Opening up reasons for adding a contact...

February 11, 2008 10:41 AM

Any way we can get an input box on the 'add as contact' page so that we can enter something that only we can see (on our own profile page) as to why we're adding someone as a contact? I find the provided options useless and I'd like to leave myself a note as to why I've added someone. Often, I'd even like to "link" them to a specific comment/post.
posted by dobbs to feature requests at 10:41 AM (42 comments total)

hmmm, I want to snark at you for this, but no I think I like this idea.

if I come up with something snarkable later, though, I'll change my mind.
posted by shmegegge at 11:06 AM on February 11

2nded. Sometimes it's more of a, "this person makes me laugh, " than a muse or sweetheart or crush.
posted by misha at 11:10 AM on February 11

The system was developed by internet geeks so the provided options reflect their ideas on human relationships.

I shouldn't have to point out the flaws in that but one thing that amuses me is that how strongly you feel about someone (including a relationship of spouse) has nothing to do whatsoever with whether you've ever even met them.
posted by vacapinta at 11:22 AM on February 11

Yes, we should do all we possibly can to make Metafilter's "add contact" look as much as possible like Facebook's "add friend" dialog.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:22 AM on February 11

I have to admit curiosity as to why two people have linked to me. I mean, I don't MIND, but I just can't fathom it, given that I've never been to a meetup and I'm not all that active...
posted by lleachie at 11:27 AM on February 11

one thing that amuses me is that how strongly you feel about someone (including a relationship of spouse) has nothing to do whatsoever with whether you've ever even met them.

Hello? Arranged marriages? You're so insensitive vacapinta...

But yeah, it's kind of weird because internet geeks came up with XFN, which it is based on.
posted by mathowie at 11:27 AM on February 11

How about an all-purpose designation such as "cool"?
posted by Cranberry at 11:35 AM on February 11

I vote for radically pruning it down to two categories:

[ ] CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER
[ ] NO CHEEZBURGER 4 U
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 11:47 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

But yeah, it's kind of weird because internet geeks came up with XFN, which it is based on.

Does that mean "no, I can't change that?"
posted by middleclasstool at 11:58 AM on February 11

That came out sound really snarky, sorry. Didn't mean it that way at all.
posted by middleclasstool at 11:59 AM on February 11

DNAB: I'm definitely boned by that distinction, as I would end up as

[ ] U CAN NOT HAS CHEEZBURGER. COWS B HOLY.
posted by heeeraldo at 11:59 AM on February 11

Mefi's own jacalata wrote a greasemonkey script that let's you put notes in someone else's profile - its creation prompted me to install greasemonkey (finally). Very useful.
posted by rtha at 12:01 PM on February 11

Argh! Lets! No apostrophe!

*puts on hairshirt*
posted by rtha at 12:01 PM on February 11

XFN arguably has a different and more limited sort of use than what it's being used for here, which, as matt mentioned, explains the 'weirdness'. XFN was developed (afaik) so people could use their blogrolls to set up a ad-hoc friend network. Here's a nutshell explanation of what XFN was meant to do (from the gmpg.org website):

XFN puts a human face on linking. As more people have come online and begun to form social networks, services such as Technorati and Feedster have arisen in an attempt to show how the various nodes are connected. Such services are useful for discovering the mechanical connections between nodes, but they do not uncover the human relationships between the people responsible for the nodes.

There's a very well-thought out explanation of why these particular values were chosen for XFN on the gmpg.org website.

The other major relationship framework that I know of is FOAF, or friend of a friend, which also seemed pretty limited for the complex types of relationships people want to have on social networks; it's main goal seems to be making six-degrees-of-separation maps, and thus requires all relationships to be public.


Although friend networking/mapping is probably interesting to many users, I think most people want relationships in social networks to primarily act as some form of access control. In this respect, as much as people may dislike Facebook (or as much as Facebook is trying to shoot itself in the foot), Facebook and LinkedIn do pretty sophisticated relationships and do them very very well. "Very well" here refers to the potential for not just describing relationships differently, but treating them differently with regards to user or site-controlled access levels. IE, my 'friends' can see my photos, but my 'associates' cannot. IME, this is exactly the sort of way people want to describe relationships -- in terms of access levels. They don't necessarily want to put a NAME on it, any more than you would want to tell your 'less than best friends' that they ranked as an acquantice rather than a good friend (and thus were not permitted to view photos of you in your underwear).

Human relationships are very complicated the data describing them is arguably mostly hidden in mainstream society so it's not surprising that they're difficult to model with a handful of public enum fields.
posted by fishfucker at 12:32 PM on February 11

We've discussed this idea before, as rtha pointed out.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:39 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

A feature like this would definitely improve my ability to hold grudges. Too often I get angry about something and by the time I've added the person who offended me to my "list" I've forgotten what it was they did.

With something like this, I could narrow the time it took to retain my resentment to just a few short clicks!

And if there is one thing I love, it's when technology and hostility come together to make future recriminations easier.
posted by quin at 1:12 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

I have this, but it's knitted.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 1:15 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

I just use a Sharpie and Wite-out.
posted by Eideteker at 1:32 PM on February 11

But yeah, it's kind of weird because internet geeks came up with XFN, which it is based on.

As middleclasstool said, what does this mean? If it means that we can't have it because it's not built into XFN then I'll revise my feature request to be: can we get rid of the XFN add contacts thingy and replace it with something that's actually useful and MeFi-friendly?
posted by dobbs at 2:23 PM on February 11

I have to admit curiosity as to why two people have linked to me. I mean, I don't MIND, but I just can't fathom it, given that I've never been to a meetup and I'm not all that active...

As one of those two people, I will explain: I kept seeing interesting comments by you and wanted to make sure I saw any posts you made. If it bothers you, I can delete the contact.
posted by languagehat at 2:33 PM on February 11

As one of probably only about 2 people who aren't on Facebook (and the other one doesn't have a computer), I had no idea what their "add contact" form looked like, but I would like a small textbox so I can put in my own reasons (i.e. first against the wall when the revolution comes, father of my secret lovechild, do not take too seriously as usually posts when drunk, etc.). I think that would be eminently useful for...stuff. Like Secret Quonsar mail lists and CoS protest meeting agendas and Mefi meetups (when I can actually get to one).
posted by misha at 2:55 PM on February 11

As middleclasstool said, what does this mean? If it means that we can't have it because it's not built into XFN then I'll revise my feature request to be: can we get rid of the XFN add contacts thingy and replace it with something that's actually useful and MeFi-friendly?

I've stuck with XFN because although it's not a 100% perfect fit and maybe the wording it awkward in parts, it fulfills at least 80% of the needs that people have here and it's a ad-hoc standard that people build web apps on top of. You can toss your contacts page into something like Google's new thing and it'll pull relevant information out of the page and everyone on it. It's a way to build a social app without having to rebuild your friend relationships, so someday you could sign up for facebook or flickr or whatever and pull out everyone you know from mefi that is already on facebook/flickr/etc and those apps will let you add everyone you already know thanks to XFN.

If you'd like to scrap it altogether and propose something else, it'd have to really hit some critical need we're not getting right now. Can you outline what your dream system might look like?
posted by mathowie at 3:09 PM on February 11

oh, and matt brings up a great point on network portability. No one has really nailed this yet -- arguably XFN and FOAF would both work ok with this, but they'd be incomplete ports if you had some sort of associated access level (a la facebook). A quick glance at the Social Map API thing seems to indicate that again, it only works with PUBLIC networks which have been crawled by google.

Many people were disappointed (myself included) that google's OpenSocial was/is more about portability for social apps, rather than portability for social networks. XFN and FOAF are good-enough-for-now choices because since they are standardized, once someone DOES come up with a portable format, it should be dead simple to convert existing XFN data to it. If matt starts monkeying around with what's available to you with regards to establishing relationships and IF there is ever a more common standard for modeling social networks (inevitable), he either needs to do additional work to achieve full compatibility or you'll lose that additional information if you ever need to port. Additionally, adding on functionality to the existing XFN implementation would probably mean ugly ugly code/data structures, or a scrap and rewrite.
posted by fishfucker at 3:32 PM on February 11

X. F. N. SUCKS.
posted by Plutor at 3:58 PM on February 11

Can you outline what your dream system might look like?

My absolute dream setup would be to be able to give myself a reason reminder ("expert on WigglyPoos" or whatever) and also drop in a series of tags attached to that user. Then, every time that user comments in a thread tagged with that tag, I'd get a notification of some kind, whether that be that their activity only light up in the sidebar when that condition is met or I get a Mail or whatever. But I imagine this system would be ridiculously draining and hard to set up. In the meantime, however, I'd love to just leave myself a reason (or link) for adding someone as a contact.

As it stands, there are X thousands of members here and I've only bothered to add 25 or so as a contact--not because I'm only interested in that many but because my brain can only remember about that many reasons. I feel that if I added everyone I really want to add that the system would just bottom out for me and I might as well not add anyone.

Every five minutes or so I see in the sidebar that Jessamyn added X as a contact and I can't imagine why she bothers (presumably it helps her with official duties) as, currently, how can she keep track of 296 contacts? My brain hurts just thinking about it. But... if I could remind myself that, "Oh yeah, Bingo and unSane are guys who I really like to read responses by in Screenwriting threads!" then I could just occasionally click on their names in my contacts section and scan the results for Screenwriting threads.

As for network portability, I couldn't give a shit. I appreciate that others use and like facebook and flickr or whatever, but when those reasons trump usability for all users, they become a detriment. It's like saying, "Use this greasemonkey script!" Thanks, but no, I use Safari and like it. It's excellent there's an option there for those who use FF but...

But, then, maybe it's just me. I guess it depends how people use contacts. My feeling is that they are not nearly as useful as they could be. Currently, they're just sort of neat--I just think adding this one aspect to them would take them to the level beyond neat: genuinely useful.
posted by dobbs at 4:58 PM on February 11

I also just thought that for my dream setup maybe the contact's activity page would be the same but responses that occured in threads with my chosen tags would be highlighted like a best answer, rather than using the sidebar or mail. Again, too complicated, but you asked...
posted by dobbs at 5:15 PM on February 11

I would find something like this at the end of all comments very useful on this internet website:

posted by xxxx at 8:00 PM on February 11 [+] [!] (Note: believed the plane wouldn't take off)

posted by yyyy at 8:00 PM on February 11 [+] [!] (Note: probably drunk)

posted by zzzz at 8:00 PM on February 11 [+] [!] (Note: a fool)

posted by xxxx at 8:00 PM on February 11 [+] [!] (Note: probably high)
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 5:27 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

I would find something like this at the end of all comments very useful on this internet website:

That is both hilarious and no.
posted by cortex at 5:35 PM on February 11

languagehat, you can certainly keep me as a contact. I'm flattered! Thanks!
posted by lleachie at 5:43 PM on February 11

That is both hilarious and no.
posted by cortex at 8:35 PM on February 11 [+] [!] (Note: fascist with sense of humor)
posted by languagehat at 5:46 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

That is both hilarious and no.

To clarify, while the answer is still probably no, the idea is that my notes reminding me who thinks planes take off with their wheels are only shown to me and languagehat's notes on your fascism are only shown to him. Theoretically, it may even be possible to write nice things about someone.

Actually, if I ever get a day to learn to mod Firefox I imagine I can have my toys with or without your approval.

Also, I need to try something:

pоsted by xxxx at 8:00 PM on February 11 [+] [!]

If that works I just need to figure out how to hax the color a little bit. Alternatively, I will trade the small tag for the img tag.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 6:35 PM on February 11

P.S. You guys did foil my first attempt, though.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 6:36 PM on February 11

No haxxy the color. Trust me, I've been there.

And, no, you were perfectly clear: and no. That kind of constant-reminder grudge-filter (or, if you prefer, crush-filter) hit-with-a-hammer feedback is exactly what Greasemonkey (or maybe a dedicated Moleskine) is for, because it so really, really not going to happen onsite. Yuck.
posted by cortex at 12:07 AM on February 12

It is so hard to grow up. Colored, decorated profiles were cool while they lasted, so were the few comments in color. And, ah! the img tag. The pictures were sometimes awful, sometimes hilarious. When people say the site has changed, the loss of these features is probably a factor.
But the bad guys found us, and some of our toys were as dangerous button eyes on stuffed animals, or paint from China. So we are older but duller. Alas.
posted by Cranberry at 12:44 AM on February 12 [1 favorite]

I kind of reckon that one of my old-timey feature requests -- (optionally) private freeform tagging on everything, including users -- would go a long way to satisfying this need and a lot of others, and it would work, presumably, as an extension to the current tagging infrastructure.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:50 AM on February 12

⇒TheOnlyCoolTim: "reminding me who thinks planes take off with their wheels..."

If planes didn't take off with their wheels, airports would have to hire guys to go out and cart them away, or eventually there'd just be a huge pile of wheels at the end of the runway.
posted by Plutor at 5:34 AM on February 12 [2 favorites]

No haxxy the color. Trust me, I've been there.

1. Invent artificial language which has text color as an important element.
2. Use this to convince the boss of Unicode to put in color-changing Unicode characters.
3. Wait for this update to disseminate.
4. Color haxxed.

Unicode has got to be some sort of minor trolling security hole: the text reversing characters, the stealthily Communist 'o' I found so useful in my experiment. There's probably a page widener character somewhere in there, and a single character Goatse.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 5:41 AM on February 12

If you'd like to scrap it altogether and propose something else...

XFN is not exclusive, so you can add non-XFN relationships to the XFN relationships or use alternative descriptions for XFN relationships (e.g. call a relationship "nemesis" and still mark it up with rel="contact") and nothing will break as far as social network portability.
posted by scottreynen at 5:48 AM on February 12

What people fails to realise is that while the contact categories remain rigid and fixed (like Cortex's ugly fascism) their meanings are flexible (like Cortex's loose morals). For example, I categorise my contacts according to the following idiosyncratic understandings:

friend = this contact has only one friend.
met = this robotic contact is made of METal.
coworker = this contact orks cows, whatever that means.
colleague = this contact is in league with someone named Col.
co-resident = this contact has multiple personalities.
muse = this contact is dyslexic and mousey.
crush = this contact should be crushed underfoot.
date = this contact is a fruit and is popular in the Middle East.
sweetheart = this contact should be butchered and his/her offal consumed by others.
s.p.o.u.s.e. = this contact is stupid, pointless, odious, ugly, sanctimonious, etc.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 7:09 AM on February 12 [2 favorites]

*reorganizes contacts*
posted by middleclasstool at 8:05 AM on February 12

I just started using the greasemonkey script, and all I can think to use it for is first names.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:47 AM on February 12

MetaFilter: the wording it awkward in parts
posted by Sys Rq at 12:22 PM on February 12