Right, this is me brainstorming in my lunchhour so it’s necessarily brief. But:

There’s a good article on abstractdynamics.org which basically explains one of my fundamental problems with Friendster-like systems. Namely, that they require you to be far too definite about your relationship to people. At basic, it’s binary: they’re a friend or they’re not a friend. Beyond that, you can say how much they are a friend but rarely how little they are a friend. And, as the article points out, this is all counter-intuitive, when real-life friend networks are far fuzzier.

So I was trying to think how to organise something a bit better, and this is basically what I came up with:

1. Start by dividing friends into “piles”. A pile could be, say, “all my friends from Barbelith, or “all my friends from home”; it needs to be a group that is on roughly equal standing. Essentially, the user should be willing to compare the friends within a single pile with one another.
2. The user now compares the friends in a pile with one another – starting at the top, you just decide whether a person is more/less/the same “amount” (ugh) a friend as one other. As this process is repeated, the pile settles out. Repeat this for every pile.
3. Now, the strength of ties of the piles to the user need to be explained. For instance, you might rank family or really close friends a bit above, say, friends from an email group. Not in particular – in general. A statement like “my family is probably more important to me than my friends from Barbelith”, say, might be the kind of thing we’re looking for.
4. Finally, there ought to be a way of having “satellites” – ie, people you know but would never go as far as to call a friend. They’re not connected to your network; they orbit it. As you become closer, their orbit could tighten until they were probably roughly in line with a pile. And then perhaps they could be merged into a pile.

Now, that’s only a beginning. I’m not sure how to cope with people in multiple piles – to be honest, I could avoid it quite easily as, say, friends I met on the Internet who’ve become really good friends would probably slip into a “RL friends” pile rather than a “digital friends” pile, but I can see this is a problem.

Also: part of my idea for this implementation demands that no-one bar the user ever see the rankings. What should be public is a relative chart of links – ie, you can see who/what is more important to a person, but not by how much. And so we’ve got a relative graphics that judges friends fairly – by comparing like groups with like groups – rather than by comparing all with all. And, crucially, the comparison is of most import to the user making it, not to other people – which is why they can only see a relative map of things. Also, I really like the whole satellite friends thing, because I usually acquire a lot of them.

Anyhow, there you go. I’m sure it’s riddled with flaws but as I said, it’s a half-hour lunchtime brainstorm. Anyone want to take me up on this? Anyone want to comment? Anyone read this damn thing?

Well, I’m settled into lodgings and stuck into the routine of work – and it’s turning out to be most interesting. It’s also keeping me busy, and that’s got to be a good thing. And, I’m learning stuff – lots of stuff to do with eGovernment and the like. This isn’t quite my area of expertise, but I’m remembering how to fact-sift and discovering a pile of innovative and interesting stuff.

So, despite being rather tired at the end of the day – especially when I’ve spent my evening trying to fill out a job application – I’m pretty happy, and enjoying myself a good deal. Not much more of use to say about the workplace or anything else outside it, really; hopefully I’ll have something more to say soon. Which might even be interesting.

So, in the past week or two, I’ve seen Lost in Translation, the first episode of series 3 of Six Feet Under, and just tonight, Big Fish. I have left all three with the same lingering thought;

I really want to write.

I mean, I write on the small scale; the odd short story, the odd article, gibberish on here. But I’m sure that somewhere in me is a big story waiting to be told. I’ve got one, nearly; it’s been refining itself over a very long time and suddenly, a week or two ago, my brain took a most brilliant shortcut and the real workings of a plot emerged. I might start writing it quite soon – it’s that exciting. It just needs a little more research… as I always seem to say. Soon, though, I swear I’m going to get on with it. I’m running out of time to tell these stories with every day that passes.

And so it’s back off to London for yet more interning. This time, I’m working in new media type stuff – online production and marketing. Quite looking forward to it, I guess. One useful thing I found for my time in the city – Chris Heathcote’s London Art Aggregator, perfect for discovering what’s open after work or at the weekends with which to while away my time.

So I’m mobile, again. More jobs to apply for at the same time; maybe I’ll end up staying. We’ll see…

Orkut. It’s one of those trendy things that is like Friendster. I got an invite onto it today, which, given it’s invite-only, I wasn’t going to turn down.

So I spent about twenty minutes this afternoon filling out my information, typing in my favourite books and films just like I did for Friendster when it hit me:

Why the hell was I doing this?

I don’t know, to help someone out with their product. Anyhow, A more solid trial of Orkut has led me to the following conclusion: it’s terrible, and I have no idea what it’s for. Let’s outline those problems in full.

• It’s lilac. It’s ugly, essentially. It’s also lazily designed – the type for my name on my profile is horrid, the caps look wrong, and I barely noticed those tabs top right of the profile. Not many points for design.
• The UI is really odd. OK, so say I have Tom‘s list of friends up to see if I know anyone in there, and I see someone I’m interested in. I click on them to see their profile. Do I see their profile? No! I see their list of friends. More faces. The more you click, the more faces. You actually have to click “profile” in the left submenu once you’ve found someone this way. This is fundamentally crap. I want to go from friend-lists to buddies, not from one friendlist to another.
• Communities: I don’t get them. I’ve been on yahoogroups, mailing lists, all these things. Communities are much like the messageboards for a school on FriendsReunited. Except I don’t get them, here. On Friendster, if I clicked on one of my interests, I could see other people with that interest, too. I’ve done that on Orkut already, except I can also have a badge and belong to a community of people who like, say, web design, as well as being interested in it. What the hell? What’s the point? So I can have a little messageboard? Now I’m throwing too many things into one basket; surely dedicated messageboards would be better, or even a Yahoogroup? Follow the example of iLife: lots of little things that work together. As it is, most communities are overlapping with interests, underdeveloped and scattershot; on a single persons profile, I can see nine of however many of their friends, nine of however many communities, plus all their standard info. It’s worse than watching Sky News; it’s information overload gone mad.
• I don’t like the terminology. I hated the terminology of Friendster. I hate this more; not only do I have to call everyone a Friend, but then I can rank them, or be a Fan. You can’t be negative about people, you can just be more positive. So: I like x, but I like y more. Or: I know x, but I am good mates with y. But this is silly, because it ranks people according to number of vague acquaintances, as if it were some competition; not according to number of strong friendships. Too many terms; I don’t want to rate my friends like they’re eBay sellers. In fact, a lot of Orkut reminds me of eBay. But friends are not like knicknacks I want to flog.
• What’s it for? I have no idea. I quite like the selectable privcay (who can see what info); I quite like the job-related stuff. But it’s too many things all at once. If I want to find out about a person, I don’t care about their education. If I want to hire someone, I don’t care how tall they are. In fact, I don’t care about most things on the site. I don’t make friends this way, I just find out more about people, but a lot of the time it’s too much information. And it just makes me scream. All these people are on it, all in this big circular chains of A-list tech and web people and bloggers and writers and stuff, and it’s just so boring and when I’ve clicekd on all those faces and found out not much other than how tall Matt Haughey is or what food someone likes, I just want to scream. I’m told these things are important, but I honestly cannot see the point.

And that’s it, really. It’s not only a bad piece of software, it’s pointless. Not only does it use irritating terminology and make most fuss of the weakest connections, it’s also overburdened with features, and yet it still hasn’t told me why I should use it. There’s no killer feature (bar the lilac). I have the people I know in my email book, in iChat. I have their friends linked off their websites, or a google away. Or, you know, I could ask them for an introduction by email, or something. I don’t need so much information in the network.

I’m just confused, I guess, being a lowly writery-person with an interest in tech, rather than the other way around; I don’t know what I’m meant to do with this software, other than scream and swear at it as it does stupid illogical things and is generally useless. What I do know about social software, though, is that Warren Ellis is right here. Software can make us more social, but it can’t make us better at it. Finding out about degrees of seperation is interesting and surprising. Making a Community for people who like drinking tea and setting it to a lilac background is, frankly, bollocks.

So, it snowed. Snowed pretty much everywhere, in fact, in varying quantities. This morning was crisp and clear, and I’ve always liked the view from my window (or rather, the study window), so: two raw, taken-right-now photos, to show the world (or whoever reads this site, delete as applicable) what it looks like.

So that was a pleasasnt weekend, in which I went to my first gig for about, well, nearly a year and a half. (The last, incidentally, was DJ Shadow at the Birmingham Academy, and he rocked bells).

This one was Arab Strap. The Strap were the first band I failed to see; they were playing the now defunct Attic in Cheltenham, I was about 15 or 16 and nuts about them following the release of the single Here We Go. I wasn’t sure if I’d get in. I never bought a ticket. Now I’m 21, I finally got around to seeing them, and they were great. I won’t say much more, because I’m writing up a review for a friend’s zine, but I might get around to posting that later. Anyhow: have a blurry mopho:

Aidan at the mic, Malcolm playing guitar; rest of band offset. This is during Packs of Three.

I also made a bonus discovery that led to my first expedition to a nightclub for god knows how long; it too was awesome. Following an NME tour gig, The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand were meant to be playing DJ sets at Sub Club. Franz Ferdinand seemed happy to mainly let the Rapture boys work the decks; they were quite busy with a bottle of Jameson’s. And so we were treated to house, electro-dance, Michael Jackson instrumentals, and rock; shifting from a remix of Sister Saviour into Louie Louie and then Smells Like Teen Spirit gives a rough idea of the fun involved. It devolved into a karaoke session for Luke, and when they played Nirvana again but at about twice the (already rather painful) volume, we headed home. Still, awesome fun at a great venue. Have a picture of two of the guys I can’t quite name:

And there was the usual good food and chat and filmgoing (OK, Paycheck wasn’t that good) and it was a great time.

And then I got home, and found out I didn’t get the job.