Andrew Chen wrote a very interesting post on the richness created by one-way friend requests otherwise known as following. He explains that when it comes to building online relationships less can be more, using the Follow model found on Twitter as an example.
The premise is that the Follow model creates four different types of relationships all using just one ‘follow’ button: you follow someone, they follow you, you follow each other, or neither person follows the other.
Whereas, the two-way friend request model found on Facebook and other social networks only allows for two types of relationships: you’re friends with someone or you’re not.
It’s a great post and it creates a platform for discussing what each of these relationships mean as social gestures and how they’re different from one another.
It’s possible to loosely equate two people following each other and neither person following the other as ‘friends’ and ‘not friends’, although it’s not necessarily the same thing. It depends on why people follow one another, what ‘friend’ really means and how people manage their ‘friendships’ in social networks.
In Follow models, neither person has the power to acknowledge the other so although a mutual relationship might exist, it’s not explicit. It’s possible to ‘block’ followers but that’s definitely not the same gesture as refusing a friend request. Regardless, the asymmetrical nature of relationships is the most interesting part of the Follow model.
Following should be viewed as more like subscribing to a person than friending them, except that following them is more personal. As supporting gestures like ‘retweet’, ‘reblog’, and ‘like’ are introduced, following has the potential to become more powerful and more valuable than subscribing because it’s more expressive and more closely tied to personal identities.
This is partly because of the way the Follow model has been implemented. The initial barrier to following people on any given service is actually higher than subscribing to a feed. For example, in order to follow someone on Twitter, you need to have a Twitter account.
This means you need a profile that others can see before you can follow them. However, once you have an account, following someone only takes one click. You don’t leave the page you’re on and often it doesn’t even need to reload so following becomes easier than subscribing to a feed.
The barrier of creating a profile is like being asked to introduce yourself before you can follow anyone. Your profile puts you in the same room as the people you want to follow. They can see you even if they don’t follow you back and in that sense the Follow model brings people closer together.
It is possible to create a meaningless username or leave profile information blank but the ‘block’ gesture awards power to the person being followed and lets them resolve that problem however they choose.
In contrast, you can travel around the Web fairly anonymously and subscribe to as many feeds as you like using a single feed reader to bring all of the content you want into your own private room.
However, despite the difference following seems to draw more comparisons with stalking than subscribing does. This is precisely because people are brought closer together in Follow models and they can feel it.
It’s also what makes Follow models potentially so much more valuable.
Posted on March 17, 2009
My name is Phillip Baker and this is my personal blog about finding value in a world of free information.