I talked in the last blog about the mass migration away from IM towards both texting for fast unthethered communcation, and Facebook for…what? Answer: It’s just the Away Message again, stupid. Facebook calls it the “What are you doing right now” thing which always starts off “Jothy is…” so you can say a lot of different things. My son used to like saying “better than you” back when he was a wise guy. The point is that it is this that they consider the critical feature of Facebook not the Newsfeed which they hate and not even the pictures which lots of sites have.

Where Facebook falls down flat on its face again is that this message is binary: either you have one up on your page or you don’t and the whole world that visits your page can see this message. We think that is dead wrong. Just as you want to control how much information on your profile is seen by the different concentric circles that describe your relationships, you want to control who sees what about what you are doing. Maybe you do want to say “In the shower” but you only want those closest to you seeing it. Everyone else should just see “Away” or nothing.

I used the term “relationship-centric” computing in my first blog post here and I should explain more about what I mean. In a way the term is a tad redundant since one could say that anyone you communicate with by definition is someone you have a relationship with. But if it’s so obvious how come most email systems only give you the ability to sort messages by one attribute such as ‘From:’ or ‘To:’ at a time? That feature where you can sort by a column are great but more often than not, I actually want to see all the messages To and From a particular person. And by the way, I would actually also like to have those messages where they were just Cc:’ed included as well.

Truth is what I really want is every communication of every type that I have had with a certain person grouped all together to give me the complete picture of what, frankly, my relationship with that person entails. This is drifting back to the concept of a truly unified inbox but all of these problems with our e-communications are somewhat interlinked. To see the complete picture of my relationship with that person, I want all emails, all IMs, text messages and yes, I want the Facebook wall postings and the comments they made on my blog. I want it all and I want it all in one place. That finally would give me a complete picture of where our relationship is going.

So seeing everything in one place is part one of relationship-centric communication. Part two is fine-grained control over who sees what in my profile and then how I can categorize all my relationships into groupings that I think of as “circles”. Around me (because in this situation I really do get to be the center of my universe) I will see a set of rings or circles of people who are close to me and then not so close to me and finally people I barely know but still want to sometimes communicate with (even if its just to call them to order pizza). Once I have done that, I can use those groupings or circles to not only control exactly what parts of my profile each circle gets to see but I get to go back and exert my callee-control (see immediately preceding post) again, based on these relationship circles.

We’ll visit this concept again when we delve a bit more into what seems to be working and what doesn’t in social networks.