Let’s face it, not all friends are created equal in terms of what I want to share and how I want to communicate. I would really like multiple profiles and profile preferences managed from a single place. I don’t want to live in multiple social networks…meaning Linkedin for business and Facebook for social. I really just want one place to live and services in and out that allow me to communicate and share content, ideas and presence data in ways that make context sense. Let’s say my daughter was in a dance recital yesterday and I wanted to share photos or videos. I’m pretty sure my entire network doesn’t want to see this – nor do I want to share that kind of info that broadly. Likewise, most of my personal friends and family could care less about my latest blog post about social media.
What I’d like is the ability to easily create, manage and publish to a variety of "friend populations" that I control. The set up for me might look something like this:
- Group 1: All approved "friends" in my network"
- Group 2: "Friends" I approve but don’t really know
- Group 3: Business associates (all)
- Group 4: Business associates (within the company I work)
- Group 5: Business associates (external to the company I work)
- Group 6: Personal friends and family
- Group 7: Family
- Group 8: Fully custom 1
- Group 9: Fully custom 2
Then, give me the ability to configure (with easy multi-select on publish) who gets access to what content, ideas and/or presence data. Admittedly this adds complexity to the system and in general, complexity is not good, but I think this would make Facebook even more of a personal platform for business, entertainment and social networking.
What do you think?
Sean