Inside Facebook speculates that Facebook may be in the process of adding Friend Lists, aka Buddy Lists aka Contact Groups to a future release of the platform:

The two new API methods are:

friends.getLists
friends.getListsMembers

Based on these method names, “Friend Lists” could be buddy lists that you might use to organize your friends. For example, “Work Friends” or, say… “Top Friends”.

If these are indeed upcoming features of the Facebook Platform, I think this has two major implications:

1. This could dramatically simplify privacy controls. Right now, users manage privacy settings per-feature or by managing their Limited Profile list. The addition of Friend Lists means one can now much more flexibly and powerfully manage privacy settings per List. Work friends see one portion of your profile, personal friends see another, best friends see yet another.

This will be a welcome change for everyone whose LinkedIn networks have migrated to Facebook. Consequently, this could mean accelerated LinkedIn attrition: per-Friend-List privacy settings could substantially decrease the need of many to actively maintain their LinkedIn accounts as well.

2. More significant, this would mark the first time Facebook has moved to directly compete with a top Platform application.

Source: Inside Facebook, “Speculation: Facebook adding Friend Lists; implications for Top Friends, LinkedIn?”

I’ll take the second part first, since I think it matters less. Anyone who has been paying attention to Facebook should have known that it:

1. has always had the option to make whatever it wants, even if inspired by an app on the platform
2. was probably on the long-term roadmap for Facebook for some time
3. should not be a surprise to anyone

In contrast, the first point about privacy and security is much more interesting to me, probably since I’ve been talking about it for years now (at least since March 2004) and it’s nice to see it making it into the usable, at scale realm:

SNS 1.0 is at risk from another powerful force, however. Although the feature sets of these tools will often fail to accommodate user’s needs, a far more fundamental problem may exist in the very foundations. As mentioned we all interact within different social zones and contexts. As mentioned, our circles are interconnected and often linear (although promotions and demotions can be accelerated for any arbitrary reason). I call this the Social Context Continuum. Relationships evolve, or devolve, over time. As more information is exchanged, the bonds change based on a number of criterion — trust being near the top of that list.

The dilemma is two-fold. One the one hand, there are not enough “shades” for tinting relationships in the current systems. Degree-based systems are meaningful only in term of understanding graphs. However, they do nothing to indicate affinity or opportunity. Graduated scales, going from Enemy to Friend only serve to collapse the value of categories as a whole — much like the junk drawer in most everyone’s kitchen which becomes a convenient catch-all for hard to place items.

On the other hand, the positioning of SNS is problematic to its long-term unevolved survival. For some users, SNS provides a unique social environment that encourages and develops new relationships. For others, the potential of SNS to create business opportunities provides significant value. Unfortunately, the quest for ubiquity at the same level as e-mail or cell phone address books is extremely difficult to pass, at least by current standards.

In the end, these two forces will come together and result in a growing sense of frustration for users. This frustration will stem from the inability to manage more of their network from a single location. The result will be that users will be forced to maintain identities in numerous locations without the ability to easily leverage previously efforts. Some may argue this will prove to be a much smaller problem than it seems, however, we live in a culture of consolidation and where time and other pressures continuously drive us towards new forms of “efficiency”.

Source: SocialTwister, “The SNS Differentiation Challenge”

Interestingly enough, Facebook could have the requisite level of engagement and momentum to materialize the “Social Context Continuum” for a large part of the internet populous.

Technorati Tags: f8, facebook, facebook+applications, social+architecture, social+networking, socialcontextcontinuum

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In my attempts to turn over a new leaf and return to my public life of blogging, I’ve made a couple of changes here at SocialTwister. First and foremost, you’ll notice that there is a new theme in place. I’d like to send special thanks to Elena at Design Disease for this great theme that I was able to drop in without a hitch. As a bit of trivia, Elena also designed the SocialRoots web site for me some time ago.

Secondly, you’ll notice that there is a new tagline for the site: Confessions of a Social Tools Architect. While I don’t anticipate that the nature of my writing will change, but more importantly, I think it quite aptly summarizes the work that I’ve done here to date. Since the majority of my work for the last 4 years has been circling and toiling around the design and development of Social Tools, it seems only appropriate to bring that to the top.

Hope there’s still some of you still out there :)

Technorati Tags: greg+narain

There’s some very interesting discussion circling now about the use of channels in Twitter. Most every Twitter user is well aware that groups are a fundamentally lacking feature in the system - perhaps it’s a strength, not a weakness.

Chris Messina has prepared what can only be described a working specification for the implementation of Channels, a la IRC, in Twitter. There are some great observations, so I recommend reading the whole post. For the unwilling, here’s a few useful excerpts:

What I’ve realized is that this “channel” concept meets many of the aggregate desires expressed in various “Groups for Twitter” discussions while not inheriting a lot of the unnecessary management cruft that most group systems seem to suffer from, it is easily accessible adapting current Twitter syntax and convention, it’s easy to learn and lightweight, it’s very flexible and entirely folksonomic and works with people’s current behaviors, rather than forcing anyone to learn anything radically new. It also keeps the interface aspects to a minimum (as I’ll soon explain), invents little by borrowing from age old IRC conventions also adopted by an existing web application and, from what Britt said so far, actually works consistently on cell phones (whereas, for example, the star key does not).

[…]

Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well. Rather than trying to ping-pong discussion between one or more individuals with daisy-chained @replies, using a simple #reply means that people not in the @reply queue will be able to follow along, as people do with Flickr or Delicious tags. Furthermore, topics that enter into existing channels will become visible to those who have previously joined in the discussion. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can choose to leave or remove topics that don’t interest them.

Source: “Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels”, Factory Joe

I’m quite keen on the notion of “metaprogramming” against the Twitter OS - largely related to the various hooks we’ve built for LittleGrams. Curious if Chris’ model could work, I attempted to setup an account to no avail. Chris’ approach relies on the # (pound) symbol as the marker that a channel tag is ahead. Unfortunately, there is an implicit meaning to the # in URI-based systems which could be a source of conflict going forward.

But wait! Twitter does allow us to register names that have the _ in them. To give this a try, I’ve registered _littlegrams on Twitter. I’ll attempt to use this as a channel for making announcements regarding the product - the actual littlegrams account is used for posting to the application. I am ok with the signal that an _ is meant to be channel as opposed to @ being direct.

That being said, I’m just not sure I want this in my stream in general. I see Stowe’s taken to using them in his tweets but I find the whole affair a bit messy. Twitter serves up too small a triscuit for any real meat - and that’s a strength, not a weakness. In fact, what I would prefer to see is some pre-processing happen on messages. Let me explain using LittleGrams as an example.

For our system, we wanted more robust messaging via Twitter, however, for a number of reasons (efficiency, security, etc) we opted to work via direct messages. To this end, you could say that we setup a Channel Director. With our app, you send a message to the director like so:

d littlegrams word bye-bye

Our system polls for the commands and then is able to parse that into two distinct things: an instruction on what to publish and a notification back out to the network. If we were to adopt this to the current problem set, I might be able to do this:

d _channel #barcamp #chris+messina Can’t wait to get to the Block!

As we’re doing, a processor for _channel could be setup (or Twitter could offer one) that was able to make the channel descriptors into metadata instead of direct data. The message that would be broadcast out to those individuals following either of these channels would be a short, cruft-free message:

Can’t wait to get to the Block!

The other thing I like about this approach is that it quarantines someone’s accounting work. While tagging is a great thing that continues to subvert systems everywhere, I think it is still largely personal. That may fit well with the nature of most Tweets today, but is that the future?

I think that all the other mechanisms Chris has are awesome and could easily see them working out well, especially if the fine folks at Twitter can make the dream into a reality.

That’s my 20 cents. For some more background, check out Stowe and Brian’s posts.

Technorati Tags: brian solis, channels, chris messina, groupings, littlegrams, stowe boyd, twitter

It’s been quite some time since I’ve had enough spare time to even think about the URL for my blog. We’ve been overwhelmed with work at Blue Whale Labs for the last few months and that has quickened to a near-death pace in the last several weeks as we pushed out projects for some of our clients. I will blog about that separately as they deserve their own time and place.

At the same time, I have been toiling in the background on a new secret application that’s been described as many things:

• Dogster for Babies
• Facebook for Parents
• Pownce for Parents
• Twitter for Babies

I don’t think I have a favorite - I like them all. The project is truly a labor of love, driven more and more by the obsessive pursuits of a first-time father. I started thinking about the app back in February (though I had another version of it in mind a couple of years ago). It wasn’t until May that I undertook the building process in earnest. Unfortunately, setbacks run wild and borrowed cycles from an ever-increasingly-busy development team has made it a bit harder to get things done in the time I would have liked.

To help push me in the right direction (and to get a little good old-fashioned buzz going), I decided to enter the TechCrunch20 competition. I’m sure most of you are aware, but it’s like a smaller scale Demo event sans the expensive fees. Mike Arrington and Jason Calcanis organized the event and now share that role with Heather Harde. There was some fierce competition, to be sure. It seems there were close to 700 applications, no doubt accelerated by the $50,000 prize that will be awarded to first place.

It’s going to be a great event, I am sure. I say that just a little disheartened, of course, since we won’t be on stage. Announcements went out via e-mail today to the winners and, erm, the losers. Needless to say, a nice note from Heather dropped into my inbox this afternoon. Ahh well, that’s how these things go. I’ll spare the details of what happens to those of us who lose. I do look forward to see how has made it into the 20 - I think that’s reward enough, to be honest. In due time, I am sure they will make a formal announcement on their own.

So now I’m in the 21+ crowd. It doesn’t buy you much, but you’ve got to toss your card in the hat if you want to play the game. And play on we will.
Update: So I guess it’s even worse than originally anticipate. Apparently they selected 100 semi-finalists, and no, we weren’t even in that group. Now that is depressing.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship, events, heather harde, jason calcanis, michael arrington, techcrunch, techcrunch20, web2.0