Has anyone made an effort yet to do the evident thing, and simply build a social service that lets you have separate groups of friends for all features?
Pretty much what ycombinator funded "the fridge" tries to achieve. The problem is the best tool is probably a hybrid between full segregation and full connectedness. Problem is that in this kind of territory your application becomes harder for the user who has to think more about who is going to see which piece of content.
Is it really that hard? Why not just let me check the box near "high school" and uncheck the box near "parents' friends"...
Anyone who isn't naive about the implications of a "like" or a comment or a photo in everyone else's news feed will think twice about whether to post at all, which I'd argue uses more cognitive energy than simply opting in the correct group of friends to receive the information.
Actually it is. Think about how few people actually categorize people in their IM client, or bookmarks, or virtually any other service.
There are a couple of ways to try to deal with this:
1) Put the onus on the contactor to specify the relationship. This is what LinkedIn does.
2) Actually have several different mechanisms that users can use. I really like free form tagging. I'd like to be able to send status and then have a tag field where I just list the tags of the various groups I want to send this status update to.
The oddly nice thing about how Facebook does it today though is that since everyone is so used to getting random weird status updates, no one cares. Imagine if you got an email from a friend that said, "Eating pie, watching Glee. Bored, might go to sleep early." You'd be like, "WFT? Is this guy gonna kill himself or something? Why did he send me this?" But on Facebook, you don't even notice. Heck you might even say, "Yeah, Glee is kind of weak in season 2".
I don't know. How people interact on the internet is weird.
I have to say that any application intended to allow people to manage, say, four intersecting sets of items of any sort is going to back rather hard to use, unless someone has come with some incredibly clever UI metaphors I don't know about.
Will there be four (or five) checkboxes next to every normal action? It would seem to complicate things by a few orders of magnitude. Remember adding elements is often a multiplicative rather than an additive affair - just adding a few extra checkboxes to a given page can take it from clear to "head-spinning".
The problem is that nobody wants to present their users with a gigantic list of contacts on first login and ask them to sort and organise them into groups. Instead, everybody just lumps all the contacts together so that the user is least inconvenienced at first, only to later experience problems. Google is in a pretty good position to tackle this, since a fair number of people who already have Google contacts probably also have their contacts sorted into groups for email, and that's a good representation of their real-life social network.
You sort your contacts in gmail? I honestly would never bother, really don't see the point.
I very much doubt Google are, but Facebook might be in a good position to figure this out themselves now anyway. If I'm friends with Em, Bob, Barry and Jill, and Em and Bob are friends and Barry and Jill are friends, the friendship groups are fairly obvious aren't they?
Obviously I've never seen their data so don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised that they do have the information. Just looking at 'Mutual Friends' of people I know on Facebook it seems to be fairly well defined.
Facebook goes further than the mutual friendships and takes into account all sorts of interactions like "Like"'s, comments, etc. and probably re-sharing of contents, common events, common pictures, common places... I've been told they use that to figure out what to show you in your feed, so pretty much to know whom of your FB friends you're actually interested in.
But I'd be very surprised if they don't use that in a "group" perspective as well. Which would be very interesting because groups evolve over time but you going back to clean up your lists doesn't happen very often, if ever.
From a privacy standpoint, it is a bit scary. But it's very cool from a tech/CS point-of-view.
We're working on exactly that issue for our product (Windsoc). We're working on algorithms that attempt to create social circles, while providing an interface that should make manual adjustment and categorization easy. When someone posts using our service, they'll be able to select specific circles of contacts, or even individuals, to Facebook or other services.
I've noticed that people have started to give up on the idea of contact management across services, which is usually a good indication that it's the perfect time to make it happen.
(If anyone is curious, we'll be starting private beta in December.)
There are sites that addresses this by creating completely independent social networks for separate interests. This seems to actually work for certain sensitive topics (look up "FetLife" for an example).
