Nuanced relationship and Facebook

Michael Arrington writes:

When you confirm a friend on facebook, you are asked to state how you know the person. But the options are simply too narrow. “We hooked up” is rarely an appropriate way to describe someone you know through blogging, networking, etc. In fact, most of the options are not really useful for the millions of non-college student adults flooding into the service. It’s time to add more options.

The underlying problem here is that we all think about and express the nature of our relationships in different ways, but computer systems aren't yet very good at inferring similarities between these different descriptions. Which is why they straightjacket us into using a few, standardised descriptions, rather than allowing us to make up our own.

Roll on natural language research for the inspiration of better data integration system design! Until we progress in that area, I suspect these kind of data standardisation issues will remain rather intractable.

Exogenously unbounded identity

Kermit Snelson writes:

A few days ago, David Weinberger issued the following challenge to the readers of his new book: “Can you come up with the Everything Is Miscellaneous elevator pitch? Lord knows, I can’t.”

How about this: “To equate identity with location is an instrument of autocracy.”

A more verbose but less gnomic summary of the argument might go like this: In the physical world, everything must occupy a single location. In the realm of identity, however, different rules apply. The fact that the Mona Lisa cannot “be” in the Louvre and in the Prado simultaneously doesn’t mean that it cannot simultaneously “be” a piece of old wood, a masterpiece, and a tourist attraction. Laws of physics and laws of identity are not of the same ontological order.

I couldn't agree more. Indeed, this was one of the key points that John Madelin and I argued in our white paper of 2006: we unconsciously reproduce the 3D limitations of our physical world in the location metaphor of the the web's addressing architecture (DNS), but in so doing we distort the web's ability to mediate our exogenously unbounded, subjective perceptions of identity.

More of my thoughts on the original post as a whole are in its comments section.