We had a discussion the other day about reputations and relationships. I brought up the point that there were private and public reputations; a public reputation being what society thinks of you (i.e. your feedback on eBay), and private reputation being what a certain person thought of you.

Relationships in this context on the other hand, are set roles between two people. Currently, IMs suggest that you organize your contacts by relationships; you have groups for co-workers, groups for college buddies, etc. However I don’t think this really works because you may keep in close contact (or want presence information) with a small selection of people from every group. The way things are setup now, you would have a difficult time keeping track of the people you want to.

I think the better way to organize contacts on your contacts list is by (private) reputation. So people that you talk to more often would be higher (and more accessible) on your list than the ones you hardly remember. The best way would be if there was some functionality in your IM client that automatically did this for you. Of course you could still view your contacts from a relationship paradigm, but I think this alternate view would be better than sorting contacts alphabetically or by status.

related:
Parts of my Ideal IM Program

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: geeky, ideas