Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Filtering needed in social networks

If anyone from Facebook or Twitter should read this here's my suggestion for making social networking more versatile. The main problem is that when I send a tweet or post something on Facebook, all my "friends" can see it, whether they want or not. Why not let people group their contacts into different categories like family, close friends, colleagues, tennis club members etc and then let you choose which groups to send posts to? In this way I can avoid bothering work contacts with details of my family activities or boring my family with work-oriented comments.

A recurring discussion on edublogs is whether or not you should have students as friends on Facebook. There are advantages and disadvantages of this of course but we could easily solve the problem by enabling this kind of friend filter. Comments that are relevant to my student friends can be easily sent whilst material that is not relevant to them will not reach them. Nearly all of my tweets are about net-based learning but sometimes I'd like to use Twitter to comment on other interests. Either I send irrelevant coments to my e-learning colleagues or I have to create a second Twitter account. If I oould just choose from a quick menu which groups I want to tweet to the problem would be simply solved.

So what about it Facebook and Twitter?

2 comments:

  1. Yes, this is a feature I really have been missing for a long time. Right now though it seems they want us to tell anything to anyone...

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  2. An easy fix would be moving over to Buzz, right? It might be tough to convince 500 million people to make the switch, though :)

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