Curiouser and Curiouser!

Williams sister killing: Man held. A 24-year-old man is arrested in connection with the murder of a sister of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

This item bothered me because they don't even give the poor girls name!  She's just "sister of tennis stars Venus and Serena."  What a fate.

Granularities of relationships.

September 14, 2003

Codifying Relationships
  - Posted by Liz Lawley at 2:22 PM

One of the problems that plagues the “YASNSes” (as Clay calls the growing number of social networking systems) is how to define or codify relationships.

On the one hand, trying to make all relationships equal and bidirectional, as Friendster and LinkedIn currently do, is clearly problematic. As I wrote on Joi Ito’s LinkedIn wiki page:

I’d also like to be able to differentiate between (at the minimum) two types of contacts—those whom I’m willing to receive referrals from, and those whom I’m willing to have make referrals on my behalf. There are far more in the first category than the second. I’m more than happy, for example, to have Meg Hourihan or Anil Dash send someone to me. But since I don’t have extensive working relationships with either one, I’m not sure I’d want them to be the first line of introduction for me to someone else—for that, I’d be more comfortable with someone like Joi or Clay Shirky or someone I’ve worked more closely with.

But today I was playing with a pre-alpha version of a new system that does in fact allow me to define types of relationships, and as others have pointed out, that has its own set of problems. In the system I was looking at, I was given the following options:

• I am a close friend of this person
• I am a friend of this person
• I am an acquaintance of this person
• I know this person (by reputation)
• I know this person (in passing)
• I am related to this person
• I would like to know this person

I was trying to categorize my relationship to another system user, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I’ve met the person at a party, and had a brief conversation, but I have no idea if the person remembers me. I’d like to get to know the person better. So…I might be “an acquaintance,” I do “know the person in passing,” I definitely “know the person by reputation,” and “I would like to know this person” better. What do I choose? (I ended up giving up, btw, and not choosing anything.)

This is where David Weinberger’s concerns about making the implicit explicit become most relevant for me. Relationships are complicated. Expressing them algorithmically is terrifically difficult. Reducing the complexity takes something important way from the relationship. And forcing users into these choices without a clear and compelling payoff for doing so (payoff for the users, that is…clearly the marketers and demographers get a payoff!) seems doomed to failure. [Many-to-Many]

Marc's response to Liz's post............

My bet is that there WILL be a way to algorithmically express dynamic - changing relationships.  Afterall - that's what real life is.

Dynamic, adaptive user experiences are where it's at.

I also bet that this new system Liz is talking about will be able to handle OTHER kinds of challenges presented to the social networking world - like "why would I want someone to link to my FOAF file?" or "what I show to a stranger should be different than what I show to a close friend." 

I also have it from a very good source, that this un-named new pre-alpha system will attempt to grapple perhaps the BIGGEST challenge of them all: "how do we inter-connect and share social networks BETWEEN disparate social networks"?  You have to imagine aggregating people together, but if 'someone' could do it - that would be totally cool.

[Marc's Voice]

I've thought about this a little and I think the problem here is that the current approaches only tackle half the problem.

It is reasonable to expect that being able to define a relationship in more accurate terms than the simple "friend" is a good thing.  Yet in Liz' case the increase in granularity lead to hieghtened indecision and ultimately an inability to make a choice.  We know granularity is important, yet further increasing it will lead to more indecision, not less.

My take is that the missing piece is a recognition that relationships are multi-valent.  From such a viewpoint statements like:

• I know this person (by reputation)
• I would like to know this person

do not define a relationship, but name some of it's many characteristics.  Being able to choose many of these statements (and you could expand the list of statements considerably) allows you to provide depth and, where necessary, inconsistency to how you view the relationship at that time.