Thought Labs Blog

The “How Robert Scoble Hijacked My Facebook News Feed” post by Dare Obasanjo a few days ago talked about the repercussions of adding a high-volume content provider like Robert Scoble as a friend on Facebook. Scoble posts many links and videos, joins a lot of groups, and is very active with his Status Updates.

Dare found that this torrent of content drowned out the feed items from his other Facebook friends, and that the default Facebook filtering wasn’t enough to solve the problem. In the comments, many suggested just unfriending Scoble. However, then then Dare would miss out on all Scoble’s items.

What users need is the ability to deal with Facebook friends on their terms – controlling when they consume, regardless of when or how much is produced by those friends.

Inner Circle provides exactly this functionality, by allowing users to create Circles of friends and view or hide their Facebook News Feed items based on these Circles.

For example, Dare could create a Circle called Internet Buzz and drag Robert Scoble into it. He could create more Circles called Coworkers and Family and High School and drag the appropriate Facebook friends into them. On his What’s Happening page, he would see all the Facebook items organized by Circle. Dare could leave the Internet Buzz Circle collapsed until he was ready to view it and spend the majority of his time focused on the Circles he was most interested in.

Inner Circle does more of course, letting Dare and his friends share external feeds, like Twitter, Flickr, and blogs. These feeds would be integrated right into the Circles on the What’s Happening page. Dare would then know what’s really happening with the friends he cares about.

Mike from Blue Dot posted a very nice review of the Circles and Feeds aspects of Inner Circle.

He asks why we have users copy and paste their Facebook feeds into My Info. The reason is that Facebook doesn’t expose this via the API, most likely due to privacy concerns. The user may not want their feeds shared with the world. In Inner Circle , only the user sees these feeds, not their friends. Blue Dot also looks interesting. It is not a Facebook application, but purports to be a better bookmarking site. I am going to check it out.

Inner Circle is a new Facebook application that lets you cut through the Facebook noise and get real information about your friends.

The Problems:

Too many friends - You have lots of friends and all their information is jammed together. The more friends you have, the harder it is to find out what you want.

Too much noise - In real life, you interact with groups of your friends in different ways - some you talk to all the time, and some you talk to once in a while. In Facebook, everyone is talking to you all the time and some friends generate so much activity that it drowns out everyone else.

Not enough real information – There is more to your friends than just their status messages. Your friends have lives outside of Facebook – their blogs, Flickr feeds, etc – and there isn’t an easy way to get this information all in one spot.

Our Solution:

The Inner Circle Friend Manager lets you privately group your friends into Circles that represent your relationships. You can have a Work Circle, a Family Circle, an Inner Circle - as many Circles as you want. Only you know who is in each Circle.

The Inner Circle My Info page lets you enter additional information to share with other Inner Circle users. You can put in your blog, your Flickr feeds, and other things that let people really know what is happening with you.

The Inner Circle What's Happening page brings all the information together for the friends in each Circle. Now you can see at a glance what everyone is doing, or focus on just one Circle at a time.

Inner Circle lets you know what is really happening with the friends you care about. Give it a try.