Real Life Social Networks

Paul Adams, a senior user experience researcher at Google created an extremely rich and insightful presentation looking at the challenges that real-life social networks bring to web design.

When it comes to reflecting our real life social networks into what could be considered rudimentary online networks, there is a real design challenge in terms representing how your friends, colleagues and associates inter-relate to each other.
****

Social technologies such as Facebook and Twitter have a homogenised view of friendship; they group everyone together. This typically doesn’t reflect how real friendships are nurtured and naturally creates communication challenges.

For example, not everyone will want to know on a daily basis about your fondness of cats, or wants to know about your regular eating habits.

So next time before you tag your photo’s on Facebook, Flickr or send that Tweet consider who will actually see it and do they need to?

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

hattip