fidelity
While software systems tend to strive towards accuracy and fidelity, I have frequently observed that these exact qualities may hurt social software.
When you walk down the hall and see someone you know, you raise your eyebrows to acknowledge their existence, and expect the same from them. If they don't reciprocate, you can plausibly tell yourself that perhaps they didn't see you, or were otherwise distracted. However, when you send someone an instant message, and they never reply, you can be reasonably sure they got it and are ignoring you. Thankfully, in the email world, we can at least blame the spam filter as to why you never replied.
It occurs to me that not every factoid gleaned from the constellation of behavioral data should be presented.
For example, the emminently social Twitter, happily informs me that while 34 people count themselves amongst my friends, only 31 of them care to be informed about I'm up to every day -- and then shows me who those folks are. While these lists are on different actual web pages, it's not a herculean task to figure out the actual people involved. Even though it's possible to show all the information, from a social perspective a degraded view would be better.
Comments
Hi Joshua,
I would suggest that it is better to not let any technological tool
such as Twitter be interpreted as an accurate barometer. Their
"data" collection method may be built on values that are not universally
shared, nor does it allow for personality differences, resulting in the
"data" presentation content to be of questionable usefulness as well. Sort
of like a soundbite that the media could take out of context. It may be
better to see how things stack up empirically over time - whether there is
a decent level of consistency.
- Chris Novell
No offense but... 2 posts in the exact same month? Is there something wrong?
- Rick Stratton
Well said. Reminds me of our most early FOAF experiments, where I made the mistake of having "knows", "knowsWell", "friend" as relationship types. Even that limited vocabulary made it possible to say "I know them well, but we're not friends". Sometimes greater expressivity isn't a good thing...
- Dan Brickley