Adding Friends is a Full Time Job, and I am Tired of It!
There is something very wrong with the web……
I wonder how many times I have had to find and add Gabor Vida, Steve Mackenzie, Ryan Stewart, Mike Chambers, Phillip Kerman, Mike Downey, Mike Potter, Stacey Mulcahy, Ryan Murphy, Mykel Ruvola( and on and on and on and on) in the last few months. I have spent a huge amount of my time across social networks re-finding the same people over and over and over again.
I just got a Pownce invite yesterday and was excited to try it out, but I must admit a sense of horror came over me as I realized that I had to find everyone all over again.
I mean, I have spent a lot of time adding friends on Facebook – I have used it to reconnect with people from eras throughout my entire life and I have poured days of time into the effort. I have done it to a certain extent on Twitter, where I have a pretty solid snapshot of my industry colleagues. I have done it with my MSN friends list, but it is becoming less important these days as I forget who most of the people I have added are – there is very little context with traditional chat applications as you have to rely on remembering silly screen names.
Then I thought, what about everything else, like Xbox Live, Finetune, LastFM, AIM, MySpace, and so many many more.
This has turned into a nightmare.
It is clear to me as an experience designer and strategist that the social web cannot keep continuing down this road. Eventually everyone will be sick and tired of this arduous process, and users/contributors will quickly be frustrated and turned away from our applications; the very ones that are supposed to rock!
I have blogged many times over the last two years about Identity 2.0. I don’t know how many times I have posted this link to Dick Hardt’s famous Identity presentation at OSCON in 2005. Again…., if you haven’t watched this, you must.
Things like OpenID are starting to gain traction, but very slowly. I think it is time for all of us as a community to start getting involved, and attempt to get this type of approach into the mainstream.
I’d love to see OpenID be able to support some kind of “Friend Confirmation” system that would allow me to submit my OpenID to a social network like Pownce (which I am currently going though the “Friend Finding Headache” with), and have it automatically add all my friends that are members of that application. It would be amazing if applications could also add new friends of mine back to my OpenID as well. With this I could traverse all the brilliant applications in the Web 2.0 world taking all my friends along for the ride with me.
I think it is so important for our development community to really start taking this conversation seriously, and start looking into this technology. Paolo and I attended the FOWA conference in London this year and Simon Wilson did a great presentation on OpenID. Many of the attendees were inspired by the concept, including Kevin Rose, who announced at the same conference that OpenID would be supported by Digg in the near future. The fact that Pownce has no support for it (and it is a prime candidate for it) is disappointing. His influence could have really helped move these standards forward.
I would go as far as calling Facebook proof that the concept of identity on the web will work. Instead of having a distributed approach to identity though, they have opened up the “Facebook Platform” that allows developers to build applications around their user base. That is awesome but still only halfway there. It is still not easy for me to take my identity elsewhere.
Regardless, in the near future, I am going to bet that the average user out there will see this problem as a major barrier to entry, and in turn will avoid getting involved. We need to start thinking of solutions now, and OpenID is a great place to start.
Amen. I had the same feeling ant it also came just after I got my Pownce invite. In addition to adding friends, now to keep track of friends I have to fire up several apps and visit half a dozen web sites. I’m boycotting Pownce til there is a netvibes module anyway.
I have Identity 2.0 overload… at this point I use my invites to secure my username… which is also a pretty goofy concept. There are a lot of “Mykel”s on the internet. The context should make it clear which Mykel I am…. Imagine having to uniquely name your children across a global name space.
And I know for a fact that my real userid is just an incremented integer.
Who owns the data? I think this will be a bigger issue than who has the source code to a process.
Microsoft is following Google’s lead into peering at each member of the audience. You and I can’t see or edit the proprietary data each of these holds about us.
I agree with you that decentralization of data storage seems the way to go. (But I always got confused by those “Identity 2.0″ and related conversations, they just kept droning and droning and never really arrived anywhere….
The Sith share your sentiment. I can feel your anger, and you are well on your way to the darkside. Let passion prevail! Having friends is a frivolous waste of time, use the darkside of the force to get what you want…
[...] Tony Macdonnell feels the my pain and suggests creating a portable “friends” system using OpenID. Here is the gist of it: I’d love to see OpenID be able to support some kind of “Friend Confirmation” system that would allow me to submit my OpenID to a social network like Pownce (which I am currently going though the “Friend Finding Headache” with), and have it automatically add all my friends that are members of that application. It would be amazing if applications could also add new friends of mine back to my OpenID as well. With this I could traverse all the brilliant applications in the Web 2.0 world taking all my friends along for the ride with me. [...]
Tony,
Just last week I was thinking the same thing – there has to be an easier way to manage the “Friend” list. I like to call it the FriendVerse. On the other hand, I think part of the problem is that people (or social network designers) are diluting the value of a “Friend.” Scoble, for example, says he has over 2,000 friends on Facebook – bull. 1% of those people would show up at his funeral – they aren’t really friends – I’d expect a “Friend” of mine to show up at my funeral. Flckr gets it right by distinguishing between “Contacts” and “Friends and Family.” I think people should discriminate more when it comes to “Friending” people. Seriously, I’m guessing some people would be horrified if they really knew some of the people they’re supposedly “Friends” with.
– Cale Bruckner http://www.palmit.com
[...] What we do have instead of the quality desired by Cliff is nothing short of garbage overload. After all just how many social networks can you perform repetitive data entry and so-called friend search before you say – enough is enough. Or as Tony Macdonell at Teknision puts it I mean, I have spent a lot of time adding friends on Facebook – I have used it to reconnect with people from eras throughout my entire life and I have poured days of time into the effort. I have done it to a certain extent on Twitter, where I have a pretty solid snapshot of my industry colleagues. I have done it with my MSN friends list, but it is becoming less important these days as I forget who most of the people I have added are – there is very little context with traditional chat applications as you have to rely on remembering silly screen names. [...]
[...] Great comment on adding friends… Tony Macdonell has a good comment: Adding Friends is a Full Time Job, and I’m Tired of It. [...]
so say we all.
Transportable identity or at least a second cousin – aggregation of all these SN sites into one site for mile high management and publishing duties is my killer app dream come true.
Fueled by Twitter’s easy to grok API (I’m still very fragrant with new coder smell) my imagination has been keeping me up at night with visions of a write once – publish many model that would make at least updating blogs / announcements on various platforms (lj, myspace, facebook, virb, twitter, etc) less time consuming, repetitious and painful.
I am embarrassed to admit I’ve gotten so accustomed to the friending nightmare every. single. time. something new launches that in my numbness I hadn’t even thought about there being a better way. Thanks for snapping me out of it. THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY.
-bp
I totally agree! But with Identity 2.0 you should still have the opportunity to post anonymous comments and so on. I guess a lot of bloggers would set something like “Identity 2.0 only” and it will be hard to participate in (e.g. political) discussions without identifying yourself.
I like the concept and I hope something will be done in the next years.
Best Regards from Germany
Markus
What is your take on identity management sites such as Onxiam? I log my various names there – but I think more so that I can keep track of them than anything more outward facing…
Don’t be a baby. Ever heard of automation?
Offshoring baby, think offshoring. Villages in China play video games and sell characters with uber points, so you can play the fun stuff (I guess). So send your list, once, to someone in Asia, let them sign you up everywhere and each time a Pownce, Twitter, 2.0 gonna be rich cuz I have a cool misspelled company name type comes along.
$50 will do it for each service.
[...] In Dante vond gisteren een geslaagde eerste Nederlandse Twitterborrel plaats. Ik vond het opvallend hoe vaak de discussie terechtkwam op OpenID en de huidige mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden ervan. Ondanks de kritiek op de manier waarop OpenID werkt is het wat mij betreft een van de beste startpunten voor het oplossen van een probleem waar mensen in toenemende mate mee te maken zullen krijgen. Vele verschillende vriendenlijstjes en plekken waarop je jouw identiteit en profiel moet aanmaken, beheren, etc. Tony Mcdonnel denkt in dezelfde richting. [...]
Giving up the userbase letting you take your identity and all your friends with you must be a bit of a big step for many social app’s since the very power of a socialnetwork is the amount of people using it and linking to eachother. Because of this I’m not sure if the “mainstream” socialnetworks are the places this will take place – I think it has to come from us – the users, and from a place not compeeting the networks as they are today. OpenID / XFN might be the solution 1.0
Who every develops a useful, easy to use transportable identity module is going to have all of our undying love, and a very full wallet……
I use Outlook combined with Plaxo, LinkedIn, and others as my central identity sync. Most of the time the toolbar/add-in will create the “link”, but otherwise I export my Contacts and import them into the new site.
Such as LinkedIn. You can import your address book into “Other Contacts” and then filter for who is a member to send them an invite.
Outlook as an authoritative source is not the best identity system and I do wish for the same type of app/directory discussed above, but it does get the job done most of the time.
Hmmm … isn’t this simply a necessary evil of the global web we have all created.
Many people connect to you because you are “known” and they wish to also be “known” like you. This is their effort at personal branding, you have yours already, you built it inside the web. They are just copying what we (you) have showed them to do on multiple platforms.
Being known is an important offering of the web in the age of the individual.
You (we) are providing a service to other people who want to engage with the nature of the personal web, identity 2.0 and web 2.0.
You (we) are the guides and it is important to light the path for others as the future develops. Where we are right now may well be forgotten soon but we all had to develop it in order to discover the futures better solution.
Tough out your identity awareness service until all these social networks merge into a single place somehow – for one day they will … sadly I know not how.
There’s a difference between friends and followers. Scoble has a lot of followers. He probably follows rather fewer. And somewhere in the intersection will be a few friends.
To transport contacts networks from one SN to another, we need:-
a) A unique identifier. It used to be email but that’s as disposable as everything else. Maybe it will be OpenID. But they’re proliferating as well. How manay OpenIDs do you have?
b) A way of aggregating our lists of contacts across sites, exporting them from one place and importing them somewhere else. FOAF might have been this, but it’s flawed. We don’t even have much of an agreement about how to describe people in code. The nearest thing to a standard is VCard as exported by Outlook.
c) Multiple SNs to actually play along. Sadly some of the major ones (like Facebook) make it extremely hard to get data out (no, or almost no RSS). And have no API for moving data in.
So don’t expect this to happen any time soon.
And don’t expect some big shakeout where a clear winner absorbs all the losers. This area is *hot* now. And that attracts VC and Developers. It’ll get more fragmented not less.
Meanwhile there’s some things you can do to take all your FB, Twitter, Jaiku, Plazes, Pownce, last.FM, Ecademy contact’s updates and display them in one place (in Skype!). And if you’re really clever, you can update one each day and have all the others synced (well most of them).
Does this provide an opportunity within OpenID that would accommodate at least part of this thought?
http://openid.net/wiki/index.php?title=Group_Membership_Protocol
[...] ADDING FRIENDS IS A FULL TIME JOB, AND I AM TIRED OF IT! [...]