Stuart Robinson’s Weblog

Here’s facebook getting it wrong by providing application developers with a way to trick users:

I’ve been calling them ‘unidirectional friends’ but the concept is the same. I suspect that popularising this form of social network is going to be twitter’s longest standing contribution:

The idea of unilateral connections is an important one. People’s ideas of ’friendship’ differ and it’s not a good idea to, at the outset, ask a user to accept another person’s measure of what friendship is.

A site that visibly promotes how many ’friends’ you have turns friends into commodities, creating an economy where you are motivated to make as many friends as you can. That’s not a good idea because the utility of these sites suffer as social networks become too densely populated. Throw in the social implications of ’un-friending’ someone and you result in a cycle where the only way to solve the problem is to stop using the service and instead jump on to the ’latest’ social network where you can start with a clean slate. This is how we went from Friendster to Tribe to Orkut to MySpace to Facebook (with a few more or less along the way).

From blogoscoped