Now that social networking (okay, let’s be honest: Facebook) has reached critical supermass, we have collectively stumbled across a new problem: the network (well, okay, Facebook) is too large, too loaded across social, professional, and generational lines, and too public for anyone to feel comfortable interacting in view of virtually everyone they know. When your exes, your boss, your aunts, and your little sibling’s friends (born in nineteen ninety what??) can all see your status, updating said status is often going to produce more anxiety than it’s worth. Similarly, high school friends are probably not interested in my essay on the democratic potential of social network sites for multi-directional political dialoguing among representatives and constituents; likewise, you don’t want your co-workers to see your “Spring Break Two Oh OH TWOOO!!!” photo album.

As a result, every week I hear social-network-naysayers unwittingly invoke boyd’s law:
The more people who come into your social network, the more likely you are to experience an awkward social encounter.

Facebook has finally taken a first step toward tackling this problem, with a new feature just rolled out last week: Friend Lists. Sort of like buddy lists – you can create lists of friends, message the lists, send event invites to the lists, and… well Facebook alludes to more functionality to come.

Allusions notwithstanding, this feature – which has been rumored for months – is at first glance rather underwhelming. It’s a barely-workable short-cut to functionality that would, if done right, profoundly improve the experience of social networking. Even assuming the addition of unknown features in the future (so that, presumably, you could tag a status update message or photo album so that it’s seen only by a set list of friends), it still sorta totally misses the point.

The point, by the way, should be impossible to miss: it pops up every damn time you add a friend, when Facebook asks you “How do you know this person?”  After a couple moments considering the options available to you, it’s clear that Facebook doesn’t even take this question seriously.

Currently, it offers options like:

Lived together

From an organization or team

From a summer/study abroad program

Hooked up

Met randomly

The details will then be visible when browsing through the list of your friends – and that’s about it. It’s not exactly robust. It’s not even that much fun to make jokes out of it, since it’s hard to remember the grammatical constructions that will result. For an enterprise that has matured rapidly since graduating from college, this feature is flat-out sophomoric.

Let’s imagine would it look like if “How do you know this person?” had evolved in step with the rest of Facebook. More appropriate and incisive questions would ask:

Have you lived in the same city before? Which one(s)?

Do you know them professionally? In what contexts?

Are you involved in the same activities?

Do you share the same interests?

ETC.

Currently, for the people I met at the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum, I have to wedge them into the “From an organization or team” or “From a summer/study abroad program” categories. It’s awkward and functionally irrelevant – so why bother? Most don’t.

But if these questions made sense outside of a campus, and if the information was actually accessible as you used the site, this process would automatically shape your social network into channels. Through these channels – some exclusive, some overlapping – you could communicate with people based on how you know them, sending and receiving information in much more flexible and precise ways. This would be infinitely more useful than the “limit profile” feature (which, when used, is more effective at insulting people than actually creating a sense of privacy). It would ultimately allow your behavior in social networks to be as fluid as your behavior in social meatspace: changing (subtly or drastically) to appropriately suit the context.

From this early vantage point, however, the Friends List feature leaves the work of constructing these channels up to the users. It’s not only cumbersome and clumsy (and its benefits unclear), but it’s conceptually backwards. The point should be that each contact has a meaningful set of social contexts. If that contextual information were made functional, the shape of one's network would form naturally out of all available contexts, rather than the arbitrary few that would come to mind if one were to try to divvy up friends into lists.

In conclusion: I’m impatient! And, okay, I understand little to nothing about how these computery things actually work—so maybe the social web that I have in my head is actually a technological generation away. But even if it wouldn’t be an easy thing to achieve, it’s still important (and deep) enough functionality that Facebook shouldn’t bank on third-party developers to figure it out. It very well may be the functionality that allows social networking to continue to increase in value, rather than constriction, to users.