The Jeff Pulver Blog: Facebook Feature Request: Invisibility

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December 18, 2007

Facebook Feature Request: Invisibility

Yossi Vardi recently commented he would join Facebook if he had the ability to be invisible. And after thinking about this, I realized that invisibility is a killer feature that could bring another wave of people into Facebook and could also help protect our kids against predators on social networks.

The way I imagine invisibility might work would be if I choose to be invisible, I would show up on my friends friend list when a friend looked at their friends list, but when a friend of a friend looked at the same friends list, my name would not appear. Invisibility is something that could help some people deal with the social awkwardness created by social networks.

It would be great to be able to optionally apply invisibility both globally and locally so that if I choose, I could identify specific friends whose lists I want to appear to be invisible and still appear on the friend lists of others.

I especially like this feature as a way to protect my kids from people whom they don’t want to be visible to. In the case of my kids, this would be everyone they are not actual friends with since my kids have decided to only friend people whom they actually have met and have a personal relationship with. And for their own protection, I wouldn’t mind having my kids appear invisible when a stranger is scanning the friend lists of one of their friends.

And when specifying the levels of invisibility, it would be great if someone could set themselves to only be visible to people on their same network. And in the case of kids in middle school, maybe only appear to other kids in other middle schools and/or in the same relative age bracket. Or empower users with the ability to apply some other rules which make sense to their respective parents.

Invisibility is a feature I would like to see Facebook implement in 2008.

What new features would YOU like to see Facebook add?

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Tags: Invisible, Facebook, Yossi Vardi, Social Media, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff on December 18, 2007 06:01 AM | Permalink

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Posted by: 升降机 at July 14, 2008 06:15 AM

Though I do think that if you are going to be invisible, you should see less. Ie. join no network and see no profiles other than of friends who have allowed it.

(If Facebook implemented the "I'm looking for" feature I described, you could see when people put in searches for you and could respond to them with "I'm really here")

Invisibility might be a special case of what they should really do -- interoperate. Of course, I laugh. Facebook feels it is #1 so won't interoperate with other social networks until they feel they must. If they interoperated, and you could befriend somebody on a different service, one could have a service for the invisible people which only discloses data under the rules you describe.

Posted by: Brad Templeton at December 18, 2007 08:12 PM

I think that this might already be a semi-feature. I call it a semi-feature because it's only available to a limited number of people.

My understanding is that it is available to celebrities. How they go about determining who is a celebrity, I have no idea.

Is this a rumor? Yeah, I have no firsthand knowledge.

But I've heard that if you're Collin Hanks, you get invisibility. It'd be nice if it were a common feature though.

Posted by: Jason Preston at December 18, 2007 05:19 PM

I'd also love this feature. I'd also like to see the ability to modify my profile...Nothing major, but maybe some colours and layout. Perhaps they could release a simple SDK for end-users to use. Right now you can only move things around on your profile, but it would be nice to be able to change a little bit more.

I'd love to add a bit more AJAX functionality and the ability for friends to change the way my profile looks on their computer.

The danger is Facebook turning into the Ad Haven - MySpace, though.

Posted by: Steve Pulver at December 18, 2007 04:32 PM

- voice driven social browsing.

Maybe I'm biased but it would be nice to be able to talk real time with people visiting my profile.

This continues onto a topic i've discussed a number of time on www.collins.net.pr/blog but I think the feature lacking with most lacking on the web at the moment is the social interaction of voice between friends and groups of friends/similar interest people.

It would be of interest to me at least to be able to communicate verbally with other people viewing your blog at this very minute....maybe someone will draw my attention to another post or perhaps someone on a different web page entirely that is quoting you....

The 'social interaction/user dynamics' of joining and disengaging with these flocks is what interests me at the moment.

I am workign with a group of developers to build a voice driven 'widget' the big problem is still scalability. currently per server we can only handle about 1,000 simultaneous user connections - even if we market the software for a few hundred dollars the $700 cost of the dedicated server will still make it a $1,000 'function' cost.

Cheers,
Dean Collins
www.Cognation.net

Posted by: Dean Collins at December 18, 2007 02:04 PM

December 18, 2007

Facebook Feature Request: Invisibility

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