I'm used to social networking sites like Friendster, tribe, and orkut, where you connect to people who you know, or meet people online and get to know them. I've been on LiveJournal since near the beginning - there, you "friend" people you know in order to read their blogs and to give them access to yours.
I'm trying to get a handle on how people use connections here, because it seems to be a bit different. First of all, it seems that the majority of most people's connections are to people they don't know, except through encountering their writing on Gather. The connection structure on Gather looks almost entirely independent from people's real life connections. That makes it very different from LJ and the social networking sites.
(Unless I'm wrong about that, and the sample I've been looking at is atypical)
Secondly, here we label our connections by type, and the available types are "friend", "family", and "colleague". These seem to imply that connections on Gather are meant to track real-world connections. After all, we don't have "Gather family" as distinct from "Gather friends", do we? On the other hand, people are using them for connections that aren't of those types, because there is no other keyword available.
Several people have sent me connection requests that I haven't responded to. I don't know these people. I may want to read their writing. But I can "subscribe" if I want to read. What do these connection requests mean? What do people on Gather connect for?
(Besides, I just feel weird labelling someone "family", "friend", or "colleague", when I don't know them, aren't related to them, and don't work with them)
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Comments: 7
Secondly, these are great questions that are raised from time to time on Gather. My drift is that Connections are a way for people to feel, well, connected to others personally. Subscriptions are a way to track the output of those people, or people one doesn't feel comfortable asking to connect to. So it has more to do with interpersonal touchy, feeliness than linear logic.
There is a practical side of this too, as far as Gather account management goes too. In our account settings - My Info > Preferences, you can set up your email notifications for when members and groups publish articles and images or send you messages. If you are subscribed to someone you have much more flexibility in determining your preferences than you do with a connection. With connections, it is either on or off with everyone in a category. With subscriptions and groups, you can individually determine preferences for each subscription or group.
Plus there are points. You get points each time someone asks you to be connected to them. I think you may get points (fewer) for asking someone to be connected to you and then they accept.
And, a bigger community promotes the chances of your getting your articles read. Basically, Gather is a very personal (in my experience) place. Friendships are developed here pretty quickly if you spend any amount of time on the site and are tracking particular authors. Therefore, the labels loose their meaning to the group at large.
I, for example, am subscribed to Tom's stuff. I don't add anyone to friends who I don't know in real life, and I really haven't used family at all.
Magi
Gather aims to be in a unique class, by paying people, for one thing, and by having great content, for anoterh.
A colleague is someone who I share some professional interest with, maybe another artist, photographer, designer, or someone I actually work with or have worked with in the past.
Family is clear to most people.
Everyone else is a friend.
It would be great to know your suggestions. Do we need new categories or different ones for these settings?
Jim Bostick is the User Experience Architect at Gather.
If we could create and name our own categories, people could create flexible systems the work for them, for example organizing connections by shared interest. But the current state of trying to guess what the small number of predefined names is supposed to mean, when one of them (family) is very narrow and the other two are very broad, doesn't add anything useful IMO.