Category: Social Software

David Weinberger wants the notion of friendship to remain imprecise, instead of clearly delineated with false precision.
I don’t mind if the definition is precise, so long as it is so precise as to be unique and hard to compare.
David’s picture is fuzzy to start. My picture has lots of little spikes and looks fuzzy at life-scale.

More reflection on why I find the Don Park diagram horrifying. Meeting new people teaches you distinctive new things to appreciate. Getting to know another person well is a glimpse of the infinite.
The dimensions of the chart ramify infinitely, the more people you know, and the closer you know some of them.
What poverty of expression, to try to constrain the infinite into a 5-scale in 4 categories.
Pete, of course, suggests a Friendship Wiki.

Don Park has a draft of a user interface to diagram the level of closeness of one’s friends. I hope this is intended as satire!

A Friendship Circle is basically a nested rings of people (represented by icons with miniture photo and name) around a person. To use the Friendship Circle, the user drag and drops icons from a palette of friends to the circle. Note that this can be done using DHTML+CSS.

Does one spend time with this graph every morning, and move one friend-counter closer, after he has been helpful in a difficult situation, and move one of the mistress-counters further away because she used a unappealing perfume?
Very clever and amusing if satire. Repellent if sincere. It might have a certain appeal among playboy geeks and junior high-school girls.