Another design decision we encountered on Modern Roots was the age-old question: to follow or to friend?
Huh?
Friending (popularized by Facebook) involves synchronous acceptance of a relationship between two people. In other words, both people have to accept the other as a friend.
Following (popularized by Twitter) is an asynchronous marking of interest in another person. It’s a one-way relationship: I follow you because you interest me. You don’t have to follow me back.
What’s the Point?
Before deciding which model to use, ask yourself “What is the point of friending/following?” The point is to construct a list of individuals who interest you (they’re a friend, they do interesting work, you like their profile photo, etc).
Friending is a structure for establishing a social graph, a group of contacts with mutual interest. Following is a structure for simply expressing interest. Once you have a list of interesting people, you can now filter your views to only show news and projects from those who interest you. It cuts out social noise and lets you concentrate on what’s important to you.
For Modern Roots, following was the obvious choice. Most of the people on Modern Roots probably aren’t actual friends (at least initially) so creating a social graph that mimics reality would be worthless. No one knows each other. Modern Roots is more about finding interesting people and their awesome projects. It’s about sharing yourself and drawing inspiration from others.
The following model works well for this type of social relationship. If you’re actual friends, you can follow each other. If you’re just interested in someone’s work, you follow that person. It’s simple and requires less work for both parties. More importantly, it formalizes the actual social model on Modern Roots. It doesn’t force a fake friendship between strangers or create a bogus social graph.
Don’t Need No Stinking Friends
We have no plans to implement a friending structure in the future but we’d be interested in hearing from you if you think this is needed. I can see some benefits to having both models but that sacrifices simplicity, confuses new users and muddies the social structure. Bad all around.
So find some interesting people and start following. We’ll be adding more features around the following model to further enhance its usefulness, like defaulting to a following view if you so choose, and discovering other interesting people by seeing your following’s following. Let us know if you’ve got other ideas about social features, we love feedback.
