Role Based Social Networking

Today I found profiles of a lot of technology founders on google plus (GP). I added couple of them in my circle and started following them. The good thing about google plus in its current awtar is that reciprocity is not required when you wish to establish a connection. And if you wish to go by my evaluation there are only good and the better things available on google plus. If something is not working and couple of things will not it is because it’s still in production.

I have developed such a strong bias towards this new social networking creature because I had visualised these features long before they actually launched it in the public domain. I discussed it with couple of my friends and even professor but the idea was not accepted widely. I had argued strongly for a need to replicate my real life roles on the online networking platform and to allow users more intuitive way to share things in limited group of users. The counter argument I faced were things like “How will it be different from the current Facebook? …….You have ways to do it even now……….If you think of an innovation don’t think it in field of Facebook or Google……” Sounds wired but even today organisations (and individuals) are not very receptive to ideas. Or maybe I am not convincing enough with my ideas.

Coming back to my idea of an ideal social networking site, it must replicate our real life networks. Even though GP is a great step in the right direction it needs to do more. I felt the need even stronger when I started following couple of technology founders this morning. Till couple of hours before GP was great because there were not many people in my circle and not many had added me to theirs’. All of sudden after I added some (less than 10) more people there was an explosion of information. A lot of updates flowing to my home page: which I am in no mood to consume now. I realised that when I am online I am essentially in different moods. Some time I wish to interact only with my family or close friends, sometime I wish to follow my role models, sometime I wish I only had update from within my college campus and there is no way today that I can effortlessly make such transitions on the online platforms available today. Such a feature on GP (or any other social networking site) will help real people manage their real roles both in real and virtual world.

A simple way to implement this is to provide role based access to such networking platforms. Following can be the broad level features:

          1.       As a user I should be able to define my own roles.

          2.       I should be able to switch my roles with a click of button.

          3.       At any given point of time information available to me should me relevant only to my selected role(s) at that time.

 In a way circles in GP allow users to define roles. A new functionality RoleSwitch can help them in exercising   those defined roles.

Potential benefits:

          1.       Reduced usage fatigue,

          2.       More targeted advertisement (users’ mood will influence the conversion rates in advertisement),

          3.       Users can manage privacy better.