On 11 Sep 2006, at 14:58, Alex Halavais wrote:
I suspect that most systems consider "friend" to be "contact." I also suspect that most people do not define "friends" the same way their software does, though there is almost certainly "leakage" in terminology. And, frankly, I think that these kinds of issues are leading to everyday elaboration of such gradations (viz BFFL, friends with benefits, and other neologisms).
What I find most interesting about the Flickr case is that you can mark photographs appropriate for "friends" or "family" or both. Just because I want my friends to see a photo doesn't mean that I want my Mom to.
it is this aspect (amongst others) that has been the downfall of many collaborative systems (social software). See the extensive Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) literature on permissions and roles for example. The reason they fail is the reason flickr works (for tagging at least) - real life categorisations are highly heterogeneous, situated/contextual, flexible (over time & between people) and (often) contested. This is a very tricky computer science problem and it is only human to try to keep things simple to implement (& thus stupid). I have not been active in CSCW for some time so I would be hopeful that it now has a better handle on this although my impression from the various social software sites is that either it has not or it hasn't filtered out to the development community (yet)! Ben ---- Dr Ben Anderson Deputy Director, Chimera, University of Essex +44 (0) 7710 187 806 http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~benander ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com