GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Make an animated GIF from any of the NYPL’s 40K+ stereograms. What a fun idea. I’m a little addicted.

Recently I posted an article entitled “Don’t Give Your Users Shit Work” about the tediousness of organizing relationships in the context of a social network. Google+ as based on the idea that it would be really easy to manage your friends using their “circles” page to drop people into various circles that you could then target or exclude with the information you shared on the site. The above article put it best:

What happens if I get really hammered with a Business Acquaintance and he becomes a Close Drinking Partner? Do I move his circles around? What happens if we hire him? Is he a Coworker and a Close Drinking Partner? The last thing I want to have to worry about is continually micromanaging another facet of life.

Unfortunately, there’s no hope on the horizon for reducing the complexity of relationships to make it easier to shift them into the online realm. Human beings have very complex abilities to manage relationships, and these just don’t translate well to the internet.

Up until G+, social networks like Facebook and Twitter required you to create lists, add your friends to the various lists, then (in Facebook) define the privileges that each list has. G+ one-upped these networks by recognizing that human relationships aren’t list based but are more like circles. Only, they completely misunderstood why circles are a great metaphor for human relationships.

Google, with G+, treats their circles as an easier-to-understand way of creating lists. I am still doing the same thing I was doing on Facebook and Twitter, it’s just an improved UI. That’s great, but it doesn’t solve the problem that I’d like to solve: there are things I want to share with my close friends, there are things I’ll share publicly, but I don’t feel like having to remember which circles that includes. The circles are still lists with no obvious relation to me.

Human relationships, in terms of privacy and trust, are not circles that sit next to each other: over here are my Competitive Gift Wrapping friends, over there are my Russian Cinematographer friends. They are more like slightly blurry concentric circles: I am friends with a lot of Competitive Gift-Wrappers but only one of them is my best friend and she also is an amateur Russian Cinematographer.

So how do we best represent these relationships from the privacy and trust perspective? I’ve mocked up what I think would be more helpful than G+’s current circle metaphor. Here’s the current UI (with generic icons):

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And this is a rough mockup of how I could see the circles metaphor be employed to better help me understand how I’m organizing people; through the use of concentric circles:

(Click for larger)

With this design, it is very clear to me what level of trust I’m giving a friend; they are very close to me or not. It also makes it very simple for me to rank the level of privacy I want each thing I share to have - I can decide to make it public or only visible to my close friends, or anything in between.

My version of the G+ circles does not make it easy to divide up friends according to their interests, but I would argue that is a secondary problem in social networks. For whatever reason, that is the problem that Facebook, Twitter, and G+ have all “solved” first, but most people therefore don’t understand how easily limit the visibility of their sharing, and are forced into either not sharing things because of people who might see them, or making the decision not to keep anything private. This is a real shame, because the sooner social networks mirror the complexities of human relationships, the sooner we can find out their real power. Until that day, social networking will remain rather primitive.