Comments on: Today is Steve Case’s birthday

By: P-Air

P-Air — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 18:02:55 +0000

It was my understanding (which I could be very wrong about since I’ve yet to commit to reading Brad’s social graph white paper), that the social graph would be used to make it easier to find your friends on any new network you joined, not to simply facilitate import all of your connections from one network to another. Given that users some times register w/different e-mail addresses or difference user ids, either one of these identifiers alone isn’t sufficient to find one’s connections on a newly joined network.

As for the degrees of friendship thing, I’m not a fan of creating any sort of structure around this. If users really care about it beyond some simple default (which FB basically addresses w/3 levels), then a user s/b able to create their own groupings and add people into those as well as set that group’s data viewing controls. Sure it’s a lot of work if this matters to you, but no easy way around it. By the same token, I don’t believe any level of data access control will ever get us around the old adage that “you should never put anything online that you wouldn’t want any one to read”. Even the tightest control of all, e-mail, where you send your note to *one* person, frequently has a way of finding itself getting distributed w/o the author’s authorization. Why would any one think it would be diff on any social network?

By: reza

reza — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:45:55 +0000

Dear Friends,
A group of researchers at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, are investigating effects of Weblogs on “Social Capital”. Therefore, they have designed an online survey. By participating in this survey you will help researches in “Management Information Systems” and “Sociology”. You must be at least 18 years old to participate in this survey. It will take 5 to 12 minutes of your time.
Your participation is greatly appreciated. You will find the survey at the following link. http://faculty.unlv.edu/rtorkzadeh/survey
This group has already done another study on Weblogs effects on “Social Interactions” and “Trust”. To obtain a copy of the previous study brief report of findings you can email Reza Vaezi at reza.vaezi@yahoo.com.

By: Jonathan Peterson

Jonathan Peterson — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:09:22 +0000

I like the range of “friendship” - similar to facebook’s different “how do you know this person” but significantly more useful (I insist on claiming that I “hooked up” with male friends on facebook to see if they notice).

The real rubber to the road in your range of friendship might be to require an action. Writing a a linked-in recommendation is a commitment of time that indicates a LOT more than a one click reply to a “be my friend” spam.

By: Steven Kaye

Steven Kaye — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:06:34 +0000

Hmm. On the one hand, I like privacy as the default option. But isn’t requiring opt-in for importing to another social network just a return to the status quo of “Great, I’m on another social network and I have to re-invite all my friends?”