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.

LinkedIn - Making Deeper Connections

'ARE ALL MY LINKEDIN CONNECTIONS THE SAME?'

Last week I said hello to LinkedIn after a really long time. Trust me when I was in my final year, this used to be a lot more. While accepting the numerous requests to connect, I took some time to actually go through my LinkedIn connections after a very long time. Normally, I get LinkedIn requests from a broad spectrum - people who I genuinely know, people who I haven’t interacted with much, people who I know just by name and even complete strangers, same as any other LinkedIn user. 

My process is simple – check if I know a connection or if I have something in common with a requester or lastly, if there is any value to adding them to my ‘Professional Network’. It keeps my connections clean and includes people who I really want to know about or keep in touch with.

On the other hand, while sending out requests, I usually add people I know well. But mainly, I use it regularly to add folks who I have interacted with, sometimes pretty miserly, at various networking events like competitions, conferences, barcamps and so on, if they are genuinely interesting. It’s like keeping somebody’s business card if you need to reach them someday. Some people I know use Facebook and Twitter for this, but I draw the line at LinkedIn for folks like these.

What I was really pondering was the purpose of adding these connections?

A few obvious ones like below come to mind -

1. Migrate your real network to a virtual network and then extend that network by reaching out to folks in the virtual networks of people in your network


2. Use connections as a reference or an introduction to reach out to and speak to new people of interest


3. Find somebody within a given organization to get referred or probably some information


4. Keep a track of the career changes/milestones/ skills etc. of the people you know so that you are always updated


5. Improve your discoverability to pop up on top when somebody is looking for prospective hires, skill sets and so on


6. Adding weight to your profile by showing off your network capital


7. Get valuable reading content shared by great connections

If you ask me 2,3 and 4 are what people actually trying to achieve. The rest are good to haves.

Now Quick question – I want to get referred to a position at ABC Corp which I think suits my skills. Who would be a better connection to get information about that position and possibly a reference?

• Somebody I met at Robocon 2012 or at IIT Techfest who now works at ABC Corp


• A guy at ABC Corp who my classmate or close friend regularly plays tennis with but I don’t know directly

Unless you have a magnetic or memorable personality or you met a really nice guy at Techfest/Robocon, in the most cases, it will be case no. 2. Which brings me to my original point –

‘Are all my LinkedIn connections the same?’

I feel not. There are ‘buddies’, ‘connections’, ‘acquaintances’, and simply ‘random’.

Though adding all of the above makes absolute sense and provides great networking capital, can we take a step back and think about how to provide a user with the ‘Optimum’ way to perform a ‘Task’?

Starting a conversation, getting referred, getting an expert opinion can be tasks. Though all your connections are a part of your network, not every category of connections will give you the same ‘return on connection’.

A 2^nd Degree contact may a lot of times get a task done much more easily and quickly than a 1^st Degree contact.

Now let’s look a step ahead. How do we characterize, deeper connections from the looser (loser) connections in real life?

You usually have a deeper connection with somebody who you interact with regularly or strategically whereby the person on the other end really gets to know you. This can both be in a formal or informal setting. This can be a guy who you work with on your team, your childhood friend, somebody you play tennis regularly with, somebody who you know at water cooler discussions, etc. Infact, it’s a pretty accepted fact that the closest folks at even offices are the ones who drink or smoke together.

So how do you discover and map these relationships to LinkedIn?

Using something very obvious – People who share deeper connections are also very likely to reach out to each other on other social networks, informal ones like Facebook or Twitter. By periodically accessing a LinkedIn user’s Facebook or Twitter data, one can continuously enhance information about a relationship.

Is being friends on Facebook or Twitter in addition to being LinkedIn connections a good way to term a connection as deep?

I say we go deeper. One can monitor for ‘interactivity’ on these networks. This can be simply comments on each other’s posts, posts on each other’s wall, likes and so on. All these actions specify a different level of interactivity. A comment on a post by the connection can be considered a better interaction than a ‘like’ or a ‘retweet’. Employ a weighted system to derive a quantitative measure of interactivity and assign it to relationships on LinkedIn.

Now an example -  Let us say our system assigns a ‘deep weight’ of ‘1’ to an acquaintance and increases this value on a fixed scale as it finds more interactions on these social networks. Let us say Ram is Shashi’s classmate (Deep Weight = 3) and Shashi plays tennis with Ravi (Deep weight = 2). Ram also knows Nandini who he met at a conference (Deep weight =1). Both Nandini and Ravi work at ‘ABC Corp’ regarding which Ram needs information.

Let us just say Ram searches for ‘ABC Corp’ on LinkedIn. A smart algorithm which takes interactivity into context will evaluate deep weights of both connection trails. In Nandini’s case it is simply 1. But for Ravi the algorithm can add the two interaction weights i.e. 5 and maybe apply some operation to account for the fact that Ravi is a second degree contact in Ram’s network, say divide. The evaluative deep weight now becomes 2.5 which is still greater than 1. The Algorithm will hence suggest Ravi over Nandini as a better connection to achieve a task. We will need much more sophisticated algorithms for actually evaluating ‘deep weights’ and evaluating various degrees of connections by using these deep weights.

However, this should have a fixed scale and constraints. Ram asking Shashi to talk to Ravi who then introduces Ram to to Balvinder who then introduces Ram to Sheetal just doesn’t make sense. Rarely will we find such high degrees in connections, but we need to account for this. The current system of degree of connection has fixed step values -1^st,2^nd,3^rd but maybe adding the context as above may implement a completely new ranking in the background with free flowing values.

A case can also be made to look at and derive data from other sources like Quora, Yammer or measures of interaction at a workplace say Exchange Information. These ideas seem good to ponder on too but the concept remains the same.

Finally -

• Just use the data in the background. That’s it - As interactions on LinkedIn and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter are inherently different, I have my doubts on more UI based Integration amongst these networks

• Make this a premium feature - The very nature of data that will be crunched and the advantage that will be provided screams it out to be a premium feature. It provides an edge and the edge should come for a cost. Also this exclusivity should make users comfortable in allowing LinkedIn to use their data

• Not just results, facilitate communication - For such a functionality, it is also critical to provide a way to get introduced via somebody in more seamless way. Adding intermediate connections automatically to CC automatically provide contextual information within the messages, go figure!

Finally, I would like to end with something I read-up on twitter very recently –

‘Sauthi Moti khan – olkhan’

(Guj for: ‘NetWork is Net Worth’)