Remember the big faux pas that you committed when you first sent email, or first participated in an online discussion forum, or first visited a chat room? Remember the experienced net-heads telling you to get a clue, newbie? Maybe you responded to a mailing list or used reply-to-all when sending a personal note, or spammed a forum with a chain letter, or typed in all caps in a chat room. Or maybe you were using some social software site that suddenly started broadcasting all of your actions on that site to all of your friends.
It’s happened to all of us, at one point or another.
The very existence of “Netiquette” is a testament to the fact that the design of early social technologies paid no attention to the potential to create new ways to create socially awkward situations. We don’t mean to disparage these early systems; they shaped the net, and avoiding social awkwardness wasn’t even on the designer’s radar.
In the design of Mosuki, we’ve raised the bar.
Social software must do more than help people communicate and keep track of social information. Social software must let people use their existing skills for managing social information and avoiding awkward situations and hurt feelings. And it absolutely must not create new socially awkward situations, or radically change the way that information flows between acquaintances.
There are dozens of ways that we at Mosuki could screw up and create socially awkward situations for our users. We’re very vocal about taking care of your privacy. But we also have created a system where information flows between people in the same ways that it flows in real life, where people can share information in the same ways that they are used to sharing it in real life.
The user should never have to think about their privacy and security. They should never have to guess whether some action might cause unexpected social awkwardness. Because information flows through Mosuki the way it flows in real life, it doesn’t need its own chapter in Miss Manner’s big book of Netiquette.
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