Dare Obasanjo relates an embarrassing friend incident on Facebook, which led to this spot on comment: contexts matter in relationships, and social sites like Facebook simply do not (yet) deal with that reality:

The problem here is the one I've blogged about previously in posts like Facebook's Achilles Heel: Handling Multiple Social Contexts and that Cory Doctorow recently wrote about in his article How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook. The person who uploaded the photos [who happens to be a college student] didn't consider that although the pictures may have been fine to share with college buddies, they probably aren't OK to share with people who you've only met in a professional context. Facebook's poor handling of multiple social contexts (professional acquaintances vs. college buddies) caused an embarrassing situation for both of us.

There are plenty of benign examples of the problem as well. I'm on Facebook, but I'm primarily using it for business purposes. At the same time, I use the iRead application to list books I've read. From that list, you could probably (over time) get some idea as to my political leanings - which isn't something I have any interest in bringing up in a business context.

Another example: outside interests, like board gaming, or golf (etc). I blog about those things, and references do show up on Facebook. Does the person looking for Smalltalk information care that I like to play Caylus? Probably not, and it's probably not that big a deal. They may be highly offended by something they take as political though, even if I wasn't trying to be political.

You see the problem - context. In real life, we deal with this in a one-off way, day to day, as the situation arises. Software tends to be more rigid though - it's harder to make rules about your social context with another person than it is to just act in accordance with the implicit rules the two of you have built up over time. Facebook says that they are interested in trying to deal with this, and I believe them. I also think that it's a really, really hard problem.

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