and executed on the concept that friendship is not a commodity. By doing this, they will have succeeded in creating a utility that people have a use for in their daily lives.
