Facebook

I'm not really using Facebook, although I have an account on there. I feel that its design is fundamentally flawed because it doesn't reflect how I actually interact with my friends.

Facebook (and, to be fair, most of its peers and competitors) is designed to treat all the people you know as a single pool, an equivalence class of others; adding someone as a friend basically allows them to interact with you and all your other friends. When you make a "post" on your "wall", your friends, and maybe their friends, and maybe the world can see it; if you let friends "post" on your "wall", all of them can do so, and see each other's entries.

That doesn't mirror how I communicate with others in the real world; I don't interact in the same way with all my friends. My relationships with different sets of friends revolve around different activities, along orthogonal axes. For example, many of my friends are ones with which I share a particular hobby or interest; I don't particularly care what their political or religious views are, because they're not important in those contexts (business colleagues are a typical example). Then there are people with whom I specifically share values and ideals, and with whom I work to accomplish other shared goals or changes. Finally, I have family, with whom I have even different ties. To make it even more complex, the groups are not mutually exclusive; there are overlaps.

I'm just not convinced that there are that many things I want to communicate to all those people at the same time. For example, I might choose to express a political opinion, but I really don't want to discuss it with everyone. I also don't necessarily want my "wall" to be in the middle of a heated discussion between people I know, but who may not know each other, and who may never find common ground. And I think I'd like to have some space where I can discuss, plan, or do things with my friends or family which I would not necessarily want to disclose to my business colleagues.

The online facility which I think may be closest in spirit to what I think would be appropriate is Google Wave. I should be able to create one or more Wave(s) for each of my groups of friends, and collaborate with them inside. Individual "wavelets" can be open to all the people on the Wave, or to some subsets. In addition, the collaboration facilities will be much richer than any existing social media platform; for example, I've not been able to share documents with people on Facebook, so small groups of us use Google Documents together.

So that's a long explanation for why I might not "friend" you on Facebook. It's nothing personal; I'd just rather we keep in touch some other way.