April 12th, 2007
Why Circle of Friends Works in Social Networking
by Joshua Porter | 
14 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/592
The most popular paradigm for social networking sites is the “circle of friends” paradigm. This is when you connect to people by adding them as a friend, and your connection means that they are prioritized differently than those who are not. There are other paradigms, too. Wikipedia mentions a couple others including “Old Boys Network” (classmates.com) and “Circle of Trust” (epinions).
Although organizing around friends seems like an obvious way to do things, it wasn’t obvious at first and in some cases is still not obvious. Though much of how we think about our own lives is in terms of friends, its still another step to build software that recognizes this and leverages it to make social interaction work. One of the first to do this was PlanetAll, sold to Amazon in 1998, and was the foundation of the Friends feature there. Up until then many networking sites had tried to connect people who didn’t already know each other…instead of leveraging people who were already friends. Duh, right? Well…hindsight is 20/20…
A great example of this difference is explained in this article about Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. What I Learned from Friendster. He explains that what makes his new startup, Socializer, different from other event sites like evite is that you can connect to people in a circle-of-friends fashion. In other words, your event information is prioritized differently according to who your friends are. Their events will show up on your calendar and vice-versa.
In some cases (like the professional arena) a circle-of-friends paradigm isn’t going to work. At that point a contacts-based paradigm will be more appropriate. It’s not hard to see how we can map our real life to software, but it does take a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. We have to believe that the system is modeling how things really are, and so using appropriate relationship words helps designers achieve that.
In terms of social networking, however, everyone, at all points in their life, can describe themselves in terms of their friends and organizing information in that way makes perfect sense. That’s why circle-of-friends systems are so prevalent. It works because it is the primary way that we view our social lives. Another reason why they say you can get a good sense of someone by looking at their friends.
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1. John Carricaburu 9:10am, Thu 12th, 2007
Interesting read! Our company’s free software fits in there too (Our slogan is “File Sharing Between Friends”; it’s basically peer-to-peering without the random strangers, fake files, and virus risks).
GigaTribe is like MSN or Yahoo! Messenger, with an extra twist: you add your friends to your network, and give them access to specific folders on your harddrive (and vice-versa); you can download huge files off of each other’s hard drives and chat at the same time. Neat thing, though, is that you can give certain friends access to folders that other friends won’t have access too. If you want to comment (or criticize!) our model, feel free to, I love feedback!
John (john at gigatribe dot com)
http://www.gigatribe.com
2. David Malouf 9:57am, Thu 12th, 2007
One of the things that gets me in “Circle of Friends” is that not all of my “friends” are in the same circle. I belong to many circles. I find this really apparent in my use of Twitter, where what I say goes to ALL of my followers and I can’t direct to a specific circle. I.e. I have my real friends and then I have my UX associates on Twitter and even then, there are subsets of each circle. While I think for 90% of my Twits it just doesn’t matter, there are times where I have to revert to other methods to send the equivalent of Twits to some filtered circle of my complete collection of circles.
But in general, I totally agree that “circles” are definitely a one great assumption for thinking about social networking.
3. Lee LeFever 2:11pm, Thu 12th, 2007
Hi Josh.
One of the things that makes circle of fiends most useful too is the filtering effect. You don’t want to keep up with the flow of everyone in a social network, so your friends enable you to limit the flow to only people you know. Linked-in Answers does this well. In this way it does work like real life – my friends enable me to filter new music (for instance) and it works because we know enough about one another to be able to say “you’re gonna love this.”
4. Kat 10:10pm, Thu 12th, 2007
OurStory.com takes the “circle of friends” theory to heart with privacy circles that allow users to create an unlimited number of circles. For example, I can post publicly or privately, with photos, video and narratives and assign each story to a specific circle.
I can also assign interview questions to each individual “circle” and allow only the circle to view, comment or post to my visual timeline of my life story, circle of friends, or family history, etc.
It’s pretty cool.
5. James Edwards 9:07am, Fri 13th, 2007
The problem with circle of friends is that not all friends are the same. I have friends I like but have only just met, friends I trust only up to a point, and close friends I trust implicitly. And there are some things I’d say to a tiny number of people. “friends” is too loose a definition – really, we have a unique relationship with each person we know.
Where XFN and the cirlc-of-friends concept fails is in not taking account of the granularity of trust relationships. “friends”, “contacts” and “the world” is not enough data to describe the situation.
6. Josh 10:15am, Fri 13th, 2007
Right points, all. I’m currently working on drilling down into the different connection paradigms and finding that most, if not all, are stretched and used in ways other than their literal meaning. But it also mirrors the way we use the term “friends” anyway…some people consider folks they’ve met once a “friend”, while for others a friend is someone whom they’ve had much more interaction with.
7. Dexter Zaf 4:22pm, Fri 13th, 2007
Very good point. These social networking sites doesn’t excite me at all. I have been using social networking sites back in the the late 90’s. This is just another buzz word.
8. Lifer 4:56am, Sun 15th, 2007
And you never really know if someone really wants to be your friend, or if they just want access to your circle of friends .. to increase their sphere of influence .. hmm, kind of like the real world
9. Jimmyco 6:07pm, Sat 5th, 2007
10. Jimmyco 6:08pm, Sat 5th, 2007
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