What is a COW friend ? And do we really need them ?

[Bob Zelin]

I was just going to post a question, but it relates to this. I too don’t understand what a COW friend is, but often I want to contact an individual “off line” with his direct email, and I don’t know how to ask for it, other than to post “please send me your email address” right on a forum.

Perhaps I don’t understand how to use this feature, but it would be great if “extend friendship” would allow someone to see each others email addresses, once both parties agree.

Bob Zelin

[Abraham Chaffin]

That’s an interesting idea Bob.

I admit the friendship area is not fully developed at the moment though I believe it will be a handy part of the site in the future due to the fact that it is a network of people and you want certain people closer to you than others for various reasons.

At the moment there are a couple things that having friendship with someone does. First it lets you converse with that person on their profile or them on yours by adding notes. Secondly in the blogs you can post blogs that only your friends see. Optioning to display your email address to friends would be a good idea as well. More will come in the future I’m sure.

Abraham

[Bob Bonniol]

I guess I can’t argue really effectively against a richr user experience. There are definitely going to be people that use it. And of course it’s all right to not to (for people who are already crazy busy around here… like most of the forum leaders).

My concern is more about the egalitarian sharing of info that is the result of no back channel. When people are just tackling questions in private friend threads, the wider base doesn’t derive the potential benefit of that knowledge share.

Of course there are plenty of other reasons that these features could be good. The wonderful, amazing vibrancy of this community, it’s growth, and the general success have all derived, I think, from this core value of open knowledge share and reduction of boundaries between experts and novices… Or even between experts and experts. If there is the potential for friend features to result in the formation of informational cliques then that might be counter productive.

I hope the collective ‘we’ who are the developers and leaders on the site will watch and modulate the implementation of the feature to safeguard this phenomenal informational balance…

Bob

MODE Studios
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Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
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[Abraham Chaffin]

Your concern is duly noted. At this time the only place where private information is able to be passed between friends is in the blogs where there is now a feature that allows you to post a blog to only COW members or only your friends. The blogs are an area where people are allowed to have more of their own space and control and each blog becomes almost their personal property. I say almost because of course each blog is part of the COW. We have granted, however, much more control in this area so people feel like they have something that is theirs.

Abraham

[Stephen Smith]

[Abraham]
First it lets you converse with that person on their profile or them on yours by adding notes.

Can you make it so notes are not visible to the general public?

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