[mrpsbrk]

I used to think that any kind of data management in FB-like site would boil down to a friend list. I even had dozens of lists in orkut back when i gave lots of energy to that site, but it turns out lists are weirdly inappropriate to this kind of thing. I mean, i do have some lists in my FB, and i will dutifully file every single new contact. But it turns out not to be too useful!

Now i think that maybe "lists" have bad orthogonality to what people want to do. They seem to make sense from a DB perspective, from inside the system, but they miss the point by so little that they actually cloud the issue. Weirdly enough.

My current guess is that it boils down to identity management. I would like not to classify friends, but to manage "personas", like masks or roles that i play. For example "student" or "employee" or, you know, "night life". It is more like a sub-profile than like a list of friends, though. This would obviously involve a list of friends, maybe it could only involve a list of friends, but still...

Definitely an area where more experiments would be needed.