Friends list

[ailbhe]

Well, that poll proved for sure that LJ needs to sort out their "friends list" confusion; the "trusted readers" list and "journals read" lists are so unalike that it was totally unclear. Which was kind of intentional. It's probably mean to perform social experiments on acquaintances but I do it to my children all the time. In fact, I suspect they might be a social experiment in and of themselves. Or two totally separate experiments.

But still no control-group baby. I suppose I must have forgotten to pick one up along with the manual.

Comments

[helenprev.livejournal.com]

I am giggling at the thought of a control group baby - I suspect no such child exists, and if it did, he/she would be terribly boring. ;-)

[jentifred.livejournal.com]

The whole "friends list" thing drives me nuts. I much prefer the way Vox is set up--adding someone to your neighborhood means you want to read them, and adding someone to the group of "friends" or "family" means you want to share more private posts with them. There are a few people on my LJ friends list who I'd actually rather NOT share personal details with, due to the flist setup, I end up doing so anyway.

(no one likely to run into this post would fall into that category--I have several of my husband's blogging buddies on my flist and that is who I'm talking about)

[pauamma]

I use two friends groups for that:
- One is "Default view", and that's journals I see on my friends page.
- One is "Readers", and I post entries to this one that I would otherwise post "Friends only" (that is, that's what I use as my least-restricted setting, besides public).

I have a few journals who aren't in either, but that I want to keep on my profile for reference.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

I had quite an interesting talk with a guy at a conference about this, how the term "friend" is being redefined in the two contexts of online and offline social networks - in a practical sense it comes down to LJ having been created for a group of friends wanting to communicate, and the terminology just not scaling, but it ties in very well to that ambiguity over how we refer to online aquaintances, people we would probably default to calling friends if we knew them down the pub but not quite so online.

(Tim Spalding of librarything has a marvellous rant about this, how the one feature he explicitly never wanted to include was anything with the words "friend" in it...)

Um, yeah.

Anyway, it looks like we're stuck with "friends"!