Hey Facebook, why no nicknames?

This week, Facebook launched Facebook Home, its next big thing after Graph Search. So since the world is talking about Palo Alto and new features, I thought I’d write about a feature I’ve wanted since quite some time.

I got this idea first when Facebook had just launched the functionality of being able to tag friends in comments. On a photo which had a long thread of comments, I tried to tag a friend to hurl abuses at him, only that when I tried to, for five seconds I couldn't figure out what to type.

I was trying to tag a friend of mine called Ashish who is known by all but that name. Now people from my class would know that despite knowing Ashish for 6 years now, I have for most part known him as ‘Matya’, so have all my classmates and he was ‘Appa’ to me before that. I wrote Matya for the first time and took five seconds to realize that I need to type Ashish. That was my first experience with how unnatural tagging close friends with their given names felt.

Gone are the days when Facebook for me was about adding more friends or liking more pages or poking people. My day to day Facebook activity now is only about keeping track of and knowing about what’s happening with a bunch of my close friends and folks who I no longer meet on a day to day basis. I also share what I want these people to know – my last check-in read Cheese Disco Pav at Relax was quite a matter of envy among my friends.

A large part of my Facebook activity is now conversational by nature with a bunch of very good friends, classmates in the form of comments, likes and photos. As a result, as I comment and post every day, I think of this missing piece every time. I believe it is something quintessential to good friendships that didn't make it to the Facebook experience.

More so, even today I have observed, people use their friend’s nickname in a post and then tag them by their given name at the end of a post. Everybody would have liked this.

But then well if Facebook has to implement something like this, this is easier said than done. Even Matya can clearly list out the issues in something like this –

• People don’t want EVERYBODY to know their nicknames
• People don’t warm-up to the idea of them being called by their nicknames by someone other than a certain set of people
• People are conscious about where and how their Nicknames are used, especially people with embarrassing nicknames. (‘Dude, don’t call me that in front of her!’)
• People have multiple nicknames and some more issues

So how do you implement something like nicknames for people on Facebook?

Now let me think for a moment about what a user like me would actually like to do when he says he wants to use nicknames on Facebook?

I want to be able to –

• Tag people using their nicknames in posts, comments, check-ins, photos and so on.
• If one of our mutual close friends does the same, I’d want to see the nickname instead of my friend’s given name.

Simple. Not too much to ask. All in the name of a more natural friendship experience on Facebook.

Now let’s see what my friend who is being tagged by his nickname would want?

• He wants to be able to control who can tag him via his nickname. His close friends
• He wants to be able to control to whom his nickname appears. Again his close friends
• In case there is a situation where a friend who has been granted the privilege does so, in an inappropriate context, he should be able to revert to his given name

If we can make sure the above three can be satisfactorily taken care of, the next question would be what happens to such posts where people get tagged? Do they become protected or don’t appear to people who don’t have the permission to view or use a person’s nickname?

Here’s my simple proposal –

Let users send their close friends requests to use a certain Nickname (maybe piggyback on the close friends feature Facebook already has). The friend gets to approve which friends get to use nicknames and by extension the various nicknames he allows these folks to use. Now let these people have the functionality to tag that friend by his nickname in posts, comments, check-in and photos. Similar friends who have also received the permission to use the same nickname will now see the nickname instead of the friend’s given name. For others, Facebook should simply replace the nickname with the given name.

The last part I feel is the most important because this will lose value if we change the current experience to accommodate nicknames. Instead, we should simply hack the current experience and make it more natural for our close set of friends.

But here’s the catch. Even this simple user design has implementation challenges. Imagine maintaining a mapping of every user’s multiple nicknames to his identity and with it a whitelist of people who are allowed to use them. On the other hand, whenever a user logs in, Facebook would have to check all his whitelists to display posts and comments with nicknames instead of given names for all the posts on his feed. Doable but quite a task.

And to add to it we won’t appreciate this much compared to something huge like Graph Search or Facebook Home. It also offers Facebook very less the product differentiation or competitive advantage. Maybe not something which Facebook would want to put on top of their priority list.

So sadly for quite some time, you will most probably only see this idea on this post and not on Facebook. Unless there’s more to it. I ponder.