When it Comes to Friends, Flickr’s Had it Right All Along
Relationships on the web are, to borrow a bit of Facebook parlance, “complicated.”
Some social networking sites (like Facebook) require relationships to be reciprocal — you must approve people before they can be friends with you and see what you’re up to. This model is often referred to as a symmetrical relationship.
The concept of “friends” in Facebook’s parlance seems on the surface like a reasonably accurate model of real-world human interactions — we share things with our friends, not strangers. But that model ignores the people at the fringes of conversations; friends of friends and extended networks that go beyond our close friends, but still contribute to the conversation.
Consider, for example, a dinner party at a friend’s house. You know four people there, but there are four more you’ve never met before. In the midst of conversation, you probably won’t stop one of the people you don’t know and ask them to be your friend before they continue. No, you simply follow the conversation.
Recognizing this limitation, sites like Twitter use the concept of “following” another person, which need not be reciprocal at all.
In fact, the asymmetrical relationships on Twitter are arguably a big part of its success — you can have thousands of followers, but there’s no need for you to follow them all back. That gives you the freedom to pick and choose what conversations you want to participate in, rather than being forced into conversations via the “friendship” model (This fact still stands even after Tuesday’s much-derided settings change).
Tim O’Reilly laments the disadvantages of symmetric, “friend”-based social networks, arguing that for users, the concept simply doesn’t scale. “I can’t even keep up regularly with the 500+ people I do follow on Twitter,” writes O’Reilly, “keeping up with the 400,000 who follow me would be impossible.”
O’Reilly argues that developers working on social sites ought to adopt the Twitter model rather than a Facebook model.
We agree that would move things in the right direction, but we’ve long wondered why more sites don’t copy the social network that’s always had the most nuanced way to define your relationships — Flickr.com.
All of Flickr’s available relationships — contacts (like followers on Twitter), friends and family — are asymmetrical. What’s more, they can be used to define different levels of privacy. For example, it’s easy to upload photos and set their privacy levels to “friends and family” or just “family.”
In addition, to offer a more flexible way to define your relationships on the site, Flickr uses the nature of the relationship to offer a much more flexible privacy system. You can limit content to only approved groups or you can offer it up to the world. In short, Flickr offers the best of Twitter and Facebook and does it on a per-post basis.
Facebook, which prides itself as the private social network, lacks a similar flexibility. Because it locks you into reciprocal relationships, if you try to expand beyond your circle of closest friends, the data stream eventually becomes overwhelmed by noise.
Which isn’t to say Flickr is perfect. In fact, we prefer Twitter’s model of following and followers to Flickr’s “contacts,” which, frankly is a word best left to address book applications. And Flickr’s notifications system could be better; for example, if you change a “contact” to “friend” Flickr doesn’t inform that person of the change (although some might argue that’s a feature).
However, semantic nuances aside, Flickr does offer perhaps the best model of online relationships — asymmetrical, grouped and with plenty of privacy options to control who sees what.
Facebook, Twitter, and whatever supersedes both, take note — sometimes the best solutions are are right under your nose.
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