Privacy and Boundaries

One thing that continues to bother me with modern social networking tools (particularly utlities such as Facebook) is the way that they institute such strict and uncompromising boundaries and divisions amongst their users. For example, I am in both my University network and the London network on Facebook… which means that for the most part, I can’t view or interact with members of other networks. This is, I am told, done for very simple privacy reasons and considering the fact that there is the choice to have your data open I have no real problem with this, except of course for the problem of groups.

Groups are clearly designed to allow members of disparate networks to discuss and interact with each other by providing a mutual meeting place based upon mutual interests, beliefs, and so on. The major problem with this is, I think, the lack of intelligence built into the group system, and how this carries over to the user base. Let me give you an example.

When I did my English degree my dissertation was in one of my favourite authors, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Feeling well disposed to him last November I set up a group on Facebook entitled “Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Writer, Thinker, Gentleman” which attracted a few members, and I promptly mostly forgot about. I looked it up the other day to discover it had several hundred members, and decided to search for what other groups might be providing similar services. There were, in fact, several almost identical groups. So why did these different groups all exist, and moreover, why do they still exist?

Part of the problem is that there is no intelligent system sitting behind the group construction and maintainence facility, and thus these superfluous groups do seem to form with alarming regularity. How hard, really, could it be to have the system do a quick search when you enter a group name and say “Did you know that there are already several groups devoted to this subject?”. If that’s too difficult for the programmers over at Facebook HQ to deal with, what the hell is the problem with using a simple tagging interface? You already have to select a broad category, why not allow your users to tag their groups (and events come to that) with more specific words. If I had tagged my group with “Lovecraft” “Literature” and “H.P. Lovecraft” there would have been a swift BING and I would have known that setting up this group was more or less pointless. And if I didn’t think it was more or less pointless, I could have ignored the warnings and gone ahead anyway. This is an absurdly simple system, so why isn’t it in place?

What makes it worse is that there is no way to correct this mistake once it’s been made. It’s impossible to kick people from a group, and the creator leaving just hands over admin rights to some other chump. If only you could merge your group with another as long as, say, the officers or creators both agreed. Then the Lovecraft groups could merge into one glorious whole, with no real disadvantage. All you’d need to do was port the officers, discussions, and wall, and lo and behold, you have a single group. Exactly how this was done could be left up to the individual creators, but it can’t be difficult to implement. Seriously guys, get with the program.

But this isn’t really just Facebook. We’re such an active tagging community online these days, particularly in the blogging world, and it seems surreal that we’re not extending this to other internet-based media, or even those strange things we do when we’re offline. If Facebook could benefit (even in this limited and pretty obvious example) why can’t other facilities? Why shouldn’t my hardrive be taggable? If I could tag my fiction output it would make searching and organisation about a million times easier, and if you can’t be bothered to use it… well, don’t.

Manual tagging is a very useful tool, and it needs to be used more often, but there is also a place, I think for an automatic tagging tool. Though it would be much more difficult, it could be feasible to create a tool that monitored what you were typing, and associated it with a key tags that slotted into an ontological dictionary. I type “brownie” and later on I write something about “biscuits” and the computer goes “Oh ho! He’s talking about baked goods today!” and could, if it were useful, alert me to this fact. Of course, I’ve touched upon the major problem here – what is useful? Well, that’s just a small crease to iron out in the scheme… honest.

Well, it’s a nice thought for the future. But until then: GET TAGGING!

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Tags: Facebook, groups, ontology, social networking, tagging

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