Google Researchers Exploring Social Networking

Jodie O'Dell, Mashable, July 13, 2010.

Adding more fuel to the wildfire of rumors about a possible Google social network, one Google staffer has posted a huge slide deck of research findings on social networking problems and solutions.

Social networking is a complex, fascinating puzzle that we're just beginning to solve. Technologists as a group are making great strides in user adoption and functionality, but we're still missing some important elements that would allow our online lives to better emulate our real-world experiences.

In a killer 216-slides-with-footnotes presentation "Real Life Social Network" posted on SlideShare, Google UX researcher Paul Adams laid out the full gamut of challenges for today's web designers. It's a topic of great importance for every product designer, interface designer, web startup and social media consultant struggling with social groups in the online space.

The Social Web of the Web

Social media is here to stay, and it's becoming an integral, irrevokable part of the Internet (Internet). Our identities and our friendships are creating connections with content; never before has the term "web" been more appropriate. Yet with all these linked synapses firing away, our "web" is looking a lot more muddled and a lot less systematic than the average engineer might like.

For example, as the Adams points out, "People don't have one group of friends." We've got work friends, neighborhood friends, family friends, hobby friends, school friends - and although filters and lists attempt to make better sense of these disparate groups, we haven't quite mastered the art of correlating our online and offline social lives.

For example, in the real world, the people Google's (Google) researchers have interviewed have tended to have between four and six distinct social groups of 2-10 friends each - that adds up to between eight and sixty real-world friends per person, and most of us meet on a weekly basis with around 10 people with whom we have close ties. Trying to mix these groups together in real life doesn't generally go so well (imagine, if you will, the last awkward birthday party, wedding, or band show you attended, and you'll get the idea).

But in our online lives, we constantly combine our conversations with multiple groups of friends. Our party conversations have to use the same space as our family conversations and our school or work conversations, and it can be just as awkward as the misfits table at a big wedding.

Adams went so far as to state that we can't even call all of our online connections "friends" with any verisimilitude to real life, given that most of his team's interviewees didn't use that term for most of their real-world connections. In other words, not all the names in our mental or digital Rolodex are equal.

In its current state, the social web is a bit busted in this regard. We censor ourselves, fearing professional and personal recrimination for "oversharing," and we make ourselves digital hermits to avoid those we're not close to or with whom we don't want to communicate.

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