Stuart Robinson’s Weblog

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

Well, that’s the total cost to the US Department of Defense for the whole New Land Warrior project so far, and below is the current user interface. They can’t coerce their users, soldiers whose lives are on the line, into adopting this system, so the apparent lack of design is quite shocking (at least until you remember half a bil. is only 0.1% of the DoD annual budget).

The UI for the OLPC project looks great. Designed so that literacy is not required. The focus on collaborative features is refreshing.