I got some good value out of last.fm today, which I’ve been passively using, but not really getting into.
Then Delicate Genius added me as a friend.
So I said, let’s roll, let’s get into it.
So I went to a friends friend roll, and then sighed with disappointment. I have to click through to each one and add them. I wasn’t going to spam and just add everyone, but there were multiple people I just wanted to add.
I like the easy friend add that Facebook and others have (we’re adding it to Goalsy now) because I control the speed. But I’m sure some networks like to make it a bit harder so they maintain a higher quality of network.
And that’s what happened. I clicked one friend, added them, then looked at their friends, added one, looked at their friends, added one, etc. So it was much more linear, not exponential.
What do you think? Let the user decide or make it multi step to add some cost so that you only add real friends.
Popularity: 14% [?]
2 responses so far ↓
1 Cait // Jul 4, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I want to be able to just import from multiple services and untick those I don’t want to import. Email address invites should not be mixed with actual account holders. FriendFeed does it well, but with a crappy number of services. Minimum should be Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Gmail.
2 Gary Barber // Jul 4, 2008 at 11:18 pm
This is the major problem with SNS. Its an age old one (in relative terms) that if you think about it isn’t that hard to solve within the early adopter community. However when you step outside that community into the real world the situation changes.
A number of solutions have been touted about. Using an extension of XFN to find and subgroup the friends via an openid link to the primary id site of the user, hence allowing a blog roll to become a friends list. Not ideal
Teach people how to be phished and hand over all there gmail and various account details.
Use Oauth and do it correctly!!
allow people to collect friends and add them via an ajaxy add module while examing other peoples lists.
Or collect then like shopping basket items for review later.
Collect and spam your firends… great lets be facebook.
Still the problem of refinding the your community without an import becomes a problem. To the extent that this is now seen as the biggest hurdle of SNS uptake.
Yes Friendfeed does it somewhat well, it could be easier to allow adding anywhere when you encounter a possible friend as a ajaxy call from recommendation to the general feed of friends, there are greasemonkey scripts for this. But the functionality ideally should be build in.
Leave a Comment