Dan Birchall

In the beginning, there was Friendster.

(Yeah, I was on it, too.)

Friendster's concept of social networking was simple enough for anyone to understand - either you were someone's friend, or you weren't. Of course, you had to decide for yourself whether second cousins, co-workers and whatnot counted as friends, but most people simply linked to anyone they knew. A few were even less picky, and would claim strangers as their friends. And some, ultimately dubbed "Fakesters," would create accounts for inanimate objects and intangible concepts, and link to others who did the same.

This unfettered, unfiltered, many-to-many model carried on largely unchanged with MySpace, but Tribe featured a bit more of a geographic focus, which helped avoid the "Fakesters" to some extent. On Orkut, things became a little more complicated, as users were asked to rate how closely they knew each other. And while media-sharing sites like YouTube allow users to "subscribe" to notifications of each other's new videos, humans are naturally incapable of watching unfiltered video produced by amateur hacks for more than 24 hours per day. So limits of some sort have gradually come into place.

Here on Multiply, of course, the social network is labeled according to various types of real-world relationships. This is important partly because it lets users accurately define who should have access to each piece of content they post, if they so choose, but also because reflecting the real world makes it easy to understand for people who happen to live in the real world. You can still search all the public content here for whatever you want, but your personal message board should be of a size you can handle.

Unfortunately, even elegant or realistic technological solutions tend to be vulnerable to errors, lapses or simple quirks in human judgement, and Multiply is certainly no exception. Several times, I've realized that a relationship had been categorized incorrectly, or categorized in a way that was technically correct but perhaps overly generous, and have had to change my own links, or in rare cases, try to persuade others to change theirs.

How do I come to such a realization? Usually it involves an influx of content from an unfamiliar user with whom I:

1. lack common geography,
2. lack common interests,
3. lack a common language, or
4. two or more of the above.

Of course, this can be my own fault - and in the vast majority of cases, it is. I've categorized several people as "colleagues" who work in the same fields that I do, but who aren't really my colleagues - our work doesn't actually directly involve one another at all. Mind you, most of my colleagues are in fact people I've worked with in the past, or work with in the present - but in a few cases, I've bestowed the title upon people who I haven't even met or spoken to, and in retrospect, "online buddy" is probably the more sensible choice there.

In the few cases where it's not my fault, it's usually because someone else picks (or accepts) the "friend" label for their link to a third person, where that relationship is really better described as "online buddy." This can have bizarre results on any scale, and when "promiscuous" linkers get involved, things rapidly become worse.

I can only imagine that trying to read one's message board after linking to Liam Owenmolloy as anything other than "online buddy" must be like trying to get a drink from a firehose - he has over 3,300 contacts, most of them linked as friends, and over 5,400 more invitations open! Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, whose research indicated that humans aren't even capable of mentally keeping track of more than a couple hundred others as distinct known individuals, would be spinning in his grave if he weren't still alive!

Clearly, some people haven't evolved beyond the simplistic Friendster view of things. And clearly, "Fakesters" remain a challenge for social networks to address, even here on Multiply. Perhaps that's a small part of why Multiply's own rules reinforce the idea that the social network here should reflect reality:


Yeah. They said it, not me. I don't make the news, I just report it. I report, you decide. Yadda yadda.

With about 50 contacts - for the curious, that's 4 relatives, 5 friends of my family, 13 friends, 9 co-workers or (perhaps miscategorized) colleagues and almost 20 online buddies - I've got things pretty much in hand. I can look at my message board once or twice a day without wondering "who on earth are these people?" or having to translate five different languages I can't read at all (on top of the several that I can read to at least some extent).

But as Multiply grows, and everyone keeps inviting more people, new names continue to crop appear in my message board. New names that, if the social network did reflect reality, wouldn't be there. Like I said near the top, as cool as Multiply is, it's still vulnerable to errors, lapses or simple quirks in human judgement.

Of course, I want "My Multiply" to be as close as possible to what Multiply intended - that is to say, as close as possible to reality - and that means periodically going through my contacts and checking to see whether all those relationships are current. Things do change over time, you know!

In fact, I think I'll do that tonight. I can think of at least one person I've talked to and hung out with in the real world but still have listed as an online buddy, so "friend" better describes our relationship now. On the other hand, as I mentioned before, I'm really more of an "online buddy" to some people I listed as colleagues. (Don't worry, Mom, you'll always be my mother!)

Honestly, I'd encourage everyone to do the same. Next time you update your headshot, or make a change to your profile, why not take a look at who (including me) you're linked to, and how, and ask yourself whether those relationships are for real?

Thanks for reading. :)