“The problem is that the social networks we’re creating online don’t match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.”
- Paul Adams, User Research for Social at Google

This slide from Paul’s presentation seems obvious and it’s mainly a critique of Facebook (they even make a reference to scaring young, ten year old swimmers with pictures of a gay nightclub). To me, it shows something interesting—which is a kind of taxonomical approach to thinking about relationships, which seems pretty wrong-headed and inorganic. It seems much more congruent with the idea of social software to have platforms that implicitly teach people that they’re making things for public consumption (yay tumblr!) rather than try to have extensive class models for how you want to relate to people. Tumblr should ship Paul and Google some t-shirts that say, “Tumblr is Facebook for Grown-ups.”