Social products, for "friends"?

Recently thinking about a problem: social class app--such as Weibo, micro-letter, Mo Mo, Ishin and so on the big line, has become our mobile phone on the most important applications, information sharing between people and instant communication is also more and more frequent, everyone in different social products operating a different interpersonal circle. Micro-blog has dozens of mutual attention friends, the micro-letter has hundreds of contact people, the MO on the street can be brushed at any time girls and young men, easy to believe is no verification can directly call ...

So, in the social more convenient, less cost today, "friend" is the weight of the weight or light? How many people in your entire address list can be called true "good friends"? We often recall who who is my best "friend", now, we and these "best friends" still contact? In the mobile internet age, how do you define "friends" and how do you define each other as a friend? Will social products eventually destroy "friends"?

360 President Xiangdong has a point that impresses me: innovation is seeing things behind the poor user experience. The 360 core competition area is "security", "What is the security behind the stuff?" Users are not looking for the "security" itself, but for efficiency-users often use security products to improve the efficiency of surfing the Internet.

So the key to thinking about these issues is to get back to the product itself: the real value of social products is to help users find new friends and maintain old friends? or to provide a more practical value behind "friends"? This may help some peers understand why the business model of "socializing" is often just looking beautiful, Why are so many big companies eventually falling into social mud?

Before answering these questions, we revisit a concept: the six-degree network relationship theory (Six Degrees of separation). It was first proposed by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and was conceived 40 years later by the American sociologist Stanley Milgram. Its core spirit is that all people on earth can connect to any other person through the chain of acquaintances within six layers, saying that there will not be more than six people between you and any stranger.

Let's look at the definition of "friend" again. Traditional understanding, friends are very important interpersonal relationships, refers to interpersonal relationships have been developed to no blood relationship, but very friendly people, the so-called "Taohuatan water depth thousand feet, less than LUN send me love." But now when I ask people around me (including myself) about the definition of friends, the boundaries have become very vague, the threshold has become very low, more like the "Sea memory confidant, the end of the Earth is near."

There are two root causes of this phenomenon, one is that the industrial Revolution accelerated the movement of human space through the influence of traffic, and the information revolution accelerated the free flow of information by influencing the communication industry. In addition, as everyone's age increases, the definition and understanding of friends can also be changed in a subversive way. From the earliest wearing a pants playmates, to the middle school classmate, college students across the line of senior brother, and then after graduation across the company, industry, region and even the country's network circle. Once, we used to stick together with one or two friends, but now, look at our hundreds of people, dozens of groups of mobile phone address book, our time spent on more people, whether you admit that the taste of the best friends are less and more pragmatic tendencies are more and more strong.

I have a lot of friends who are sad, but to be honest, I think that those seemingly beautiful but inefficient, and not necessarily emotionally profound "friends of the Age" is gone. Why? This is from the original intention of making friends.

In general, a true friend is honest, faithful, loyal, and considerate to the other. Their interests may be similar, and they may often be active together. They may also help each other, such as listening to each other's troubles and giving advice. To most people, a friend is a trusted partner. One of the most important values of mobile Internet is to speed up the flow and symmetry of information, to establish a more reliable foundation of trust, which is also the fundamental of the development of E-commerce.

Once upon a time, we did not trust strangers because there were so many obstacles that we could not understand a stranger who was even outside of Barry. We have neither convenient means of communication nor reliable sources of information, but these are now being addressed through social software, search and other tools. The result is that we can easily find someone to talk to on the Internet, a business partner, a similar type of interest, and so on, which is exactly what we used to do together.

A friend of mine said to me, "when I have time to finish 10 important things with 10 people each day, I don't have to spend 10 days with 1 people to do these things because of feelings, not to mention the results are not necessarily good." The idea may be too cold-blooded, but calm down and consider it an inevitable trend to help us move towards a better life. Frankly speaking, what is the original intention of friends together? For affection? Far from it. Besides the highly developed mobile Internet today, we are obviously much easier to deal with in most things. And behind this, is more and more invisible friends in the help (such as micro-blog search, tracing, etc.).

Based on this, I understand that the real value of social products should be to help users find new friends, maintain old friends, to provide "friends" behind the more practical value. In this sense, the micro-letter is not really a landmark social product, Facebook has the opportunity, but not enough. Further, in the "hooking up" more convenient and cheaper today, the boundaries between friends and strangers will become more and more blurred, and really good social products, precisely should break the boundaries of the concept of "friends".

I think it should be the real touch of Zuckerberg's ultimate dream of making the world more open to the Internet.