When I asked my Italian flatmate if she used Facebook a few months ago, she replied with a resounding “NO!!!“, and breathlessly continued to explain that she had never had so much pressure to sign up for something in her entire life. You would have thought I had asked her to do something awful. It was clear to me that she had huge barriers against socialising online, and perhaps also the idea of meeting people online. This she pointed out, I think, because I had met my other flatmate online. (Both flatmates, two months later, are now on Facebook.)

It occurred to me that it’s become socially acceptable to talk about Facebook and internet-socialising whilst actually socialising in the ‘real’ world. Chatting online, when the internet was first becoming mainstream and excitement about dot coms was brewing, was largely considered geeky or nerdy. It definitely wasn’t cool to talk about it with your friends, since it was unlikely you’d be mixing with them. There was a taboo about using your real name online. I think there was a lot of actual fear about who might be “out there” if you can’t see them, or detect information about them by how they look, speak, and act: people (and dogs) are invisible. I’ve seen a trend towards using real names instead of ‘handles’: the fear over revealing your identity online has dissipated. There is generally a greater embrace of the medium to communicate with your friends, and other people, online.

I would argue that Facebook is the first significant instance where socialising online has become totally mainstream and normalized. I would also argue that it has made a huge effort, in its core design, to bring synthesis to the online/offline worlds. Here are some of my thoughts.

Facebook’s appeal to offline socialisers (or “real people”): clear walls and restrictions
Facebook is designed in a way that restricts itself to people we already know. It has an emphasis on importing existing contacts. This restriction is built deep into its core, in its division of networks that are geographical, work-based, school-based, college-based.

As a point of contrast, Myspace leaves us open to the unorganized, chaotic web-without-walls. We can find people we know, sure. But there are also few barriers and few restrictions.

A social network is defined by its restrictions. It is defined by what it doesn’t allow, and who it doesn’t invite. It can do this in subtle ways too: it was pointed out to me that Virb, for example, is clearly trying to attract a certain kind of audience, via its design and copy.

Having the quality of being a “walled garden” has been cited as one of the 5 reasons social networks fail
“They do not want to share information with others for fear that it will dilute their power as THE central hub for all relationships.” — Tristan Louis, the interim CTO for Boo.com.

I think having the quality of walls is essential for the success of social networks.
Giving structure to the unchartered, massive, growing internet is something people are looking for. People like simplicity, and we look for order and pattern in all our experiences. Social networks are a way of making sense of the internet. Walls give structure — and Facebook gives people a clear system for finding other people, and letting people into your network.

Friends?
One of the interesting questions Tristan Louis raises is how do we define, in words, the nature of our relationships? “Relationships are not binary. It’s not either someone is my friend or not.” (Louis).

Easy enough on to define on LinkedIn: people added to your network are professional contacts. But what about the word friend? The word doesn’t seem to fit the contacts I have on my Facebook friend list: it encompasses many different ‘categories’ of people in my life. The word ‘friend’ no longer seems to fit. Relationships don’t exist in language, and they are not really defined successfully in language. Human relationships are amorphous, always changing, things (are they really “things” — tangible?). The word ‘contact’ doesn’t satisfy totally either.

Offline, human relationships are maintained by contact and communication. They need constant maintenance. (Virginia Woolf: “I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.”)

What’s the online equivalent of failing to cross the street? And what happens when a friendship or a relationship breaks down? A contact presence can’t simply fade naturally through lack of communication. Relationships offline are defined immaterially by contact and communication; relationships online are defined materially by presence on your contact list, whether or not you are actually in contact.

Deletion of a contact is abrupt and difficult to reverse politely. You can’t bump into a deleted contact in the supermarket and initiate a conversation to respark the friendship. A deleted contact is more like a divorce: final and material; remarriage is rare.

Using a different model for online interaction
Perhaps because the way we socialise offline is governed by neurosis, niceties, and the platitudes of social oil, we can’t translate it well online. Different models for interaction should be considered, given the context.

This idea is particularly relevant to flirting, which is something else I’ve been thinking about, provoked by a friend’s suggestion.

It was pointed out to me that real-life flirting, in a bar, for example, is based on the external: physical looks. But often physical looks are overruled further into the dating process as you gain a sense of someone’s character, which may wither attraction. Online flirting circumvents most physical attraction, despite the fact we may have photographic proof that we are attractive human beings in the real world, as we are somewhat disembodied personalities.

It was pointed out to me that some things can’t be faked in a virtual social setting: “just like a rather frumpy looking person can’t pretend to be a fashion model in the real world, one can’t really pretend they have a great “sense of humour” when they meet somebody online”. The models for dating sites and flirting ‘mechanisms’ are faulty, then, because the way we interact online is fundamentally different from offline.

I’m trying to think of instances when appearance has been used to make a concept more attractive to users, when the concept on its own would not be popular or as popular as, say, music (but what is?). It is difficult to ‘sell’ something to someone if it is not desirable on its own.

I’ve seen a couple of ideas pop up recently which add incentive and fun to altruism:

1) Facebook application: Causes
One of the features I like on Causes is charity gifts, which are really nicely designed gifts that actually make a difference.

It was pointed out to me that there’s quite a surreal contrast between the shocking reality of the situation and giving a charity gift on Facebook from the comfort of your expensive apartment. But this way, at least something happens at all.

2) Website: Free Rice
Free Rice is a fun and educational game that donates 20 grains of rice for every word you define correctly on the site. You learn, and the UN World Food Program helps end hunger. I even learned a few new words.

Really good design must go deeper than appearance. But appearance should not be undervalued, especially when appearances can be leveraged to impact change.

If you choose to wear something – anything – then you should really wear it, and its design should reflect this choice. Current hearing aid design is in a kind of wearing/not wearing purgatory. The majority of designs are flesh-coloured. A flesh-coloured hearing aid says to the wearer that this device is embarrassing, so I’m attempting to camouflage against your skin.

Well-designed eyewear is desirable even by those with perfect vision. So why can’t we go beyond that to take advantage of the technological advantages hearing aids can give us (even, and perhaps especially, those with average hearing)? This is even more relevant as we live our lives closer to technology, and in light of the fact that one in seven people suffer from a degree of hearing loss, and the RNID predicts that this will rise as noise pollution increases and people live longer.

The Hearwear show at the V&A in 2006 showcased a variety of stylish hearing aid designs, which I think is a timely and exciting stimulus for designers. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go.

Hearing-wear should be as mass-market as eyewear, mobile phones, and iPods (and ones you can sync with the technology you use, like the Oticon Epoq can, to the ecstasy of Wired journalist Charlie Sorrel). I think it’s just a matter of time before it is.

Peter Steiner’s cartoon of a dog using the internet was published by the New Yorker in 1993. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, runs the caption.
My online presence is manifested in this blog, in Facebook, and in various other profiles I’ve created online – not always obviously connected to me. I don’t necessarily want all my profiles connected to me (especially not my Livejournal from ’00).

Above all, it’s clear that my presence is disparate, uncontrolled, and rather schizophrenic in nature. I’ve lost track of the online services I’ve signed up for, the profiles I’ve created (from Geocities to Neopets) since I first started to sign up for stuff. Each of these services had their own mail system, their own network.

Jeff Jarvis proclaims that the internet is the social network:

The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet is the social network. We have our identities, interests, reputations, relationships, information, and lives here, and we’re adding more every day. The network enabler that manages to help us tie these together to find not just connections or email addresses or information or songs but people — friends, colleagues, teachers, students, partners, lovers — across this open world, that will be the owner of the biggest network of them all: The Google of people.

How do we find people? Without network enablers, people online are without presence. A network enabler does three things. It gives people a presence, and organises these presences, and gives people a clear way to find other people. Without this, people online are the sum of all their data debris, their purchases on eBay, their Amazon wishlist. A profile gathers this information together.

The open web – I think of a vast, expanding, mostly uncivilised terrain – means we rely on network enablers to make the ground habitable for us. We rely on technology provided by Facebook, by Google, for example, to organise presence.

The trouble is that by putting my presence in the hands of Google, I am giving them my trust. Do I really want to depend on one company for all my online services? My dependence on Google, at the moment, is not too bad; it spans my personal email and my feeds. I also use Google for maps and search, which doesn’t require me to be logged in. Even though my Google dependence is not very strong, I would hate to lose my account with Google.

OpenID is a possible answer here. I like their brief summary: An open and decentralized identity system, designed “not to crumble if one company turns evil [nice choice of word] or goes out of business”.

FOAF looks interesting too. Otherwise, I think online identity is still problematic. Maybe it’s the dichotomy of online/offline: unless we turn people into their devices, there’ll always be a space between the person, the machine they use, and what they use the machine for.

Turning people into their machines is an extreme solution. Perhaps what we need, my friend has just suggested, is a “distributed identity, across many sites, with an independent means of controlling which sites have access to data from other sites … a really advanced keychain”.