Tim O’Reilly: Facebook Needs to Recognize Relationship Asymmetry

Tim O’Reilly is keynoting at Graphing Social Patterns right now and talking about how he wants social networks to get smarter. One of his great points is that Facebook needs to create some granularity in two ways:

• What you show your friends.
• What you want to see about your friends.

I’ve talked a lot about the first point, but the second point is not something that entered into my thinking until Tim brought it up. It’s a critical part of the granularity feature that Facebook will soon launch. Putting friends into different buckets doesn’t just mean that you want to show them different sides of yourself, it also means that you want to see different information from them.

The information I see on a person’s profile should be the overlap between the set of data points that she wants to share with me and I want to see about her. And the information should display in the order and format that I ask for it. Not the order and format that she determines.

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