I have two points to make in this blog post:
Point 1: Eric Berne’s work is relevant to the discussion of grouping friends in social networks.
He is the creator of transactional analysis for crying out loud. This discussion has its scientific justifications in his work yet nobody seems to be referencing it. It is called the six ways of structuring time and everyone on earth falls into one of the six categories depending on how we spend time with them.
To summarize the Wikipedia entry I linked to, there are six ways of structuring time:
Withdrawal:
Basically you don’t know the girl.
Ritual:
You say hi to the girl on the way to the restroom but that’s about it.
Pastimes:
You are at a dinner party and exchange vaguely interesting stories with the girl while sipping your wine.
Activities:
You work with the girl at the same office or play softball every weekend.
Games:
You and the girl have a relationship similar to the one between Maddie Hayes and David Addison from Moonlighting. Only much much less interesting.
Intimacy:
You are very good friends or happily in love. You give personal and genuine attention to each other with no obvious reason to do so.
So there you have it. These are your groups of friends. This is how close you are to everyone you know or don’t know. Every Google Circle falls under one of these groups, mostly under 3 and 4, I suspect.
Point 2: No one really cares about grouping of friends that much.
The problem is that unless you are a psychologist, a professional who wants to use social media to promote something or a software engineer with way too much time you don’t care. The world does not consist of data modelers who want to structure their friends in groups. No normal user cares that much about Facebook, Google or Twitter.
If a piece of software does the structuring automatically, oh well, I guess some people might find a use for it. (Katango takes a crack at this.) A small percentage of people still value privacy way more than the average person and they make a big deal out of it. But that’s it. Google Circles, Katango or whatever don’t address a pain point for the majority.
The next innovation in social networks will not come from a better structuring of social relationships. Anything better than what we already have, provides only marginal benefits.
Yalım K. Gerger
Update:
I’d much rather readers comment here in the blog post itself so that every reader can benefit from their input. However, I can’t overlook the discussion going on at the Hacker News site about this blog post. So here it is for your reading pleasure.
