Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

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Like every obsessive tech nerd, I was right in the front of the line to get my Google+ invite – hoping to the Lord of the Rings that the seed of Google would finally speak the truth, instead of another four letter Google disappointment.

I'm the ultimate end user. A nerd with no friends– with the exception of Dr Sbaitso, the Artificial Intelligence Psychologist on MS-DOS by Creative Labs in the 90s. Yes, I’ve embarrassingly been there and done it all since the lost lands of Mirabilis ICQ and Microsoft Comic Chat.

But logging into Google+, I was quite quickly put off by the basic UX and… what was supposed to be heaven's answer to Facebook’s privacy flaw.

I expected more than just a visual representation of one’s real life social circles. Instead I all I got was not even a lousy t-shirt, but an idiot proof experience at pointing peer generated content.

Either that, or I must have A.D.D.

I remembered reading through the first 28 of the 280 slides a year ago on the topic of The Real Life Social Network by Paul Adams, a Senior UX Researcher at Google.

The theory was great, but what I didn’t expect was a literal translation of real life circles into virtual ‘Circles’.

Why? Because I know that categorizing friends into groups didn’t work for me once upon a time. I realised this in 1999.

With an oversupply of 700 friends in a chat list amassed over my years of living as a nerdy networked cyborg allergic to real life, I created lists and categories on my MSN friend list that was bursting at its seams to manage my conversations… and my virtual social life.

I present to you, my brainache as a fifteen year old. A time when social media barely existed and my eyebrows rivalled Frida Kahlo.

My social categories:

1.     Best Friends

2.     Family

3.     Hot Boys

4.     Friends 1

5.     Friends 2

6.     School Peeps

7.     Music / D&B Heads

8.     Mountain Biking / BikeTrial

9.     Acquaintances

10.  Not Bothered

11.   Stupids

Now, like the love child of a Swiss watch and bonsai garden, my lists required a lot of time and effort to maintain its gold star in accuracy and efficiency. A weekly re-evaluation of my friendship category bins would yield several conflicting instances.

For example:

1.     Many of the ‘Hot Boys’ would eventually need to be demoted to ‘Not Bothered’

2.     1-2 school friends would turn into ‘Best Friends’ for a while, before being de-categorized into the ‘Stupids’

3.     Some ‘Acquaintances’ would eventually be placed in my BETA testing phase of friends in ‘Friends 2’ before being promoted to ‘Friends 1’

4.     Several friends from ‘Friends 1’turned out to be daft and it would be a hybrid of two bins, I knew them well enough to be ‘Acquaintances’ but deserved to be in the ‘Stupids’as well, which then brings me to point five.

5.     There was always going to be a need to create a hybrid category of two instances– such as ‘Stupid Acquaintances’, leading to a bottomless abyss

6.     More often than not would spy from the corner of their little eye that they were binned in ‘Acquaintances’ and I had to deal with all sorts of evil eyes and spiteful spells

In short, it was hell in 1999.

In long - it was a long, long journey before concluding several realities of internet life and that social circles don’t work, at least for me they don’t. And over a decade on, my friend bins have evolved to manage a horde of 3000.

I eventually settled on a complex labyrinth of privacy settings both online and in real life. I lived the social truth like an open book - only really grouping work folk and kids, for the inebriated peer generated content and swearing.

I tag no controversial or sensitive content and look at myself as more of a content publisher with a responsibility to my ‘readers’ rather than friends I need to filter from. It’s a lot easier to digest that way – because it’s hard to categorize human relationships for the sake of privacy.

I decided to stick to real life and honour thy few friends. In the wise words of Rick Astley:

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