A guy who runs a social software service wrote to me recently asking me, in light of my statements about these services, how he could improve things. I have a lot of ideas, but here's the biggest one:
Adjust your tool so that it subtracts bad social interactions, instead of adding to them.
Right now, I get a lot of email along the lines of, "A person you vaguely know wants you to click a link in order to confirm his assertion that he's a pal of yours. Click here to confirm this, or click here to break his heart by utterly rejecting him." I don't know about you, but these things drive me bonkers, and leave me with this kind of nagging guilt that builds into resentment for the people who put up the service.
I have mail-rules for a lot of these things that silently discards them, so at least I don't know how guilty I should feel, and I have autoresponders for others, like this one:
Hi there. you appear to have sent me an eVite. I'm sorry, but due to time-pressure and my intensely creepy feeling that companies like eVite view me as a "sticky eyeball" and wish to interpose themselves between me and my personal relationships, and deliberately break their service by sending out non-forwardable URLs and emails that don't contain the invitation details, I no longer read or even see eVites (this is an automated form response). I am very grateful for your invitation and would love to hear more about it, if you'd be willing to send me the invitation as text in the body of an email.
Thanks for understanding!
Cory
But here's a way that the social software operators could help me out. Let me use their service to opt out of their service.
Here's how it would work. You go to eVite. You create an invitation. You invite me. eVite consults its list of opt-outers, and gives you this message:
The user "Cory Doctorow" has asked me not to contact him any longer. Here's his message:
I'm sorry, but due to time-pressure and my intensely creepy feeling that companies like eVite view me as a "sticky eyeball" and wish to interpose themselves between me and my personal relationships, and deliberately break their service by sending out non-forwardable URLs and emails that don't contain the invitation details, I no longer read or even see eVites (this is an automated form response). I am very grateful for your invitation and would love to hear more about it, if you'd be willing to send me the invitation as text in the body of an email.
Here's the best part: eVite gets to keep track of how often these opt-out messages appear, and can, from time to time, examine the explanations proffered by the most popular opt-outers. In other words, they can get a real-time moving snapshot of the elements of their user-experience are most alienating to the users that are most-sought-after within the system. They get a free, permanent, floating focus-group, and emprical data on which complaints are doing the most damage to their value-proposition.
All of these services could erect these tools, including the YASNSes: "I'm sorry, but Cory isn't on this service because he: found it socially awkward to reject strangers who wanted to be his friends. Your invitation will not be sent."
If you want to have a non-evil social service, first do no harm. Don't create bad social situations for your users.
Wouldn't that be something?
