This is an excerpt from my friend Nate’s recent blog post “How to Get Millions of Users“, which is a great distillation of some big and heady thoughts tying product design, development, marketing, and onboarding all together in a nice little package. It’s a pretty long post, but read it all. I promise it’s worth it:

When we build products for groups of people we aim for a fictitious middle. While we’re trying to make something people LOVE we make assumption about what they love. It would be like saying to your girlfriend “I hear women LOVE Victoria’s Secret. Go try this on.” when in actuality some women might like that but she really loves sweat pants; taken as an individual, demographics mean jack.

When we build products for real people — starting with ourselves — however, we know exactly what to build.

Before he launched Foursquare, Dennis Crowley would go around saying “I just want a Leaderboard for my Saturday night and I want to be at the top of it.” Foursquare wasn’t just built for himself, it was built with a very specific set of friends in mind — those he spent his Saturday night’s with.

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Oh baby, you, you got what I need
but you say he’s just a friend
but you say he’s just a friend
-Biz Markie

Trying to get intimate
A couple weeks ago at the Startup Mixology speakers dinner I had a good conversation with Micah Baldwin about intimacy. Not the kind between the sheets, but the kind that perpetuates true friendship. It’s a topic that’s been rolling around in my head for a while, and I’m not the only one. Obviously, my acquaintance, Dave Morin has been thinking about it too. His new social network startup, Path, limits you to 50 friends. Zuck is taking a shot at intimacy as well, with Facebook’s renewed focus on one on one conversations and the new groups system.

Twitter is a lie
One thing Micah and I agreed on is that most social networks don’t really encourage you to be you. How many times have you started a tweet and then backed out? Not because you aren’t thinking what you typed, but because it’s not something appropriate to share with the world. Maybe it’s not relevant to everyone. Maybe it’s just too emo. Maybe it funny as hell, but could offend someone you care about. It’s not just about 50 friends vs 5000 friends. It’s about grandma vs Dave McClure.

I am not a private person. But while privacy isn’t a concern for me, respect for others is. I don’t curse in front of kids (usually). I don’t do shots at my parents house. I don’t rub it in that I had a good year financially to friends trying to make ends meet. This doesn’t make me inauthentic or non-transparent– It makes me not a douche bag.

Circles of friends
My social graph isn’t a thousand points of light. It’s not flat. It doesn’t look like some trippy exploding 3D dandelion either. I have an inner circle that I talk to almost every day– people I constantly bounce ideas off of (and still love me in the morning). I have friends that care what conferences I’m going to. I have acquaintances that may want to know what I think of my new XBOX 360 KINECT. I have announcements I want to get out to anyone who will listen, like that we’re hiring at SproutBox or that I’m throwing a conference.

Even though these same friendship levels exist for nearly everyone, they are largely ignored by social networks. It’s like each of us started up a radio station and then we’re surprised about the airwaves getting crowded. Facebook can’t tell the difference between my best friend at work (who incidentally I don’t interact with on Facebook much because, well, he is sitting next to me) and some over-requester  I accidentally added because we share 19 tech friends.

Users end up trying to model life by using different sites to segment their circles of friends. While it’s a pain to go to a bunch of different sites to update your status, the bigger problem lies in that people don’t use networks consistently. Some people use Facebook as a contact dump, others use LinkedIn for that. Some use foursquare for just their closest friends and some have 5000 foursquare friends.

Getting on the right Path
The just-launched “personal network,” Path, is attempting to identify the inner circle of your friends. The idea of a 50 friend limit has all the the right intentions. Segmenting your graph further, however, isn’t a solution–it’s part of the problem. Your friends change and having to remove one to add another is a not what a user wants. Granted, sometimes it isn’t what the user wants that matters, it’s what’s best for the collective that wins out (see 140 character limit in Twitter). But an arbitrary 50 friend limit isn’t good for anyone. If someone moves out of your inner circle, they are most likely still your friend. The last thing you want to do is indicate that: “Hey, you’re not in my inner circle anymore”. You probably still have a relationship with your former inner circle friend. You have photos you want to share with them, just maybe not the ones of your freaky new leg rash.

But Path is onto something big (at least for me). I want to decide who I’m sharing with when I post content. This isn’t new. Nearly all communication methods work this way. I can do a call with 1 or 100 people. I can send an email to 1 or 1000 people. I can mail a letter to 1 or 1,000,000. It’s up to me. As the creator of the content I control it’s reach. With status updates the problem is there is a lot of overhead in assembling lists to send to. No one wants to add recipients one at a time to a quick status update.

Your social circle
It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and bitch that someone else hasn’t solved your problem for you– So mostly that’s what I’m going to do. However, I do have a few half baked thoughts on a solution. It may be too complex for today’s non-power users. But it would work for me, so I hope someone builds something better.

What I want is a slider that I can quickly tweak when posting an update. The slider would have notches representing my inner circle all the way to up to a public post. When posting I could bump the slider up or down depending on my content and my intended audience.

I would define the rung of my social circle a particular connection falls into. These handful of rungs would correspond to a notch on the slider. Similar to friends, I could place web services at various rungs of the circle. So a post to Foursquare would be in ring 2 (among my friends), but a Twitter post would be at the public level (past my acquaintances). I’d post to public services like Twitter or Tumblr only when the slider was all the way up.

I could also see value in defining multiple social circles. So maybe a ‘Family’ circle would have my immediate family in the inner circle and extended family in tier 2, and family friends in tier 3.  A ‘Location’ circle could divide your friends up by how far they are away from you, etc.

Configuration overhead would be the biggest obstacle to adoption. You’d need a fun drag and drop interface to make initial sorting enjoyable. Categorizing a new friend would feel a little bit like building a game character. The process could be  jumpstarted by making recommendations for the default social circle based on interactions.

Obviously there’s a ton of flushing out to do– but the rewards could be meaningful. A system like this would have a significantly richer view of a users social graph. Widespread use would cut a lot of noise out of everyones feed– making some headway on solving the information overload many of us face daily.

I’m pretty sure the tools to do a proof of concept already exist in the privacy:allow fields of the Facebook social graph API. It’s just a matter of wrapping an interface around it. A social network with circle data at it’s core could use it to improve prioritization of messages, events, photos– essentiality any feed data.

One parting thought: Please, for the love of god, let’s never make a social circle public. The last thing we need is more MySpace Top Friends type drama among teenage girls.

Thanks to Kacey Martin for talking through this post with me.

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If you didn’t make it to The Combine, you missed out. You can’t beat hundreds of tech enthusiasts, developers and volunteers getting together to make great things happen in the best town in the Midwest.  As a sponsor of the event, SproutBox is dedicated to building an environment of talent and innovation for a startup hub in Bloomington.

Participants experienced some of Bloomington’s historical and cultural hotspots, including the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, the Farmers Market, B-Line trail and Indiana University. The event was the perfect opportunity to showcase Bloomington as the perfect oasis for focus and creativity aspiring entrepreneurs need to start a successful business.

The weekend kicked off with an open pitch session at the Box where participants, including ScheduleThing and MyJibe, pitched ideas and recruited extra help for their projects.

Everyone headed to the Memorial Stadium Hall of Champions for TECH cocktail, a networking event featuring our sprout family and their founders. The evening made for great mingling among techies and developers with a little taste of Hoosier football.

The speakers series on Friday was packed with talent and laughs. The lineup included:

Sloane Berrent, Founder of Answer with Action

Ben Huh, CEO of Pet Holdings, Inc. (FAIL Blog, Can Has a Cheezburger?)

Frank Gruber, Co-founder of TECH Cocktail

Neil Patel, Guerrilla Marketer, Co-founder of KISSMetrics & Crazy Egg

Christian Lander, Author of “Stuff White People Like”

Micah Baldwin, CEO & Chief Community Caretaker of Graphic.ly

Chris Wansworth, CEO & Co-founder of GitHub

Brian Gorbett, Architect, Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelism Division

Michael Showalter, Comedian, Host of CollegeHumor.com’s The Michael Showalter Showalter

Michael Ian Black, Comedian, Chief Content Officer at WitStream.com

“More Than Corn,” led by Brad Wisler, was a discussion about the benefits and challenges of tech in the Midwest. Panelists discussed why Bloomington is the place to be to start a web-based company and why it is much more than your average college town.

DevDerby was a day-long challenge for teams to develop an app to serve a need using the programming language of their choice—PHP, C#, Ruby, Python and Java. The rest of the weekend was reserved for hands-on training from experts in Adobe ColdFusion, followed by talks on “Experience in Design for Startups” and “Conversion Optimization” led by James Paden and Kristian Andersen.

I’m thrilled to see such an amazing event held here in Bloomington. All participants and volunteers worked very hard to inspire growth and creativity to the Bloomington tech community. You don’t have to be on the West Coast to be a part of the startup action, and I think The Combine proved just that.

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