Friends. Taste the word.

Does it describe your Facebook contacts? What about your Twitter followers - or your LinkedIn contacts.

My guess is that when you think closely about these environments, very few are really friends in the original sense.

Why the use of the word Friend? Why not use contact or acquaintance. The worst offender is Facebook. Most of my real friends are in my Facebook contact list. A lot of people I know professionally are in my contact list - but they are not my friends. The only real distinction on Facebook is if you have access to my full or my limited profile.

If I told someone that they are an acquaintance instead of a friend - would they be offended?

Google's Orkut has done something right there - when you add a new contact you can classify the person into a friend (good, best) or more remotely connected (acquaintances). It is also possible to mark the person as "haven't met". If the categorizations is not enough - you can create your own.

In the traditional social software offerings (Faceook, Friendster, Orkut, etc) there is this notion about network. If you contact anyone and you end connecting with this person you extend both your networks.

Of the more popular social network offerings available, LinkedIn is designated for professional use. LinkedIn is Facebook for grown up people. Facebook contain to much noise - and LinkedIn too little. LinkedIn is as dry as business cards - and the notion of networking is very clear.

Twitter in a professional perspective

With Twitter the notion of a network is not clear cut anymore. Are the one you follow part of your network? If they do not follow you back - do they know who you are and what you stand for?

Very few of the people that I follow on Twitter, and is also a followee of me, are in the category of friend. Mine, and it seems their, use of Twitter is professional. I follow probably the sharpest minds in the VoIP business - and I am very honored to have them follow me back.

However, the are not my friends. I have never met them. I read their Twitter messages - I read their blogs. They read what I have to offer. From time to time they even use what I offer into their own blogs.

So if we are not friends, or buddies - but we have a mutual interest in VoIP, telephony, communication, social software, etc - what are we?

The Tribe

We are a Tribe.

A Tribe could be defined as a group of people which possesses a certain quality an characteristics - they have something in common.

Some years ago I had a couple of long and deep talks with a good friend of mine and we where discussing ultimate connectivity. Actually we discussed what is now known as Unified Communication. We then coined the phrase "Tribe" for people belonging in the same group. You can of course belong to different tribes - and most people do.

You have your work Tribe, you have your old classmates Tribe, you have your professional Tribe. Within those Tribes you may even have friends, where some even are your closest one.

On huge problem facing Twitter is the lack of grouping. The only way to group stuff is to have multiple Twitter accounts. On Twitter I have to refrain from posting to many Norwegian tweets - if I did, I'll bet that most of the people I want to follow me will simply unfollow. For these people something written in Norwegian is noise. For my Norwegian followers, these tweets may be high signal quality. This is a extreme, but easy to understand, example. The same would also yield for other domains: If I have a number of followers interested in my VoIP ramblings - they would probably not be very interested in my domestic cat ramblings - and vice versa.

Twitter, and other social software like Twitter, lacks the ability to belong to a Tribe (or a group). It also lack the ability to send messages to a given group of followers (your Tribe). Using more than one Twitter account to achieve this kind of functionality is of course possible - but then we would need to follow a person not only once, but for each Tribe we both belong to.

One thing I have wanted since I started using Twitter is have my client filter out content. Even if most the people I follow produce high quality - there are still a few that produce a lot of high quality content which I do not care for.

The notion of a Tribe could of course be emulated with filtering techniques - however this is the wrong solution to the problem.

Tribe in practice - an example

When I find a blog that is worth following (and put it into my RSS reader) I always check out other blogs the writer links to. If the linked blogs are any good I may want to follow these also. The same goes for Twitter - if the blog is worth reading I follow the author on Twitter - but also check out who the author is following.

So let's say I find someone worth reading (blog) or following (Twitter) - I could then see which Tribe (categorization) they have assigned them self to. If I find the category adequate I'll just assign myself to the same category.

A important thing: Tribes are not global. If I join a Tribe, it is the Tribe which the people I follow is a member of. Thus, there could be a number of Tribes named VoIP. I must admit that I have not given any thought about the issue when a person by following other persons tribes with the same name. Should the two Tribes merge? Will the user have two Tribes with the same name? This could be handled by Tribe members getting a notification about two likely named Tribes join - then could then vote what should happen (i.e. should they merge or not).

The Tribe thus becomes a self governed swarm of people.

When sending out a message (i.e. a Tweet), the sender must tag the message with the Tribe identificator (Tribe name). If I don't tag the message - it will not be relayed to my followers belonging to the right Tribe.

This idea about Tribes is more than just simple groups of people. My notion of Tribes lay more into the realm of how a swarm govern it self without someone being the boss.