A friend who I was talking to was saying that Facebook was impersonal and perhaps not the best way to stay in contact. I think the most personal form of contact is talking to someone in person and failing that direct video chat. So what makes Facebook impersonal?
- Broadcasting – instead of directly talking to one person, many activities, such as posting status’ or notes, are just broadcast tomany people.
- Activity stream – Unlike email where each communication is acknowledged, only a few messages appear in the activity stream
- Non-real time – When communication is real time, instead of asking a question and changing the message based on the information, often the answer or possible answers will be guessed. Also, a question may not be answered with much information, while in a conversation it would be natural to probe further.
These are just contributing factors. For example, letters are not real time, but are very personal and similarly a video broadcast can feel personal even if it is one way.
The broadcasting and non-real time are requirements of Facebook. As in, it is useful exactly because you can post content and many people will be able to see it even if they aren’t online at the time. That being said, Facebook (especially notes) could work more like Google Wave where it works well as either a real time or non-real time system.
I think the activity stream is the area to focus on. The fact that you can’t rely on your content being seen is the biggest issue to being personal. I mean, how can something be personal if the other party might not even be aware of its existence. How could this be fixed? At the moment, I pipe the status’ from everyone I want to follow into Google Reader and page down through them. I hardly think you’ll convince your typical Facebooker to do this, but adding an Twitter Client like system to Facebook might work, although some people would feel pressured to read everything. You could also try reducing the noise in the newsfeed (my thoughts on how to do this are currently in draft state).
At the moment, I believe that a method to follow certain posts could be invaluable. I don’t mean that you’ll only see these posts if you follow, just that you’ll almost definitely see them if you do. For example, I might split my posts as below:
- Programming
- iPhone
- Power user
- Christian
- General Life
- Random
This would add a certain level of complexity and a lot of effort following everyone, but it’d certainly increase how often and how useful it would be to post to Facebook. At the moment, you could try something like using the friend groups to restrict who sees what, but without it being opt in (and hence more visible) the conversation really won’t be that much more personal. Another option is to use a tool like Twitter and create multiple Twitter accounts, but managing and getting people to follow all of these ends up being a pain.
Yet another option would be to use Friendfeed. Friendfeed’s stated goal as a content aggregator was always going to be a niche area, only of interest to extreme social media enthusists. However, the ability to create groups to which everyone can post and have the content distributed to all members may be what Facebook groups would need to be truly engaging. Of course, this brings along with it the question of too much activity. Then again, this is probably just a matter of proper group management and defining rules such as no lolzcats.
NB. Facebook does have a similar option – when you post in a group any other friend who is a member of this group may have the post appear in their newsfeed, but I haven’t seen any such posts yet.
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