I think that, in our transition from hierarchical structures to folksonomies (tags) for indexing our stuff (e.g. videos, bookmarks, songs…), we might have forgotten something important: the control of visibility of our stuff. Let me explain my thought.
Let’s say you have a photo which is very personal and that you only show to very close friends and family only. Will you put it in your main photo album? Maybe not… Instead you would probably hide it in some secret place which is hard (or at least not obvious) to find (e.g. in an enveloppe inside your drawer, under your bed…).
Let’s move to the digital world, before the flickr and the web 2.0, we used to store our photo files in hierarchical structures: folders and sub-folders which most file systems rely on. This structure was efficient to organize your photos with a personal indexing scheme. For example you could decide to make one folder per event. For each event you would make one sub-folder per person who took the photos. This is a two-degree hierarchical structure. One characteristic of hierarchical file structures is that it’s easy to lose files, by not remembering where we had put it. This characteristic also applies to your appartment (or your bedroom) because it contains several objects (pieces of furniture) that can contain objects and so on… This makes it easy to hide stuff, and to make some stuff more visible (by not hiding them).
Now, by using tags (like on flickr, delicious, and other “web 2.0″ sharing platforms), we’re flattening our indexing structure, we cannot hide stuff inside other stuff. Instead, we just put sticky notes on a big mess of objects that have the same level of visibility. It’s like if we put all our photos on the ground, there is no furniture nor photo album to hide them.
Some intuitive way must exist for us to make our shared stuff more or less visible… For me, manipulating “privacy settings” is a brutal function for end users. Any thoughts?
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