Jon Udell’s Dilemma

So Jon Udell has a dilemma: when using LinkedIn he was asked to define his relationship with someone using a predefined list of options. Of course, none of those options fit his needs and he finds it frustrating that LinkedIn is trying to box in his unique relationships.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my social network less about a graph of connected dots with a single dot (me!) in the middle of it all, but rather a cluster of dots in the middle of the network, where the cluster are various forms of “me”, depending on how I present myself to the person I have a relationship with.

What I mean by that is that the way I act towards my mother is different than that way I act towards my roommate, which is different from the way I act towards my boss. Not only is measuring the “strength” of that relationship important (Spoke does this and I believe LinkedIn has plans to do this as well), but I believe that in non-virtual social circles the people at each end of the relationship are unique as well. There is only one “Patrick-talking-to-his-brother”, just as there is only one “Chris-talking-to-his-boss”. These slants on the individual make the social network much more complex.

In the real world we manage this daily without even thinking about it. I don’t swear in front of my grandma, and so the person she knows is slightly different than others know me as. That unique perspective is important in our daily lives and is very subtle and most likely impossible to ever measure. I don’t think that means that social networks are doomed to fail (duh, I wouldn’t work where I do if that were the case), but I do think this subtlety adds an extra level of complexity to the task of mapping out someone’s social network.

Jon writes that his relationship could have been better represented in the form of a Google query URL. In the future I think more software systems will begin to combine data from all over the place to better understand the unique perspective of each relationship. While not totally perfect, it might provide a good approximation of the billions of neurons that fire off in our heads when we decide on whether to claim, “That was a good fucking movie” or “That movie was really neat”.