June302011
Regarding Groups
I recently had breakfast with a friend who is a developer at Path, and I was giving him some feedback on the Stacks feature, which is a major pain point for me. The idea behind Stacks is to group your posts by “People”, “Place”, and “Thing” so you can go into the app and look at all the posts that I’ve tagged Cesar in, or that I’ve taken at Andalu, etc. People and Place are fairly useful and straightforward. The Thing field has always been super open-ended, though, and it never was my habit as a user to tag something as simple as “Brunch”—I often used the Thing category for some witty remark or commentary instead (e.g., “Going for a bike ride” [thing] in “Golden Gate Park” [place]). Because of that, the new interface that integrated Stacks became really annoying for users like me. So that led to the question of how you structure categories so that groups are useful and enjoyable to use, because it doesn’t seem like anyone has figured it out yet. The service either imposes a rigid grouping structure (Family, Friends, Co-Workers) that requires the user to force things into a category, or it’s completely open-ended (you create and name all your own groups), which I find equally frustrating.
Then the most interesting subject matter came up—when we talked about way humans group people in their environment. There’s been a lot of commentary on this thanks to fb’s revamped group feature and, perhaps more pertinent, Google+. I find Facebook Groups and Twitter Lists to be completely useless—it’s more of an organizational technique that serves as just one more damn thing I have to configure; there’s no element of sharing that I can easily parse from the noise. In that sense it’s overly open-ended. In theory, Google+ will attempt to provide a platform for people to actually interact within their open-ended groups, which re-introduces the social element. But wasn’t that what they tried to do with both Buzz and Wave?
There’s just some anthropological element missing from all this that I can’t quite put my finger on. Where is the research being done about natural human perception of their social environment and grouping habits? Are there consistent grouping patterns within a community, a state, or a region of the country? How do those patterns vary from other regions? Do real life groups differ from how people ACTUALLY interact with the people within those groups on the internet? Surely Facebook has access to data like this—I want to see that data compared with human perception of real-life social groups and see if we can come up with a grouping structure that is tailored to a given society’s social behavior. The company in the mobile/sharing/location-based space that cracks this riddle will be the one that sticks, and proves its permanent cultural relevance.
