Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Asynchronous Requests

On Face­book: why do I have to get con­fir­ma­tion from a friend when I add details about how I know them?

Why not just give me a choice: add pri­vate details, or add pub­lic details. Pub­lic details can act like the cur­rent friend details: they show on my friends page when peo­ple see I’m friends with them.

If I just want to make notes to myself, and not show them to any­one else, why can’t I? It lets me attach more con­text to some­one I’ve added: I know them through friend X, we dis­cussed top­ic Y, et cetera.

Syn­chro­nous request/approval cycles are the surest to social net­work death. More on that later.

I remem­ber when Face­book was still in their get­ting-pop­u­lar stage, they pushed the Friend Details fea­ture pret­ty hard, but then as time went by, that fea­ture was basi­cal­ly rel­e­gat­ed to the back-burn­er in lieu of oth­er fea­tures, like appli­ca­tions (which, btw, need to die). I doubt that any­one at Face­book is giv­ing the friend details fea­ture any sig­nif­i­cant attention.

LinkedIn actu­al­ly does this rather well. On the right side­bar of any con­tact there’s a pri­vate info field. I like to think of it as their “back of the busi­ness card” — where you’ve scrib­bled notes about when/how you met some­one (and oth­er extra­ne­ous details like whether or not they were an ass­hole but still pos­si­bly a good per­son to know).

I won­der what Face­book’s met­rics are on the adop­tion rate of friend details. I imag­ine it’s pret­ty low. Pri­vate info FTW.