Designing social translucence over social networks

Social translucence is a landmark theory in social computing. Modeled on physical life, it guides designers toward elegant social technologies. However, we argue that it breaks down over modern social network sites because social networks resist its physical metaphors. In this paper, we build theory relating social translucence to social network structure. To explore this idea, we built a tool called Link Different. Link Different addresses a structural awareness problem by letting users know how many of their Twitter followers already a saw link via someone else they follow. During two months on the web, nearly 150K people used the site a total of 1.3M times. Its widespread, viral use suggests that people want social translucence, but network structure gets in the way. We conclude the paper by illustrating new design problems that lie at the intersection of social translucence and other unexplored network structures.