Here is how I would like to define relationship permissions to content on social networking sites like Flickr.

relationships.png

In the first image I am assigning someone to a particular friend group. In the second image I'm telling the system which outer-most friend group I want to be able to access newly added content.

Something about selecting cones of permissions this way interests me. I would even like to use it to define severity of bugs, immediacy of problems, or even estimating the magnitude of difficulty something might have.

Oh neat: Caterina, one of the founders of Flickr, responds with some background on this idea and how it is not really a good way to define permissions. Nice to see that someone actually did it. I still think it'd be a nice UI feature for selecting magnitudes.

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Down10

How could this be arranged to apply to something like UNIX permissions? For example, of the possible users reaching the content:

Admin, Group, Client

each given permissions to provide:

Read/Write, Read Only, or No Access


Justin Mason

interesting stuff -- thanks for posting it.

However, I don't think my social network would fit into such a model. Here's my social graph from Facebook -- http://nexus.ludios.net/view/Justin_Mason/Nnb493qbYZkv/ . the problem there is that the groups are pretty distinct: I have ex-coworkers, []ers, UCI pals, the Irish bloggers, Apache people, and antispammers, and they don't really overlap very much. I'm not sure if that would make sense modelled as concentric circles.

I like the Vimeo idea Caterina mentioned...


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