The Social Graph is Neither
A really good rant about why the social graph is fundamentally flawed by Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard.
Some quotes from the (rather long) article:
Is my sister going to resent me if I finally defriend her annoying husband? Can I unfollow my ex now, or is that going to make her think I’m still hung up on her?
But these common relationships turn out to be kind of slippery. To use XFN as my example, how do I decide if my cubicle mate is afriend,acquaintanceor just acontact? And if I call him my friend, should I interpret that in the northern California sense, or in some kind of universal sense of friendship?
Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.
[…] both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action.
iOS/Android/Rails developer. geek.
