Here’s a quickie. The beauty of twitter is that by limiting each entry to 140 characters you’re forcing creativity. Same reason accomplished artists paint “still life with fruit” over and over again.
How about this…a social network where you have a maximum number of friends. Like 15. And whenever you add another friend, you have to bump one to make room. And just for fun, when you first sign up you are automatically assigned 15 friends based on your interests.
At first, you say “well, that sucks because I would have to pick and choose my friends and people would be insulted.”
But I’d bet the dynamic would actually be a lot more fun. More like hanging out with different people on different nights of the week. You could even take it up a notch and have forced rotation Volleyball style; every week you lose a friend and have to pick a new one.
Good idea?
Comments from Old Blog
- Kiril • 11 years agoDude, I wanna make this.•Reply•Share ›
- aripap Mod Kiril • 11 years agoDude, you think databases are for storing business rules. 🙂•Reply•Share ›
- Kiril aripap • 11 years agoNo, I think they’re *not*, but everyone uses them that way!
Misrepresenting me, man! 😉•Reply•Share ›
- Kiril aripap • 11 years agoNo, I think they’re *not*, but everyone uses them that way!
- aripap Mod Kiril • 11 years agoDude, you think databases are for storing business rules. 🙂•Reply•Share ›
James • 12 years agoSounds like something I’ve been working on in my free time over the last 2 or 3 months. I wanted to clean up the spam on social networking while trying to enforce true relationships; the only way I could do that was to give them a limit on the number of friends allowed. I chose 200 friends because it’s slightly above the amount of meaningful relationships a person can handle “on average”, just as jer979 says. I didn’t want to alienate users of the open networks by offering them something that was going to be annoyingly tiny; the amount of friends is where networks thrive and at 15 I think it wouldn’t get far. Good concept, not such a good idea to have so few friends.•Reply•Share ›- aripap Mod James • 12 years agoI was thinking about a different type of “friend” than we’re used to dealing with online. Instead of a directory of all of my friends, wouldn’t it be interesting to force you to declare whomever is in your “movable feast” this week depending on your context.•Reply•Share ›
- jer979 • 12 years agoKind of like finding your personal “raving fans” (http://www.jer979.com/ignit… and nurturing relationship with the highest quality people, not the highest quantity. The equivalent might be a corporation that focuses on the top 20% of customers that generate 80% of revenue. Saw a post somewhere that says “on average” people have 150 relationships, so you’re saying, focus on your top 10% of friends for most meaningful social interaction (or arguably business development).Like it.