Friday, December 19, 2008

No more invites SNS

What if...I created a social networking site with no such invite mechanism...

Okay, I know it's the semantic web. But let's think through why it would be cool.
The reason why Facebook is such a hit is because it helps people connect with one another. The problem I see, however, is that the barriers to connecting with your friends is primarily the invitation mechanism. Either you or your friend must invite the other, and the otherside needs to accept the invitation. That's quite a barrier...let me explain why.

Except for the few who enjoy going around searching for all their friends (a small population), I think most people don't bother inviting their friends. I think this is especially true after they have accumulated a proportion of their friends on the network. The problem is that when we have reached that stage, nobody bothers to invite each other anymore. For example, I know many of my friends are on facebook, but I don't bother to invite them (and neither do they).

This barrier is huge. If I were automatically friend-ed with all my friends (via photos, wall posts, etc...) and my friends are ranked based on my network and the amount of interaction between each of them and me, I would have more reasons to be on facebook. I would be truly connected with my network and there would also be more entry points for interactions between my friends and I.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just had this conversation with my colleagues and my boss couple weeks back. Research says that the amount of people that a single person can interact with was something like 200 people. Meaning, if you have like 700+ friends on your SNS, you're probably have a full time job to be on facebook or any other SNS.

our ideas was similar to yours, Ranking friends based on interaction between two people, but we think its best that once that connection slows down, pictures of your friends would gradually fades away and eventually dissapear. The population of people with 1000 friends would certainly shrink down.

Anonymous said...

where you come from!