Future of Social Networking Relationships
Photo by Wolf 359
In social networking one of the first things we think about with LinkedIn and Facebook are the relationships we have and make. We have Connections and Friends. Through our contacts we acknowledge through a virtual “handshake” that we can have a symetrical relationship. We grow our “friends” or “connections” sometimes through widgets of “Who you may know” or through referrals.
With Twitter, we “follow” other Twitterers. You don’t have to acknowledge, agree, or allow someone to follow you. They just can. You can follow more people than follow you, and vice versa. This asymetrical relationship with your followers introduces a different type of relationship than Facebook or LinkedIn. The only exception is if you have a closed Twitter account, you have to allow certain people to follow you, which in essence is a form of a symetrical relationship.
After reading Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric by Joshua Porter, it got me thinking about his theory of these two types of relationships. While Porter states that Facebook will take on a Twitter model because of the different style of relationship it allows you to have, asymetrical and thus a larger “network” than a mutual agreed upon one, I believe social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn should adopt a hybrid approach.
While Porter articulates the four types of relationships that Twitter allows highlighted by a post by Andrew Chen, there is something that is truly to be said about having a formal knowledge of who is attempting to claim a relationship with you.
The four relationships of Twitter are:
- People who follow you, but you don’t follow back
- People who don’t follow you, but you follow them
- You both follow each other (Friends!)
- Neither of you follow each other
“Following” not that different than RSS Subscribers if you think about it. A blogger writes posts, and one or many people subscribe to an RSS feed, or read that blogger on a regular basis. Twitter takes the writing to a micro-level, but the “relationship” is the same.
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