In Nashville for Thanksgiving weekend. The pace of this town is so good for the soul. It’s quiet and the weather has been lovely. Excellent thanksgiving lamb with the fam. Lots of gravy. Our once humble home is so sprawling and beautiful now, I hardly recognize. Now that my parents are rid of me and my grandparents have all died or moved in, they’ve brought out the nice dishes and tablecloths, set up the family heirlooms around the house, and so on. It’s so pleasant and proper now. Antique handmade oriental rugs and all that sort of thing.

I hung around with Daniel and Leslie last night, drank an amazing bottle of vintage port with them, designed a CD case for the Bees record. We listened to Ravi Shankar and Phillip Glass until it drove us crazy. Daniel off to England early in the morning to help out on a Julian Dawson record.

Played breakfast Scrabble with Freddie and Whitney, and discussed road trips and web design and Ryan’s mystique (is it intentional? is it unveiled by his blog?) and facial expressions and triple word scores.

The other night I spoke with Ryan offhand about friend networks. It got me thinking about all that again \\

I think we can frequently improve a design by looking at ways people “misuse” it. We do it all the time. With Friendster, an obvious example is the proliferation of fake, non-human Friends. I’ve seen “Harvard Square” as a person on Friendster. Harvard Square doesn’t have musical and book tastes, but it is a community hub of sorts, so it’s clear now why someone would want to identify with it online. Having not the foresight to build a feature to link people via objects or geography or ideas from the start, the Friendster creators have to deal with the consequences of these “fake” friends. Fake friends would not exist if the software had originally accounted for the human need a little better. Tribe Networks was smart enough to add this feature on their own. Though at first glance their site looks just as hastily thrown together as Friendster.

Another nice feature of friend network sites might be blog integration (why not mix one overhyped concept with another?) — you’d have your blog alongside your profile. Of course, you’d also want some form of access control on your blog entries; only some should be public. You could restrict some entries to yourself, and make some only available to n levels of friends from you, or groups of friends.

Many people use both blogs and friend networks (and address books!) to keep in touch. I want to see the integration of all three. I especially like to get a snapshot of what my distant friends are up to, what they’re thinking about, etc. Both a profile and a blog help with this. But I also want to know when their phone number changes.

Here are the friend network sites I’ve found over time:

Ryan’s Snuffster
MySpace (Ryan: “all the cool kids are using myspace now.”)
Tribe Networks - the most advanced in terms of features?
ChiaFriend
of course, Friendster

and… Colleen from work sent me an invite to a business networking site, same idea… but I don’t remember the name. Anyone? Update 12/9: It’s LinkedIn… haven’t really looked at them yet. Anyone else heard of them?