Social Networking, Usability and Missing Persons

It’s a little over two weeks since my 19 year old son, Kyle McEwan, went missing from Dundee University. In that time his mother and her husband, my wife and I have been using a variety of electronic means to try raise awareness of Kyle, to find him, or if he doesn’t want to be found, to learn whether he is OK. It’s as good a test of the usability of these social networking (SN) technologies as you’d hope to find.

As I write we have only a couple of possible sightings and a bagful of mysteries. We also have the amazing site of dozens of people on Bebo spontaneously changing their personal picture to be one of Kyle, their welcome statements to mention him. A Missing Persons group for him in facebook.com gained over 350 members in 5 days, and, within 4 days, a site on myspace.com (linked below) had over 750 views while a 'band' in Bebo has had over 500 views. A Google search for his name, not even in quotes, gets nine of the first ten entries.

As an HCI academic with an interest in web usability it’s astonishing to see what happens when you actually have to use the stuff we have been talking about for years in a personal emergency. Largely it’s pretty good. I’ve been inundated with messages of support from various networks of friends and from old friends I haven’t seen for decades. Friends of friends of friends have been 'recruited to the cause'. Lots of good, effective, exceeding-the-user’s-expectations type of stuff.

But as a user I am also aware of a certain cognitive overload while I am in a fragile emotional context, indeed on sick leave. I seem to spend the day flitting from email to facebook notifications, from wall postings to superwall postings to inboxes in Facebook and Myspace. From accepting the same 'friend' in different social networks, to skimming through Bebo postings looking for clues. Lots of bad, inefficient, duplicated, cognitive overloaded stuff.

If I had a magic wand at this stage I’d summon errant son henceforth, but I would also find some smarter way to pull all of the recent postings from a group of Bebo users than doing a Google or Yahoo search.

When this is all over I’ll write something more deeply analytical of the usability issues, but with World Usability Day so recent I thought I’d share this story from the trenches and urge you to keep an eye out for my slim, 6-foot tall son, short dark hair, blue eyes, in case he is spotted playing guitar at an open-mic night near you.

Associated Link: Find Kyle McEwan

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