Bearing in mind especially cultural observations, we list here a somewhat unstructured selection of requirements to indicate some of the many non-technical aspects – the more systematic treatment is covered elsewhere.

We should aim to retain the best features of existing systems as far as possible without compromising the overall integrity.  Although not comprehensive, this selection should help the elicitation of a more systematic catalogue of requirements that fully addresses the especially social aspects.

  • A memorable name/brand that is simple and apt
  • Open to any one of any age, including children
  • Easy to connect with others 
  • A natural interface that is pleasant to use
  • Encourages authenticity, where people are comfortable in being themselves rather than creating a false identity
  • Supports appropriate development of many kinds of relationships, especially through well-focused communication
  • Intelligent and active support for dialogue between people of different cultural backgrounds, so-called heterogeneous networks.
  • Context-sensitive; starting from the moment of connection the context of a relationship can be in terms of the relationship type, location, activity etc.
  • Ability for users to meaningfully organise large numbers and variations in relationships
  • Supportive of different sensitivities with regards to sharing – i.e. those who want to be open can be, but without obliging those who don’t to follow suit.
  • Trustworthy system that respects personal privacy and is technically secure
  • A system that provides good solutions to existing problems in SNS that have only weak, partial or unsustainable solutions.
  • Provides basic usage guidelines – netiquette – with options to customise according to context1. The pace of Internet uptake appears to have outstripped the general ability to use it courteously. A comparison may be made with Victorian guides for letter writing, e.g. Thomas E. Hill Hill’s manual of social and business forms: A guide to correct writing, showing how to express written thought plainly, rapidly, elegantly and correctly in social and business life, published from the 1870s onwards2.
  • Sustainable (human relationships) – cultivating genuine and true friendship. This is the main focus of this work, and was the subject of the introductory paper, Supporting Kalyāṅamittatā Online: New Architectures for Sustainable Social Networking (Trafford 2010).
  • Sustainable (mental and physical environment). The conservation of resources is generally acknowledged as vital, but sustainability is an attitude or outlook that runs deeper and should be reflected in the virtual space, which itself has physical effects (they reinforce each other). The online excesses are only slowly being recognised, most obviously with spam3.
  • Sustainable (economically). A principle of this SNS is “let water find its own level” — i.e. the service should not require excessive resources or bureaucracy to continue to develop and thrive. It should not require year on year increased monetary valuations.

Much effort has been made to make things easy – hence terms such as “frictionless sharing” (Zuckerberg), which gives rise to still burgeoning data. But how much of this is really necessary and enriching? Probably little! So there is a risk of astronomical levels of spam.

If we consider such a scenario subjectively, this facility may be compared with cases of people having eidetic memory, where they retain sense impressions with extreme precision and in huge quantity. The most common form of this is ‘photographic memory.’ However, subjects have described the inconvenience of having too many images to process; they would like to control this, but they simply cannot and it is overwhelming. So what whilst this may be a boon, we need first to know discrimination: what we should be sharing, and with whom. Systems should encourage and support such discrimination, but the flat open architecture currently in some systems has not paid much attention to this need and is already leading to information overload.

Based on research into relationship and a holistic approach to economics, we are able to approach the general problem of system design and implementation.

Notes

1 Avril Lethbridge, a pensioner living in Summertown, has offered for fun an ‘etiquette app’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-16101311
See also http://avril-lethbridge.moonfruit.com/

2 A public domain copy from 1886 is available from Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/manualofsochills00hillrich

3 The cost of email spam in terms of CO2 emissions has been computed at a 150,000 tonnes a day:
http://woorkup.com/2010/07/07/the-cost-of-spam-c02-emissions/