Dan Brickley who blogs at danbri's foaf stories wrote last week in his post "The World is now closed" that one problem with popular social networking service sites such as Facebook is that their software is making the closed world assumption: anything the service didn't already have in their database, was false, rather than "unknown". This assumption causes a service to have a view of the world that an individual didn't exist until that individual became a member of that service. This is of course incorrect:
A description of me and my friends hosted by a big Web site isn't "my social network". Those sites are just a database containing claims made by different people, some verified, some not. And with, inevitably, lots missing.
Suppose Alice and Bob got married in the 1970s. A social networking service Foo starts operation in 2006. Alice joins the Foo service June 2007; Bob joins that same service Foo in July 2007, and in August 2007 Alice and Bob decide to add the 'spouse' links between their accounts in Foo's database. Unfortunately, it is likely that Foo will immediately afterward send out an announcement to all of Alice and Bob's friends who have accounts in Foo that "Alice and Bob are now married. Congratulations!". Mr. Brickley writes
Syndicating descriptions of the changeable properties of the world, on the other hand, is more slippery since you need to have all other relevant facts to be able to say how the world is right now (or implicitly, how it used to be, before).
Through data sharing protocols and mechanisms, it may become possible for services to assemble better pictures of their subscriber's interactions, by exchanging data with the other services through which their subscribers interacts. But this approach is still limited in what it can provide, and social networking services that assume that everything is going to be available on the web will present a fantasy role-playing game view of the real world, since there's no JTAG interface to the minds of individuals, where the social networking 'raw data' resides.
I agree with his recommendation that We need better UI that reflects what's really going on....what we're most missing is a style of end-user UI here that educates users about this world that spans websites, couching things in terms of claims hosted in sites, rather than in absolutist terms
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However, while joining a new service and having it pronounce "you do not have any friends!" is disconcerting, might it also be disconcerting for a too accurate view of real world social networks to be presented? Most individuals are not used to there being a gossip column maintained about their life. Furthermore, might there be an "uncanny valley" for social networking services, in which humans reject software that appears to "know too much" about the activity of humans? The closer the software reaches to actual social skills in its attempts to provide a human-like social ability, the further it might appear to be. Jean Baudrillard in the paper "Holograms" in Simulacra and Simulation writes
The social, the social phantasmagoria, is now nothing but a special effect, obtained by the design of participating networks converging in emptiness under the spectral image of collective happiness. Three-dimensionality of the simulacrum - why would the simulacrum with three dimensions be closer to the real than the one with two dimensions? It claims to be, but paradoxically, it has the opposite effect: to render us sensitive to the fourth dimension as a hidden truth, a secret dimension of everything, which suddenly takes on all the force of evidence. The closer one gets to the perfection of the simulacrum..., the more evident it becomes ... how everything escapes representation, escapes its own double and its resemblance.
Copyright 1999-2007 Mark Wahl. All rights reserved.