The Real Life Social Network: How Facebook Affects Offline Relationships
Ever feel strange about friending mom on Facebook? Having business contacts see your pool party photos? You're not alone. Paul Adams, Senior UX Researcher at Google, discusses these issues in a presentation called The Real Life Social Network. According to Paul, that awkwardness is a result of how we're organizing offline relationships into one big online friends bucket.
Facebook itself is not the problem here. The problem is that these are different parts of Debbie's [the woman above] life that never would have been exposed to each other offline were linked online.
The problem is that the social networks we're creating online don't match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.
He goes on to discuss a shift towards a human-centric web and the implications for businesses. It's becoming increasingly important for brands to think about relationships and fostering communities (= forest), not click-throughs rates (= trees). This can be done by understanding socialization habits and how offline behavior is influencing online interactions (and vice versa). Indeed, social networking is just one way people interact; focusing on fundamental social behaviors, not the technology enabling them, is the best long term communications strategy.
See the rest of Paul's presentation here.
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Podolski
