Templates.
February 26th, 2008
Contact Templates.
As an example of the danger of large possibility spaces in content use by social web tools, I mentioned that Facebook has several different points of privacy configuration across multiple, predefined user groups. There exist several ways that these possibility spaces can be reduced. One method is through user-generated privacy templates.
As mentioned with respect to proximity and locality, there are some social web services that allow users to define custom user groups to whom certain settings apply. For example, in LiveJournal, a user is able to create groups from a list of all his or her friends and use these as the target of limited-access posts. In Pownce, the same is possible for defining recipients of microblog entries. In this way, users can specify, for example, that they wish certain information to be visible to their coworkers, certain information to be visible to their immediate family, and so forth. There is no need for people to explicitly define their relationships with their friends in terms that the system can understand (as in Facebook), but they are able to use these templates in the future. Templates get past the necessity of requiring explicit user consent for every action taken, as consent to publish to certain users in implicit in their previous definition of the user group, which is presumably given some unique identifier that the user can remember, e.g. “coworkers” or “family.”
Facebook recently added contact templates, but so far they see pretty limited use across the site. As opposed to privacy, they seem to be used to simplify tasks such as inviting friends to events.
The only downside to these contact templates is that they have to be constantly maintained. When a user has many publishing groups with heavy overlap, this can become problematic. However, the benefit gained from avoiding the uncertainty associated with the all-or-none decisions of predefined, high-level user groups such as those in Facebook far outweighs this. If these templates are introduced into the tool properly, they don’t need to be cumbersome for the user. Facebook already provides a great implementation of this maintenance through allowing users to specify relationship types when they add a new friend. Unfortunately, these relationship types are predefined (rather arbitrarily) and not integrated into the functionality of the system in any significant way. The list of relationship types may as well be removed now that the Facebook has added custom user groups. About the only place they see use is in the timeline view that shows when you met certain people, which I’m not sure anyone actually uses.
Behavioural Templates.
Another possibility for templates is a behaviour template. There are many cases when users simply don’t want to publish particular types of content to anyone at all. Similarly, there are cases when users don’t want to be informed about certain content published by others. These types of decisions can be simplified through behavioural templates. For example, some members of social networks may be more interested in forging business relationships than they are in keeping in touch with friends. Allowing for these differences in preferences to be stored in behavioural templates can help the user develop a conceptual model of the system that is more consonant with how it will actually behave. Of course, it’s necessary to develop notice into any system with templates–a user should always know exactly what effect the template is having on his or her communication preferences. Integrating template selection directly into the methods used to choose communication preferences is a safe way to ensure users will understand exactly what these present templates mean.
Then again, a theme of developing new technologies is that they will always be used in ways the developer didn’t foresee. With predefined behavioural templates, the possibilities for use cases and applications of a tool are limited. This limitation can be overcome somewhat either through close personal monitoring of trends in user activity or by learning the templates computationally (what are those aspects of users’ preferences that most discriminate between different sets of users?) Any computational solution will introduce certain threats to user trust, however, as the templates will, by definition, not be reliable. Even if the template only changes user preferences when a user updates them, one still risks confusing users with changing definitions.
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