Caleb Booker

Enemies List Social Media Widget

Prokofy Neva. What a character.

He and I argue about politics, social media structures, whether or not people should have a “no” vote, corporatism, and everything else in between. Prok’s word-fu has a way of getting under your skin if you don’t see past the feints and block the jabs, and more than one reader has gone down in flames. (So to speak.) There are good ideas in all of that, but you have to be quick and tough sometimes to get to them.

Prokofy’s latest: if social media of every kind accomodates a friends list of some kind, it should also accomodate an enemies list. Not just any enemies list, mind you – a three-tiered enemies list:

• 1st Tier Enemies – They write mean things about you, stalk you around the Internet, and stalk you at home. They research you in order to find new ways to say mean things, and spread lies about you too.
• 2nd Tier Enemies - There are personal issues between the two of you. They say mean things about you on their blog, and comment on yours, but they don’t expend extra effort beyond that to hurt you.
• 3rd Tier Enemies – These people are bad-mouthing you in private but publicly are nice to you.

Now, most professional social media people will be aghast at this idea. It’s so negative to talk about enemies, after all, and we want a happy fun place! This cements the barriers betwen the users and supports clique mentality!

Except… well, there’s another way to look at it too. By publicly listing individuals who actively seek to do harm to others, you effectively create a police blotter on anti-social behavior. Aditionally you can show WHY that person wrote that unusually cruel thing in the comments over there and advise everybody to take it with a grain of salt.

Can you picture yourself using something like this? Imagine having an “Enemies” widget on your Facebook profile or YouTube page. Imagine having a spat with someone and saying “welcome to the second tier biotch!”. Imagine being overlooked by an event organizer and sending them the quick IM: “excuse me? No invite = third tier.”

Personally, I think the widget would say more about the person who owns the list.

While some might really like the idea, I disagree with Prokofy that it could ever become very popular. There are a few things that will hold most users back:

1. Potential clients or employers would immediately shy away from anybody with that kind of widget on their profile, especially if it was well populated with names.
2. Griefers would rejoice and be encouraged by this kind of thing, running around the net looking for anybody willing to help them grow their reputation and doing the nastiest stuff they could think of against them.
3. Eventually, inevitably, you’ll have to face the realization that somebody you put up there in tier 2 or 3 really never meant to hurt you and that it was all a big misunderstanding. This will happen eventually, I guarantee it.

Having said that, I think it would be kind of hillarious to see this. Put it everywhere: YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, There, Kaneva, MySpace, hell even Twitter. It’s a drama-magnet.

I’ve tried writing a friends enemies list, but every time I think of it… I have to be honest, I can’t take the concept seriously. Sorry Prok… but this is what keeps coming out:

• Enemies Tier #1 – Satan (aka “Lucifer”, “The Morning Star”). That guy’s always on my freakin’ case. Blah blah blah I suck so bad yadda yadda, goes on and on about how much I stink to anybody who will listen.
• Enemies Tier #2 – Madonna. Ex-girlfriends, what are ya gonna do…
• Enemies Tier #3 – The Pillsbury Doughboy. What, you think I didn’t know what that little giggle was all about little man? Don’t act all innocent in that little hat with that little smile. I know you’ve been trash-talking me to the Rice Crispy boys… Crackle ratted you out man!

It’s The People, Stupid!

Ok, everything else goes on hold until I rant about this. Here, have a clip from New Scientist Technology Blog:

[...]Time Magazine placed secondlife.com on its list of “5 Worst Websites“.

Despite spending a lot of money establishing a presence in SL, Wired ran this piece saying that real world companies that opened up there are realising it was a mistake. Wired‘s editor explains how he fell out of love with SL here. The LA Times ran a similar piece. Clothes retailer American Apparel has closed the virtual store it opened to wide fanfare in last summer.

The main problem reported is that expensive virtual headquarters are almost universally deserted, and are bad PR for the companies involved.

I recently attended a conference where it was suggested that integrating artificially intelligent characters into SL could help.[...]

What are you thinking? What the bloody hell?

First off, Time proved they were a bunch of idiots with that article, Wired was way off, the LA Times was just intellectually masturbating, and the American Apparel store offered boring clothes in a boring store and was rightfully being ignored.

The problem isn’t that the builds are deserted. That’s just the result of the problem. The actual problem is that they give nobody the impression they should stay.

How do people get the impression that they should stay?

PEOPLE.

Think about it. If people didn’t matter, most real stores would be gigantic vending machines. They’re not. They are staffed by real people.

So what’s your solution? AI? Are you drunk? PEOPLE, my boy, not DOLLS.

When I went to the NBA build it was staffed, and it was awesome. People left me alone and judged by my body language I was looking for something. They also could tell that I really wanted to be left to myself, but offered the little tip I needed to get to where I needed to go. When playing the game there, they were available to play with me. They were cool, and they knew basketball. They could TALK basketball.

Now there’s no staff, so there’s no traffic. After all, if you’re abandoning your sim, and you built it, it must suck.

Events are run by people, not by AI. Imagine an automated game show. Stupid beyond all reason. Nobody gives a crap if a machine is going to belch out a bunch of pre-fab toys for everybody to play with. They DO care if somebody is going to host a game, or give a conference, or perform. They’ll come for that.

These builds run upwards of half a million USD. If you don’t want to flush that money down the toilet, the solution is very low-tech: PEOPLE. Pay a bunch of kids minimum wage if you want, just like you do at the mall. At least they can talk about the product, and if you find good ones they can run events too. Compared to the overall budget for these things, the cost would be a drop in the bucket.