My greatest hope for the hotly-rumored, might-launch-any-day-now social networking app “Google Me” is that it will not merely clone Facebook in a weak attempt at parity, but that it will innovate and solve problems that plague existing social networks.
Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled “The Real Life Social Network.” The 224 slides, embedded below, describe some of the problems and common user behavior on existing social web sites, and suggest how to better design that experience. While the presentation is targeted towards businesses who want to use social media to get their message out, it also serves as a roadmap for what Google will attempt to do with Google Me.
According to Adams, the biggest problem for users on social networks like Facebook is that all your “friends” are in one big bucket. Unlike real life, there’s no way to differentiate how you act and interact with different groups of people in your life. When you go to Mom’s house on Thanksgiving you behave differently than when you’re at Hooters with your college friends, but online all those people appear on a single friends list.
Adams also differentiates between strong ties (the 2-4 people you call on the phone at least once a week), weak ties (friends of friends, the co-worker who’s two cubicles down) and temporary ties (the person you’re buying a cup of coffee from). Collapsing all these different groups and relationships into a single context–like Facebook–and combining them with the permanence of the internet can lead to a lot of awkward situations. Like Debbie, the girls swim coach who realized, to her horror, that her 10-year-old swimmers could see her commenting on wild photos from the gay bar where her adult friends work.
The entire slideshow is embedded above. Adams also compiled reference links in a blog post here: The data behind The Real Life Social Network.
18 Comments
lilscottieme
If “Google me” launches with this level of control over the different type of friends that you have then it will get me very interested.
Brad
I really like this presentation, thanks. It definitely addresses the biggest problem I have with social media, specifically Facebook. It seems like a trust-level system would be not-impossible to implement and very useful.
Gary Weiner
this is must read.
Gary Weiner
and i don’t know you at all.
Gary Weiner
but you should know me because i am fun and creative.
ryaninc
I wasn’t intending to read the whole presentation, but it grabbed my attention. Those are some incredibly well thought out, and thought provoking conclusions and I agree with all of it. If Google keeps all that in mind when they build the rumored Google Me, it could be a major winner.
openid.sysnet.co.il/gilf
I wonder:
Can’t most of this be done with Facebook lists?
It can be done using separate services (Linkedin, facebook, etc), so isn’t the need just for social net aggregation?
Nathaniel Kabal
Excellent article, and a good presentation. If they actually integrate this kind of granular control in an intuitive and manageable fashion, I’ll delete my FB profile in one tab while I sign on in another 🙂
Steve - Kestrel's Aerie
Pretty sure Facebook lists cannot restrict “friends of friends of friends….”
My hopes (but perhaps not my expectations) for Google Me are now insanely high.
Lola Beno
@openid.sysnet.co.il . . . Not really. Lately, I’ve been getting marketplace notices about stuff that friends of my friends are selling. Do I really need to see all that? And I have a friend who’s been careful to protect the profile so that a certain person cannot find my friend; but that person found my friend somehow in group, as far as I recall. So there are cracks that you can fall through on FB.
openid.sysnet.co.il/gilf
@Lola Beno: I agree, and this is why I no longer use facebook, but I am still not sure if this is a not due to more fundamental issue of consenting how we view our social networks from a mental state to a programmatic state.
Andy Bryant
Whilst this can all be done with Facebook lists, it’s quite a pain to create and maintain those lists. I’ve created a work list, and simply don’t post any status updates for that group. I find it easier to use another network (LinkedIn) for that purpose.
The gap here is the user-interface and experience for creating and maintaining groups. Given my use of gmail, android, google profile, and social graph – it should be possible for Google to suggest who in my social graph is friends/family/strong ties, who is a weak tie, and then the others. They could also potentially create possible groupings for people that often communicate together if they had the sort of data facebook does.
Once they’ve done the initial work – if they then presented a picture of all of the people I’m connected to, and allowed me to drag/drop them between groups, I think we’d be on to a winner.
Christian Langley
Love this post Gina!
I’ve been struggling to divide my social comments between Facebook, Buzz, Google Groups, my family blog, and Picasa Web Albums. I’ve tried to keep the bland stuff on Facebook, the subversive stuff on Buzz, family-friendly stuff on the blog, and photos/videos via invite in Picasa Web Albums. I save the “raunchy” stuff for my Google Group discussions (most tightly closed off). If Google Me allows me to direct every status update, photo upload, article suggestion, etc. to only certain groups/classes of people, it would definitely make things easier (…and keep me from worrying about cross-contamination!)
effjay
Did Google Wave die or just evolve into Google Me? Or at least a portion of Google Me.
Robert Cairns
Gina, personally I do think that that Google is out to make a Facebook clone. Basically Google Buzz is Twitter clone so the track record has already been set.
The big issue I have with Google or any other social media site is they are all trying to make their sites look like each other. This is a big mistake in my opinion.
What these sites need to do is to make themselves different and stand out. Google Me will not stand out – it is an attempt to be a Facebook clone and just flood the social media market place.
Foo
Thanks for posting this Gina, I was led here from listening to the latest TWIG. Love your work!
I’ve held off from joining Facebook and can only hope that Google Me manages to get the critical mass it needs to be a success. As you mentioned on TWIG, if Google can come out with a differentiated service that offers more than Facebook and solves some of the issues that Facebook has, it will be more likely to succeed. Will be watching to see what unfolds over the next few months.
Andy Bryant
I’ve been mulling this over, and thinking about the rest of the capabilities and advantages that Google has, which they could feed into Google Me – and I’m really excited about the possibilities.
I blogged about it
Andy Bryant
Oops. Didn’t post the link correctly
http://andybryant.squarespace.com/blog/2010/8/28/google-me-the-future-of-social-networking.html