Just the other day, I saw that my colleague posted his unofficial feature request to Facebook: Add as foe. In the binary world of Facebook, where everyone is either a friend or not or likes what you wrote or not, having this additional dimension to express your complex love-hate relationship seems to be a natural next step. Who knows? This may be the next big idea for a new wave of social networking sites.
I don’t know how realistic it will be to expect a love-hate social dimension to be implemented in Facebook. But, what is clear to me is the power of semantics. When we talk about a new social networking feature, it’s very important to name it right to give it the right meaning.
At the software binary level, a feature does not have any semantics. A software program expects a domain of input, processes the input, and returns a certain range of output. It behaves exactly as the programmer codes it and does not carry any social semantics.
But to users, every feature has its semantics. For example, at the software level, friending somebody on Facebook is nothing but a subscription and access request action. Once you become a friend of someone, it means the new friend’s status update will be shown on your Facebook home page, and you’ll have access to that friend’s personal data.
If you change this “friend” feature to, let’s say, “foe,” then our familiar Facebook “friend” relationship will take on a completely different meaning. People will no longer want to send a subscription request to someone they love because its semantics is deeming the person as an enemy.
Changing the “friend” feature to “foe” is an extreme example, but there are examples that we see today on Facebook and Twitter that underscore this point.
1. Facebook Share
Facebook used to offer a “share” option for each posted article. Functionally, “share” reposts the article by creating one’s own status update. When you “share” an article, this means you want to pass the article along to your friends.
2. Twitter Favorite
Twitter has been providing the “Favorite” feature for a long time. When you mark a tweet “favorite,” it essentially makes a bookmark of the tweet so that you can easily come back to it. It’s essentially a bookmarking capability.
Because it’s been tagged as a “favorite,” however, it has semantics of personal endorsement. This means even if you see a tweet that you want to bookmark and come back to, people are discouraged from using this bookmark because it’s called a “favorite.” A tweet that you want to come back to may not necessarily be one of your favorite tweets.
3. Twitter - What Are You Doing? What’s happening versus Facebook? What’s on your mind?
When Twitter first started about five years ago, it started out as a simple microblogging tool that enabled easy SMS message updates with a limit of 140 characters. It used to ask “what are you doing?” to solicit status updates from users.
Since its initial launch, Twitter users started using it for many other interesting purposes, such as one-line advertisements, sharing headlines to articles, organizing civilian uprisings, or spawning new breeds of Internet stars. Once these interesting, new use cases were popularized, Twitter took action.
Now, Twitter is trying to become a breaking news channel service, and they are now asking “what’s happening?” because they are interested in events happening around you.
These are subtle yet powerful examples of how language matters a lot when it comes to social media product features. Do you see examples of incorrectly named features in social networking sites today? I would love to hear your examples and views. Please chime in!
