208B: Danah's paper...

I just finished my wiki entry on danah's CHI paper. I've got one idea I'd like people to consider: what if you could assign a weight to ties in Friendster (or Orkut or pick your YASNS)?

That is, a weight of 0.1 means you barely know the fool and a weight of 1.0 means that you'd kill or die for that friend, no questions asked. What kind of policies would this necessitate? We've seen a little of what can happen when you do this assymetric linking on Orkut... that is, on Orkut, you can give someone weights as to whether or not their cool, sexy, etc. and you can also be someone's "fan". However, whether or not someone is a "fan" or not is publicly available... while the sexy, cool, etc. is not. What happens when you're someone's fan and their not yours? Is it the difference in definitions of what a "fan" is or is it a real reflection of assymetry in the relationship? Anyway, I could imagine a system where relationships were detailed assymetrically like this in some detail... I just can't imagine anyone being that friendly on it. Ha!

Posted by joebeone at Abril 5, 2004 01:16 AM | TrackBack