It’s always bothered me that most social networking sites only have one level of friendship. You are either someone’s friend, or you are not. In the real world, we have multiple levels: spouses, partners, family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, etc. Since there’s no depth to our friend lists on these sites, it appears that we are equally close to everyone.

Different sites attempt to deal with this in their own ways. Twitter changed the term from “friend” to “follower” in an attempt to make it more impersonal. Flickr, as far as I know, is the only major social site that set up multiple levels: friends, family, and followers, to make it easier to control who can see your private photos. Facebook and Linkedin require the person you friend to friend you back, theoretically limiting the site to reciprocal relationships.

On the surface, the Facebook/Linkedin approach seems like a good one. No one can list you as a friend unless you acknowledge them. But I can’t be the only one who is uncomfortable blocking or ignoring a friend request from someone you went to high school with, but haven’t seen in years. Either I say yes, and then my friend list is polluted with updates from someone I don’t really care about, or I say no, and then I seem (and feel) rude. To deal with this, Facebook has implemented a “mute” setting to hide updates from friends you don’t care about! How ridiculous!

Add to this the problem of people who turn their friend list into a popularity contest. Sure, you might have thousands of followers on Twitter, but how many of them do you actually talk to? For that matter, how many are just spam-bots?

“It’s a bit like when I worked at a newspaper: Every reporter thought “Well, our circulation is a million copies, that must mean a million people read my column.” Facing the reality that only 10,000 of those people read the column, or that perhaps only 1,000 of them were reading the advertisement on the opposite page, forced a useful and important reckoning into some false assumptions that were underpinning that industry’s workings.”
– Anil Dash, Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers

Using a Flickr-style system with multiple levels of friendship is an easy way to deal with this problem, but it’s not perfect. It won’t prevent people from gaming the system by just flagging every follower as a friend. It also requires work from the user, so there will always be some users who just ignore the rankings and leave everyone at the default level of follower.

In a perfect world, this system would be automated. By default, everyone is a “follower,” which doesn’t imply any level of relationship beyond “this person is interested in seeing my updates.” Then I propose a second level called “friend” which followers are automatically promoted to based on their interactions with you over a time period. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say a friend is someone who you’ve had at least one conversation with in the last 30 days. (It has to be a two-way conversation, otherwise people could spam you and get promoted to your list. What we’re really trying to track here is the people that you actually interact with.)

In my case, I’ve got 150-odd followers on Twitter, of whom, perhaps 10 would get promoted to friends, because I don’t have a lot of conversations. For me, a simple “one conversation in 30 days” rule would work well to show who I actually interact with the most. Someone like Warren Ellis, with over 350,000 followers, would need a more complicated algorithm. I don’t have the math skills to write it up myself, but it seems like it should be possible to create a kind of sliding scale that would analyze how many conversations you have, and promote the people you talk to the most to friend status.

“When it comes to microfame, the worst place to be is in the middle of the pack. If someone’s got 1.5 million followers on Twitter, they’re one of the rare and straightforwardly famous folks online. Like a digital Oprah, they enjoy a massive audience that might even generate revenue. There’s no pretense of intimacy with their audience, so there’s no conversation to spoil. Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you’re clearly just chatting with pals. It’s the middle ground — when someone amasses, say, tens of thousands of followers — where the social contract of social media becomes murky.”
– Clive Thompson, In Praise of Online Obscurity

The best part about a system like this is that it’s self-correcting. If an old high-school friend comes out of the woodwork, follows me and starts chatting with me, and I respond to be polite, they might bump up into my friend list temporarily, but over time as we drift back out of contact, they would naturally fall off the list.

That adds the possibility of a second filter for the friends list – tracking how often they appear on the list. Obviously, someone who is always in my friend list is a closer friend that someone with a single spike of activity who then faded into the background. Again, I don’t have the math, but it should be possible to make the friend list take this into account.

I’m sure I can’t be the only person who has this frustration with social networking. If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment on this post, or friend me on Twitter.