This is a long overdue post about why Google+ and Facebook (and Twitter, and everyone else) get the "Friend" model wrong. I've mentioned before that I've thought a lot about this problem (and with good reason; many of the tools I'm best known for focus on communication in social networks).
On Friday I went to a series of talks for the kickoff of the Marketing and Social Systems Engineering (MKSE) department at UPenn, chaired by one of my professors. There were four speakers -- I missed the second -- and the talks ranged from monetizing people's browsing behavior on the internet to proving that humans exist.
I've been building an open-source suite of social networking software as a hobby since 2007 so the underlying topic of network science has interested me for a long time. I have mainly focused on building user engagement. Towards that end I've thought a lot lately about the right way to represent relationships on a social networking website given varied successes and failures of Facebook's Friend Lists and new Smart Lists as well as Google+'s Circles. My expertise is in Drupal and the choices there all require tediously, manually building your network. I'm convinced that the best approach for usability is to automatically identify people's friend groups. In general it's a good principle not to make users do anything that is not directly related to accomplishing their task of participating on your site, and manually maintaining friend lists is awkward anyway.
