I loved this presentation by Paul Adams of the Google UX team. He explores designing for real social networks by examining relationships, influence, identity and privacy.
The entire presentation is extremely well done, and the discussion around relationships and our online versus offline social network truly illuminates important factors in social design.
The Real Life Social Network v2
View more documents from Paul Adams.
Key quotes:
“We all have very different relationships with the people in our life and designing for them is very different.”
“The emergence of the social web is simply our online world catching up with our offline world.”
“A study of 3000 randomly chosen Americans showed that the average American has just four strong ties.”
Key slides:
I highly recommend all to view the entire presentation.