Max Engel - the 8BitKid » Uncategorized

I tend to avoid writing about tech stuff, since I spend my whole day working on the web, but this is just too interesting to not discuss. FriendFeed, an activity aggregator and conversation platform, just introduced a “fake follow”. In essence, it allows you to “friend” someone without actually friending them. To the purported friend and the rest of the world it looks like a connection was established, but the faker doesn’t actually deal with the clutter of making a new connection.

Last year, when I was attending the Data Sharing Summit, we were discussing the need for this as a model on the web. In real world social situations, when I receive a business card I always have the option of just throwing it away. The person that gave me the card continues believing that a connection was established, but I don’t actually have to reciprocate. Creating the illusion of a bidirectional assertion is a critical part of social interactions. In life, we often find ourselves in a relationship where the parties see the bond in vastly different ways but can still both be satisfied. This kind of nuanced relationship rarely happens on the web.

The problem has been that online etiquette tends to pressure users to make these bidirectional assertions. Many social networks do this for us. On Facebook I can’t have a one-way friend, and the same thing goes on MySpace. Address books do allow for one person to declare that a relationship exists, but this can occur without the consent of the referenced party. As we have gotten more social graphs on the web, some have allowed for the “follow”. On Twitter, for example, I can follow someone without them returning the favor. The problem is that when a follow isn’t reciprocated, feelings can be hurt and the jilted party is left with hurt feelings. This causes quite a conundrum, where sensitive social web users don’t want to damage the quality of a relationship by slighting their admirer, but they also don’t want to become overwhelmed by the baggage of content that often accompanies the formation of an online friendship. After all, our news feeds can only handle so much clutter before they drown in meaninglessness, and the scope of people you actually want to stay current on is typically far smaller than the size of your friend network.

This is why the “fake follow” is so brilliant. It creates the appearance of a relationship without saddling one party with unwelcome information. I think this is an important step in creating more nuanced social relationships online, and am excited to see how this monumental, incremental, enhancement ripples through the web.