Thanks for the Add ... er I mean the Delete

Ever wonder what someone thinks when you add them as a friend on Facebook but you met them a long time ago. Or more to the point if you delete someone that you have not talked to in a long time? What's the protocol for that?

Apparently someone in Britain has come out with a list of etiquette rules for social networking. They are in response to a survey done by Orange Telecom showed that almost two thirds of social networkers are frustrated and confused by on-line etiquette.

News Story

In terms of User Experience (and software product design in general) social networking is one of the hottest topics around. On mobile applications like MySpace and Facebook are among the top applications on networks like AT&T. And with good reason, humans are fundamentally social and the most compelling applications on computers or on mobile phones are about communication. Indeed talking on your mobile to someone else may always be more popular than any software application that happens to run on there.

I think that it is also interesting to note this is not the first time that etiquette has suddenly become of interest to people using social- and communication-oriented technology. When eMail first started to become popular users loved the service, but became concerned about how long one could wait to respond to a message before the sender would become upset and not having received a response.

Here's some specific thoughts on the User Experience design aspects of etiquette and social networking:

• In time people work out the etiquette on their own. As social networking (and specifically social networking on mobile devices) matures the users of these services will understand on their own what is ok and what is not.
• I think it's interesting to think about letting users display their emotional state in social networking applications. On MySpace today people can say, in general, how their mood is. For example "I'm feeling happy today!" However this idea could be extended to allow users to show their emotional state in regards to specific events. For example, what if I could show that I was unhappy that I had bee Deleted as a friend by someone else on Facebook? That sort of thing could provide interesting feedback that helps people realize the need for etiquette.
• I think it's useful for a user of social networking to show if actions they have taken were from a mobile device. People may not be able to make the same sort or response that they would if they were sitting in front of a computer with a full keyboard and spell check, etc. You already see something like this today when you receive an email from someone and it was composed on a Blackberry or an iPhone. At the end of the message you may see a line in the signature that says "This message was composed on the Blackberry."
  

Do people want to do social networking with complete stangers?

A company called Screenvision (who provides pre-movie advertising to theaters) is planning to offer SMS based polling. The idea is that the audience can participate in polls while they are waiting for a movie to start. They text their answers to a phone number that is shown on the screen. The results of the polls are shown to the whole audience before the movie starts.

Full Story

This got me wondering about mobile social networking. Is participating in a poll using your cell phone but in a public place a form of social networking. Well most polls are anonymous, so I don't think they qualify as social networking.

But let's work with this concept for a minute. What if users could tag their votes either with their real identities, or with pseudo identities (like some people have on MySpace and Yahoo Answers)? That, in effect, would be using your mobile phone to participate in a group activity and pseudo identities would allow people to do things commonly associated with social networking. Like connecting as friends, sending private messages etc. AND! Since you would all be located in one place you can actually meet in real life if you so chose. Could be cool. :-) Will have to think about this on some more.

We should all be scared

I don't understand this exactly, but check out this video. Apparently you can pop pop corn using a few cell phones.

I use vibrate mode all the time on my cell phone and now I'm wondering, is it dangerous in some way?