Don't Know What You're Getting Into?
So within the past two months there has been a boom in Facebook dating applications. I know this because I had a hairbrained scheme to make a zillion dollars by building one but naturally never acted on it. Anyway, I noticed one in my News Feed today. The message goes like this:
[Your friend] was reviewing friends’ friends for dating, using [Application].
[Pictures]
In his network, people have voted [Person 1], [Person 2], [Person 3], and [Person 4] as most desired.
Well it so happens that this friend’s network tends to overlap with mine a bit, and this is the first time I’ve seen the application installed. That must be embarrassing for him, considering at least one or two of these girls are in pretty solid relationships. Knowing him, he’s probably too clueless to get the picture. Knowing Facebook, he might not have even seen the news feed item.
I wrote a paper on design principles for social applications a little while ago. Maybe I’ll try to submit it somewhere sometime, but I think I might break it into a few (less dry) blog posts instead, as that seems to be where most of the discussion is going on. The premise was that there have been a lot of Bad Decisions made by Facebook, MySpace, and others, most having to do with security issues unique to social networks. Very few of these decisions actually resulted in Bad News for the users, but every one did result in a huge backlash from the user base, one which required a personal apology from a certain CEO.
I come across a great paper that accumulated a number of key design constraints for ubiquitous computing (which is similar to the social web in its large privacy ramifications), and six of them seemed to fit very well for Social Design: Notice, Choice and Consent, Proximity and Locality (of effect), Adequate Security, Anonymity and Pseudonymity, and Access and Recourse. I gave suggestions in each of these areas, and I included one more derivative suggestion, which was customization through Templates, including contact templates and behavioral templates (Facebook is very slowly adding the former; LiveJournal has essentially hit all these points.)
I’ll explain all these later, but let’s just say that this example represents a possible mistake in all six of those key areas.