Discovring new friends

One of the more interesting parts of working at a tech company is discussions that arise around future directions for a product.

At Hack Days, Yahoos from different areas of the company come together to display their ideas for product innovations. Sometimes they are completely new product ideas, other times they are extensions of an existing product.

At a recent Hack Day, a team of four Yahoos built and presented “Discovr”, a hack that would enable users to find new friends on Yahoo! Messenger by seeing who their IM contacts have on their list. A “friends of friends” concept. Discovr was created by Yahoos Ashwinder Ahluwalia, Vinay Kakade, Pras Sarkar and Ramana Yerneni.

They showed me a web-based prototype of this “friend-finder”. Here’s how it worked: After typing in my Yahoo! ID, I saw a list of other Yahoo! IDs that appear on my IM friends’ friends list. Sort of like peeking into my friend’s contact lists, except that I don’t know which friend belongs to whom; it’s just an aggregate look at the universe of my friends’ contacts. There was also relevancy rankings so I could get a feel for which of these new potential friends is the most connected in my IM community. If a Yahoo! ID appears on the contact lists of 12 of my friends, it ranks highly; if it only appears on a few, the score is lower.

This is not a new concept – just visit any social networking service like MySpace or Facebook to see it in action. However unlike those social networks, the relevancy is higher in Discovr because they are direct contacts of your hand-picked IM friends; you have some context and basis for a relationship with them.

The Discovr hack makes for interesting discussion because it breaks the paradigm of a closed, private network that Yahoo! Messenger users utilize. Rather than your IM world being limited to just the people on your list, you would now be able to expand out effortlessly to connect with friends of friends.

For some users, this would be a critical feature. Think of a brand new user that doesn’t have many friends at the start. With a feature like this, a new user could look at their friends’ friends, many of whom they would probably know, and then easily add those friends to fill out their own contact list. This would be valuable in the workplace too, significantly reducing the time to find extended team members for collaboration.

For other users, this could sound nightmarish and raise concerns about privacy. Discovr could put you at risk for unwanted conversations since you could potentially pop up on someone’s Discovr list and be asked to chat. We know Yahoo! Messenger users are fanatical about their stealth settings. But with a system like this that is limited to just a few degrees of separation, your likelihood of knowing that new contact is much higher.

Clearly any social networking feature like this requires user controls, but it’s interesting to consider the possibilities this new direction could open up for Yahoo! Messenger users. Remember, this is just a concept from Hack Day and though team Discovr built a compelling prototype, it’s not something you’ll see in Yahoo! Messenger in the near future.

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