What about using the grouping? People can be in more than one set.

I'd prefer to have my actual friends list more precise though.

metadata would be the preferred way to do this (for me) but you can do multiple groupings

The way to do this is to tag your friends, then let you select either a friend or a tag to send a message/file/etc. to.

Then again, I've spent way too long filling out the "how you know this person" crap in Facebook and all it's ever done for me is make me dread people making contact in Facebook.

you mean you want to control your communications the way the physical world allows you to manage them?! :)

We'll need to start mapping the breadth of human social interactions (hmm someone has done this part already i think) and various systems of access and intimacy management (how do you decide who gets to hear you say what when? how often to update groupings? are they sometimes contextual? are some set-and-forget-at-least-until-he-apologizes, etc?). We need mock-ups!

I'm game to play. I am hyper aware of my (real world) interactions/social systems and manage them thoroughly... been thinking of this for a while. :)

The grouping definitely works -- it's just a matter of working out how you organise them.

So there can be the "colleagues" group (to discuss work-related things), and the "friends" group (to discuss everything, including complaining about work), and the "super-special friends" group (to complain about some of the people in your "friends" group and also to complain about work).

And you just pop people in and out of the various groups as you desire.

gee, that's alot of management work Kate... there's got to be a better way!
;)

The thing about groupings is that you've got to find a way of doing this for bog standard users.

Permissions are incredibly confusing for people. How do I, as a member of say, a modern application that has groups as well as 1-many profiling, join eg: BDSM community groups, but also have friends at work, as well as colleagues at work, *and* not to mention groups for my family, and groups for my mates who zare pigeon fanciers? I used to run a hugely popular groupware app and came across this problem all the time.

How people got round it was having multiple personality syndrome. from my recollection Yahoo 360 had a go at trying to integrate its Yahoo Groups in to the whole permissions onion layer structure but it is a bit of a grunk.

The more I wrestle with it, the more I think that the permissions layers should not be the problem. You should be confident that your boss sees an version of your online life (including notes etc) that is very different to your mate with the whip and handcuffs, or indeed, your Mother. the problem is how the hell you explain it - and I think some kind of visualisation / drag and drop something or other might be it.

Then you've created the permissions structure yourself, so when it comes to sending, the different options would make absolute sense.

Woah. It lost my paragraphs. Sorry about that.

This is exactly what I use the sets for. I have a Clearleft set that I use for colleagues (very useful for sharing files). I have a Brightonians set that I use for locally sensitive stuff (very useful for events).

No - they're there.

Permissions are, as we all know, profoundly difficult and tricky things to engineer perfectly, and I do think it's reasonable to not try and meet all needs out of the gate.

However, if I try and think about the most common groups that you're going to want to divorce from one another they're going to be the people you work with, the people you play with and the people you grew up with. As a good shorthand, surely we could do stuff with that before we get into the more complex group-forming stuff?!

Jeremy - the problem with that is that I have many many coworkers, and people keep adding me as friends (whether I know them or not). So it becomes pretty difficult to manage who precisely is on which list at which time. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to have a 'safe' or 'unsafe' list, or 'trusted' versus 'untrusted' friends. Then you could just say 'only send to special friends' versus 'send to everyone'. I'd still not be able to talk just to my colleagues, which is annoying, but at least I'd be able to complain about the irritations of the photocopiers at work without feeling like I was somehow badly representing my company.

In the real world, physical contexts define social groups to a large extent (not totally but largely). Physical "realities" (ugh) also alow us ot manage interactions and levels of intimacy with member of those groups (individuals! ad hoc sub-groups!).
Online, this all changes, subtly in some places, drastically in others.

We rarely need to manage group info/permissions once we've set them, however our settings for access/intimacy with indivudals can change from one interaction to the next, and can depend on a great deal of factors.

also when an individual is perceved to represent a group, then our feelings towards the group might be afected.. etc... it's a big complicated affair isn't it? ;)

it's not as much about groups and permissions as it is about indivduals and intimacy/access.

p.s.: Tom, "thanks for the add". We've never met but I admire yer work and I figure with this many common "friends" and colleagues, it's inevitable and I look forward to it. :)

I don't think it's a problem with social software that it doesn't perfectly match the real world, particularly. There's a lot of complexity in human relations but the question is not whether it should be perfectly modelled in software but does the software generate less problems than it solves? Does it make the process of keeping up with your friends easier in aggregate? In those respects, most successful social software by definition is better than its absence. The question concerns the big blockages, those core places where you'd want to act in a particular way but can't. That's what you need to solve for the most part...

I'm not saying it should match. I am saying we should look at how we do things there and be inspired.
What you say about the software needing to solve more problems than it creates is just a standard, of course, the level of which we must stay within, for sure. But you don't get to the finish line just by staring at it. ;)
I am disagreeing with your conclusion because it is very much "I want *this*" without addressing the greater malaise, desire and context.

There is a website, Phuser, which offers the best grouping control and privacy. You can keep your different networks completely separate. If you want to. Try it! http://phuser.com

One talk at the last SXSW that I found really interesting was about the blurring of the business and leisure in the way we use the web, I think the word bleisure may even have been used - eek (although maybe I made that up), but I encounter this problem all the time and wish that colleagues/acquaintances could be marked as such. I have one friend whose Facebook friends now resemble a contacts book of the great and the good of web 2.0, but this person can't use the site in the way they used to because they don't want everyone to know their innermost thoughts or see their embarrassing holiday pics. I know that tagging, grouping and sets are ways around this, but it's too much faff for me to organise. Categorizing content and people is done in the blink of an eye in the physical world, I haven't got time to nurture my various social apps accordingly to get the same effect. It's like you have to make the decision with every new social app - do I use it for business or leisure, because both gets tricky. Hence, Facebook for me is strictly old skool mates. As for Pownce, tbd.