Comments on: Why Circle of Friends Works in Social Networking

By: Jimmyco

Jimmyco — Sat, 05 May 2007 22:08:06 +0000

By: Jimmyco

Jimmyco — Sat, 05 May 2007 22:07:34 +0000

By: links for 2007-05-04 (Leapfroglog)

links for 2007-05-04 (Leapfroglog) — Fri, 04 May 2007 06:17:32 +0000

[...] Bokardo Â» Why Circle of Friends Works in Social Networking What does Porter mean by ‘works’? I don’t think the current implementations of befriending in social software work. Friendship is such a fluid thing (as Danah Boyd has pointed out in the past) that we need to move beyond simple binary categories. (tags: socialnetworking friends socialsoftware friendship) [...]

By: newsmotto! » Circle of friends

newsmotto! » Circle of friends — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:38:29 +0000

[...] Joshua writes a nice piece on ‘why circle of friends works in social networking‘. [...]

By: links for 2007-04-19 at Framtider.net

links for 2007-04-19 at Framtider.net — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 22:21:04 +0000

[...] Bokardo: Why Circle of Friends Works in Social Networking “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.” (tags: community bokardo den_sociala_webben friendster socializer) [...]

By: Lifer

Lifer — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 08:56:49 +0000

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

By: Dexter Zaf

Dexter Zaf — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 20:22:57 +0000

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.

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:15:24 +0000

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.

By: James Edwards

James Edwards — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:07:46 +0000

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.

By: Kat

Kat — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 02:10:29 +0000

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.

By: Lee LeFever

Lee LeFever — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:11:14 +0000

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.”

By: David Malouf

David Malouf — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:57:52 +0000

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.

By: John Carricaburu

John Carricaburu — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:10:18 +0000

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

By: Social Networking Bulletin - » Why Circle of Friends Works in Social Networking

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:29:07 +0000

[...] Read the original here: Josh [...]