A More Dignified Social Dance

Carl Milsted, Jr on Mar 2 14:59:59

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Imagine walking up to someone you find interesting and asking, "Will you be my friend?"

This may be an appropriate social strategy in kindergarten, but for adults, this would be awkward, or downright creepy.

Maybe I'm just bashful.

Or maybe a social network should function a little bit more like real world social interactions. You deal first with someone's outward persona. Then as you get to know each other better, you might establish a more personal relationship.

Publishers and Subscribers

With Fnora you can establish a light contact with someone by simply subscribing to them. To avoid excess abstractions, let's consider two of our AI generated fake members: Delilah and Ella. Delilah recognizes Ella from kindergarten, and wants to connect.

To do so, she goes to Ella's page and hits the Subscription tab:

And then all she has to do is set the Social Context Ord and hit the Subscribe button. Delilah will be notified of Ella's public posts, and Ella will have permission to private message Delilah.

On Cursors and Contacts

Social Context Ord?? What's that?

Answer: it's a number, rather like an account number and it serves the same purpose. It is used to determine the order of your contacts -- not their closeness or importance.

Accountants use account numbers in programs such as Quickbooks in order to group related accounts. The alternatives could be order of account creation, or alphabetical order, neither of which would produce a logical grouping.

You can do something similar with your social contacts. For example, Delilah has assigned 1 for old school friends, 13 for ex boyfriends, and 100 for public figures she is following.

But merely sorting a list of contacts is by itself of limited interest. Where things get interesting is when Delilah looks at her dashboard to see what's new.

The new posts are grouped by social context. And this grouping affects the Next buttons, as she reads through unread posts. For example, if she wants to catch up with her ex boyfriends, she can click READ on Frederick's row to catch up with Frederick. On Frederick's last post the NEXT button will point to Geoffrey's first unread post.

Only after catching up with ex boyfriends will Delilah move on to reading posts by public figures.