A pretty good presentation about what is fundamentally broken with today’s social network (Facebook)
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2
Now, Orkut has come up with an implementation of this idea:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_version_of_googles_orkut_separates_business_fr.php#more
Now, without going into Orkut and trying it out, my thoughts are as follows:
When architecturing a social network site, it is actually logical to first think about being able to present different faces to different segments of your social network, or at least being able to group your social network into different groups. But the problem is fundamentally, “Decisions”. When a user is made to “decide”, it raises the perceived complexity (and therefore decreases usability) by perhaps an order of magnitude. I feel that one of the reason why Facebook took off so well was that it didn’t make people choose these things. Just 1 post for everyone.
But now that people are comfortable with that, lets see if this approach of different personas to different audiences will work better.
It has to be usable or “simple” to use.
Tags: facebook socialnetwork