If I’m a fan of Ian Anderson, there is a bidirectional link between us. Of course, my influence on him is insignificant, in that I am but one of thousands of fans. But the impact of thousands of fans is significant. For Jethro Tull to tour, they need fans to buy tickets, and so on. So the strength of the connection from me to Ian is fairly weak when considering my sole connection.

In the other direction, Ian’s influence on me is likely stronger, although not nearly as strong as that between me and a close friend.

Using the Flickr example, there are family, friends, contacts and everyone else. These four levels could just as easily identify strength of relationship. But it’s not really enough. I have friends on Flickr who are little more than online acquaintences — the connection is tenuous.

What I’d really like to see is something similar to a tag cloud, but with link entropy emphasized. Some social network analysis tools attempt this, but it would be interesting to see tools like Flickr incorporate automated relationship strength into their community.

This is disconcerting to me also. It’s worrisome how many people on LJ or MySpace apparently want to track who all their ‘viewers’ are, as it would end up deterring the casual browser… sometimes I randomly follow threads of people’s MySpace or LJ friends, and I wouldn’t want to peruse someone’s postings or pictures and get a note the next day along the lines of ‘who r u why did u look at my page omg ur a old perv’ just because I followed a link to the portrayal of their public persona. There are ways for people to be private on social networks if you don’t want non-friends connecting or contacting you (friends-listing & privacy preferences) already, I’m leery of a bigbrothery solution that deters the serendipity of reading other’s thoughts.

Iteration 3 was tagged and released into the wild yesterday. Right now you can see it at http://melt.staging.greenpeace.org , the code is here (Note we’re only hosting the ‘latest’ iteration at any time, so in a week or so the…

Undirected graphs are good for providing access to private data. Directed graphs are good for sharing public data.

Randy

i found your site after you linked to my friendster t shirt project 2 years ago. which was my own satirical way of trying to graft a performative, undirected graph of my social world onto friendster. except for the xeni jardin shirt, all of the original batch of t shirts were of random people i’d see around the neighborhood, who were all public figures in their own small ways (a dj, a writer for a chicago-centric zine, a karaoke superstar (he actually had following)). the general reaction that i got from my parody of microcelebrity was pretty much split in two – on the one side were 20-something women w/ media/tech jobs who wanted me to use their profile on a t shirt, and on the other side were a lot of random really angry comments to the effect of “if i ever see that creep w/ my face on a t shirt i’ll kill him.”
(i have alot i could say about the squandered potential of friendster back in the late summer of 2003 – the guy who runs that site is like a cross between dr fankenstein and the great gatsby)

this kind of strongly negative reaction towards non-reciprocal connections seems to be getting worse as the social internet becomes more mainstream. 5+ years ago it was assumed that most people reading your blog would be strangers, at least at first, and getting to know somebody from the internet via their blog or journal required forming an opinion of thembased on information gathered without their knowledge (but with their implied consent, since it was published in an open forum.) post-friendster, with people signing up for these sites bringing an established, irl group of friends, there’s this really strong taboo against contacting or even reading (“looking at”) people you don’t already know (i’ve seen livejournal comment arguments that devolve into “why are you even reading this, you dont’ know me” from the orgininal poster) for example. maybe nobody wants to admit that a big motivator for joining these kinds of sites is pure narcissistic attention and looking for sex partners? i’m not sure what, if any, kind of dichotomy i’m trying to draw here, but there seems to be,post Friendster, alot of people who join social networking sites to use them w/ their already-existing networks of friends, and specifically don’t want to use those sites to meet new people, so havining their content restricted to pre-approved users is how they’d prefer it. friendster recently introduced that feature that lets you see who’s viewing your profile and the consensus that i’ve seen on it is “that’s so creeeeepy” (which is a word that gets thrown around at alot of online behavior and seems in some circles to be the worst kind of thing a person can be, far worse than being a troll, or just being inane or ignorant). i like the “who’s viewed me” feature because i can view a friend’s profile and it’s a way of saying “hi, thinking of you” without actually having to write the note, but i know alot of people who stopped using friendster because of it.

but – i think that now that there are millions of people using sites like friendster or myspace or flickr, or blogging services, only a small proportion (“early adopter”, “power user”, “neophile” types) actually want to have a network of complex power relations where you might link to people who don’t link back to you, and you’re comfortable with the idea of strangers reading what you have to say, and possibly even commenting on it. most people i think just want to use social websites as a way to keep in touch with people they already know, and consider the openness of the networks to be a drawback.

That argument is countered by the fact that people create more unidirectional links than bidirectional links. I have 162 people in my blogroll but have a lot less people in my immediate social circle. There are about 64 people in my IM buddy list and the main reason there are so many is because I work on the IM product. Before I joined my current team there were less than half that.

Of course, once the system has taken off and critical mass has been reached, this becomes a liability in the ways you discuss.