Facebook and the "Social Graph"

itwbennett writes "Peter Smith is blogging about day 1 of the Facebook F8 conference and Mark Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook, which, as it turns out, is somewhat confusing: 'Zuckerberg clearly sees Facebook as a service. Facebook Connect (the name) is going away and being replaced by the Facebook Platform. "Share on Facebook" buttons are being replaced with "Like on Facebook" buttons. And Comcast is now called Xfinity. ... What does it all mean to the end user? There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that. The overall tone of the keynote was that Facebook was serious business and they were going to build the Social Graph, a vast network of connections between people and the things they like. Zuckerberg was a man with a mission.'"

Comments

Facebook

[kyrio]

is for chumps. I don't understand how people can give away ALL of their information like that.

Re:Facebook

[zero.kalvin]

Because we are social. We need social contact. If being social means having a profile on facebook so you'd connect with your friends, most people(whether they know the risks or not) will have one.

Re:Facebook

[AnonymousClown]

Because we are social. We need social contact. If being social means having a profile on facebook so you'd connect with your friends, most people(whether they know the risks or not) will have one.

That's not real contact, though. It's a one way broadcast contact.

It's one thing to keep up with distant friends - it's a hell of a lot cheaper than phone calls, but in many cases it's a replacement for in person contact - even if folks are local. Sure, there are folks who use it to say "Hey, I'm at Joe's Tavern tonight, come and join me!" but others?

Facebook is pseudo social contact and I think it's actually making us more isolated as a people. We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

Re:Facebook

[zero.kalvin]

Since when our social interaction were rational ? There is no point in rationalising this for the human majority. If putting information about themselves on a site so they'd connect with people is what's required , they would do it. They see this as a way of being capable of interacting with more people using less time. Question, how many(of active) profiles have a friend list under 20 friends? I would suppose not a lot, I would even go as far as saying probably very rare. People want to meet more people(in general) and online social interaction can give you something of that in less time. So people put the information there, so people would see it.

Re:Facebook

[drachenstern]

I realize the OP was being a troll, but please mod the parent up. /.ers need this awareness. Facebook is not for /.ers, it is for our mom's and our SOs. The ones who don't understand why a cryptographically hard password is important.

Because we are social

Re:Facebook

[RagManX]

That's nice, but only works in a romanticized version of reality. Almost all of my friends live hundreds of miles away. I don't care for most of my cow-orkers, and have little time available to do much with my friends who live nearby because I have a schedule to maintain with my kids and my friends work different hours than I do. There's a ridiculous number of reasons why for many people it is difficult to actually spend a lot of time hanging out with friends IRL, and probably just as many to justify keeping in touch via social media. For many, it's almost like we're integrating technology into our lives to give us more ways to keep in contact with people who physical world constraints make hard to spend face time with.

Re:Facebook

[icebraining]

We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

Wrong. Evolution has no "purpose". Fixed: Those who were more predisposed to communicate one to one survived better.
Eventually, those who can communicate better in Social Networks may have better lives and consequentially they may dictate the human race evolution pattern.

Re:Facebook

[AnEducatedNegro]

We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

Says the man posting on Slashdot

Re:Facebook

[tophermeyer]

I think the point was that to date we have spent millions of years evolving to maximize our face to face social interactions. The relatively instant replacement of that with "social networks" is not something that we have evolved to cope with, and so has a disruptive effect on our lives and social interactions.

If those social networks persist for an extended period of time than we may certainly evolve to maximize them. However, evolution happens by selection through successful reproduction. As this is most certainly a face to face activity, in person social skills will likely remain paramount.

Re:Facebook

[MrCrassic]

Facebook is pseudo social contact and I think it's actually making us more isolated as a people. We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

See, here's the problem. Facebook isn't meant to replace social contact; it's meant to enhance it. When Zuckerberg and company began developing facebook (before the 'f' was capitalized, of course), their main impetus for doing so was to develop an easy way for people in Harvard to know and keep in contact with each other. Since college students would prefer anything online over in print, it made it a much better alternative than using the actual face-book that Harvard publishes every year (which I think they still do). On top of that, it provided a medium to allow people to contact each other easily. It was way better than digging through and through to find someone's email address, let alone their phone number. This obviously proved to be way more advantageous than finding people, as attested by the outrageous growth it's experienced since it went live in 2004.

Unfortunately, making communication easier naturally implies some form of increased isolation. However, would you really consider that mitigation a disadvantage if that simplification makes your life easier? Calling people makes it easier for me to not talk to the person face-to-face, but would you doubt that the phone is a terrible way to communicate with people because of that?

I own a Facebook profile, and have accumulated a ton of friends over the years on it. Now, in reality, I only know a handful of those folks...but having tons of Facebook friends sure makes it easy to find something to do on a quiet Friday/Saturday night if I'm up for it. Which, of course, makes it easy to make real acquaintances (or friends that stick around, if I get lucky).

Re:Facebook

[icebraining]

So you're saying we should all move to your city? My whole country doesn't have enough people for two of those cities. And I bet in your country there are people who live in less populated zones...

The people I meet online are just that, people online. I don't pretend that we are BFFs.

Me too. But I do have friends who I have met in real life, but due to time constrains I can only hang out with on weekends. I don't see the problem with talking to them online on the rest of week.

I find Facebook flawed in multiple ways, but saying all online communication is impersonal and wrong is foolish.

Re:Facebook

[icebraining]

But you can say that about anything newer than a couple million years. We haven't evolved to use almost *none* of the stuff we use today.

The relatively instant replacement of that with "social networks" is not something that we have evolved to cope with, and so has a disruptive effect on our lives and social interactions.

Bollocks. Evolution is not the only way to adapt. We have adapted to millions of changes without evolving. Sure, it's always a bumpy ride 'till we adapt, but it'll be measures in some years, not millions.

If you sum all the technological evolutions in the 19 and 20th centuries, this doesn't come even close.

Re:Facebook

[Sir_Dill]

I like the direction you were both going for.

I agree that FB communication is a poor surrogate for face to face in person communication, however speaking from an American societal view, allowing people to communicate freely without some of the awkwardness or judgment based on physical appearances may allow people to "connect" with others and exchange ideas more freely.

Group social interaction and the sharing of ideas is what drives our society and civilization. To imply that the only way to do that is via "facetime" is not only naive, but its a little ignorant.

Yes body language can account for a significant amount of "communication" but it can also impede the sharing of ideas.

Personally I see FB as the next logical evolution to online disucssion forums and IRC chatrooms. The body language issue is largely negated through the use of "emoticons" and other memes, not to mention things like skype which I can tell you from experience, is an EXCELLENT alternative to face to face communication.

Ultimately FB allows more communication easier which will naturally lead to more physical interactions. The idea that just because you met someone on the internet discounts the possibility of being "friends" in real life is foolish. It's really no different than meeting someone on the train or in the grocery store. They are just as likely to be an axe murderer as the person you met online. The only difference is the method by which you were initially introduced. The same social rules and personal safety habits still apply and I think THAT is the larger issue. The internet has invaded every part of our lives at all levels. As a species we are still adjusting and evolving to take advantage of the new tools and communication avenues that have recently been created.

Re:Facebook

[Lumpy]

You are correct. it's not for /.'ers its for people that want to connect with others. I use it as a brand building tool and networking tool, same as my linked-in. I only post to my facebook positive things that build my "brand" to the point that I have over the past few years turned into a minor celebrity in some circles. A lot of people know of me that I don't know and they know my work, cripes little ol' me has 1500 fans on my fan page. It helps because only friends are on my page and everyone else sees my fan page. that allows me to insulate my private data stream from my public facing data stream.

THAT is what Facebook is really good at. mix in a twitter feed, youtube channel, and a "blog" that couples all together... and you have a HUGE brand building network.

It's also why I never even interviewed for my current job... I was contacted, they made an offer, I accepted and started. No interview, no Send your resume, no fill out a application...

p.s. : keep your social life not linked or not easily linked to your professional public facing world.

Re:Facebook

[insertwackynamehere]

Who are these CHUD people everyone on Slashdot claims to exist who communicate solely on Facebook from their underground lairs with no one on one social interaction whatsoever.

Everytime Facebook is mentioned here, a lot of people seem to create this strange stupid type of person who has 5 million friends on Facebook and talks to no one in real life. The fallacy of this is that the "person" being nerdraged against is a construct, it's easy to get mad at Facebook when you think these types of people exist and they are forced into their predicament by Zuckerberg's personal schutzstaffel. How about Slashdotter's stop freaking out about non-nerds communicating online and trying to explain from their position as a fucking Slashdot commenter that internet communication is inherently wrong.

Re:Facebook

[mea37]

You're saying two conflicting things as though they were the same thing.

When you say facebook "is" pseudo-contact, you're wrong. Facebook is a tool. Some people use it for pseudo-contact, and if those people didn't have FB to use for pseudo-contact it's hard to predict what they'd do instead. As you yourself note, others use FB in positive ways; so why hate the tool just because some poeple use it wrong?

Also, I find your opinion that FB is only for one-way broadcast communication interesting, because it is completely unsupported by fact. Yes, FB has facilities for that; it also has facilities for person-to-person two-way communiction, which work quite well.

Re:Facebook

[uniquegeek]

Or finding out some woman you don't know has three friends in common with you, all three of which don't know each other, two of which each live in different cities (and were previous boyfriends). This woman looks similar enough to me that we could be sisters. Cool and creepy, all at the same time.

I also found out one of my cousins (who I don't know that well) is a friend of one of my best friends.

I go dancing a lot, so once I start meeting more dancers and adding some of them, I get a whole list of other people I see but don't really know. I've met a few industry contacts that way, and found people who were into the same (other) hobbies I was. It is a great tool for meeting more people. Knowing you have something in common with someone makes it easier to break the ice with someone.

I also use facebook and my blog as a means of advertising my skills and interests. Personal marketing.

Re:Facebook

[elnyka]

Want to know what's much more social and stores none of your information for random strangers forever? Hanging out with your friends. It also happens to be the fastest way to exchange detailed information with them too!

Question: From where I am (Florida), how do I hang out with my friends, school buddies and relatives in California, Massachusetts, Georgia, Yokohama and Central America? Or do they stop being friends and relatives the moment they are no longer within spitting distance? It got to suck in a very insular way to not have people you care to hang out with but are very far away, in this modern, mobile and to a point, nomadic nation of ours. Either that, or you live in a cow town where everybody you know and care for enough to hang out with stays and dies on the same spot.

Here you are making the leap of thinking that all that information is available to random strangers (when in fact, that only happens if you consciously fiddle your privacy settings to make everything public.) Most people in Facebook do not do that, and, unlike Myspace (and the friend-whoring it seems to support), these same facebook users tend to keep visibility open only to actual friends, relatives and co-workers.

I'm a facebooker myself, some of my information is accessible by every one; other just to those I connect with. Fact is, I'm only connected with family, relatives and people I actually know. It's been the best thing since e-mail to keep in touch with relatives and friends thousands of miles away. With people that I've lost contact 10-15 years ago (by virtue of finishing school and/or migration) we have been able to re-found each others.

With it, and with skype, they have been great tools to communicate with faraway friends and family. It's the only way my grandma in Nicaragua and my in-laws in Japan can get regular, daily updates on my baby's growth. Networking sites are some of the best things that have come from the Internet in terms of human interaction.

When people start seeing those as ZOMG, GEEK+ATTENTIONWHORE, BASEMENT! ditching advise about getting out, that's just projecting.

and again....

[Em Emalb]

no mention of user security ANYWHERE.

That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.

That's the #1 reason why I don't use their services. Otherwise, for a ton of people, they're fantastic services.

Re:and again....

[King_TJ]

Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?

Re:and again....

[Monkeedude1212]

Both with Privacy AND with security.

I mean, from a business standpoint, yes, facebook is great for drumming up marketting, developing business, and maintaining relations with clients. However, just yesterday we ran across this little gem. A worm that targets facebook and other social networking sites specifically.

Surprise Surprise, one our sales ladies got infected. Now that we've cleaned it off we still have to assess the damage. She could have spread it to the rest of the sales team, her clients, the CEO (who is on her friends list)... But of course she isn't going to give US any information, that'd be invading her privacy.

I know, you guys are going to say "Tell her to warn others and let her deal with it then", which is what we did, but obviously if she doesn't adequately deal with it, the problem is going to circle back to us with other sales people.

Re:and again....

[caffeinemessiah]

One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies". Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?

Look, we as nerds must STOP treating "data mining" like an epithet, or at least a scarlet letter on one's resume. The term has been abused by the popular media in connection with the NSA's wiretapping, but people tend to overlook the fact that "data mining" is just a bunch of algorithms to find statistical patterns in different kinds of data. When it's referred to as "exploratory data analysis", no one seems to mind. When it's referred to as simply "applied statistics", no one seems to mind. Read the statement by ACM's data mining special interest group, SIGKDD.

That said, I completely agree with you -- of course Facebook is interested in mining the social graph and f***ing it for all its worth. They're a for-profit company whose only asset is detailed information about people and their interactions. Why is anyone shocked that they don't want to make the world a better place, and would rather become very rich instead off their only asset. For a capitalist country, a lot of nerds in the US seem to have rose-colored glasses on.

Re:and again....

[Pojut]

That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.

I am an avid Facebook user (5-10+ updates a day kinda guy), but that quote from your post is exactly why I never say or do anything on there I care about the public knowing. I'm fully aware that nothing I do on there is truly private, and I use it with that in mind.

Re:and again....

[anglico]

you live there too? Funny I've never seen you around the house?

Re:and again....

[tlhIngan]

no mention of user security ANYWHERE.

That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.

That's the #1 reason why I don't use their services. Otherwise, for a ton of people, they're fantastic services.

What security is there in the first place? You put up a private photo and expect that only your friends see it? And that maybe they're all too stupid to "save as" and re-post the photo elsewhere as a public photo?

The privacy settings are just feel-good measures. Post something good and unless you have no friends, someone's probably going to re-post it elsewhere. Of course, if people realized this all the "private" data on Facebook wouldn't be there, so you put up some basic crap that really doesn't do anything. Once it's on the 'net, it's out there, no matter the privacy settings. The only way to keep it off is to not post it in the first place.

To think otherwise is like those "image DRM," "document DRM" and "email DRM" type services out there claiming to keep your images, documents, and emails safe from third parties/leaks, and allowing things like "expiring" content.

Re:and again....

[RazorSharp]

One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?

Why is anyone shocked that they don't want to make the world a better place, and would rather become very rich instead off their only asset.

What's shocking is that everyone knows Facebook does this crap and uses their service anyway. If consumers took more of an active interest in what corporations they supported then companies wouldn't get away with this crap.

Re:and again....

[Abcd1234]

What's shocking is that everyone knows Facebook does this crap and uses their service anyway.

Why is that shocking? Maybe users have *gasp* different priorities than you do! I know, it's shocking!

For example, I don't care that Facebook knows the people I'm related to. They provide me a service, and I pay them by providing them with information they deem valuable. I consider that an equitable trade. Who the hell are you to decide I can't make that judgment for myself?

Frankly, I'm continually amused by how much smarter Slashdotters think they are than the general public, and how they seem to believe they know what's best for them. So much for that supposed libertarian streak around here...

Re:and again....

[rhizome]

Look, we as nerds must STOP treating "data mining" like an epithet, or at least a scarlet letter on one's resume.

Look, we as nerds must STOP latching on to one facet of an argument, or at least representing it as the entire argument. The difference is DM in the context of ex-CIA, not DM in general. Relax, coffeeboy.

Haters

[Enderandrew]

He missed the message. The internet is full of haters and he isn't providing a dislike button.

If I like a song on Pandora, it can link to my Facebook profile. Great, I can spam my wall and annoy my friends even more!

Facebook is the single most popular site on the world, in spite of itself. All they do is piss off their users. Some day it will blow up in their face when someone launches something better.

Re:Haters

[maxume]

Mod parent DOWN.

Re:Haters

[mounthood]

He missed the message. The internet is full of haters and he isn't providing a dislike button.

I think you missed the point: Corporations want to know what you like, they don't care about what you dislike.

Re:Haters

[Enderandrew]

The value of a social network is in the users. Myspace was the indisputed king of social networks, and drove people away. Facebook replaced them.

Personally, I don't want or care about a dislike button. I'm pointing out that Facebook is constantly going in the opposite direction of what users want. Sooner or later, they will drive people away and someone else will replace Facebook, just as Facebook replaced Myspace.

Great.

[Fnkmaster]

Now when I go to CNN.com I suddenly find information about my "friends" and their activities on CNN.com. I don't want to see this shit. And I sure as hell don't want my "friends" (keeping in mind that the several hundred FB-friends I have aren't particularly my real 'friends' anyway) seeing what I do on CNN.com.

The worst thing - this is happening even though I disabled the only privacy setting on Facebook that I could find related to sharing information with third party websites. And even though I never opted in to Facebook Connect or connected CNN.com to Facebook.

Also, CNN does not seem to have a function to disable this 'wonderful' sharing feature. The only way I could disable it was to log out of my Facebook account manually on Facebook.com. I didn't have a browser open at Facebook mind you, I just had a cookie in my browser from having logged into Facebook earlier this morning at the office.

So now Facebook forces me to log out manually every time I leave the site lest I be barraged with Facebook content on other, completely unrelated, websites. Thanks, but no fucking thanks. I guarantee I won't be logging into Facebook anywhere near as often any more since they've made their service an utter pain in the ass now.

Call me a grumpy old 30-year old man if you will. I probably am. Get off my lawn and all that. But seriously, I was an early adopter of Facebook, and before that of Friendster. I enjoy seeing a little bit of mindless drivel from my acquaintances and the like out there, and keeping in touch on my terms is nice, but it has to be on my terms. I'm not interested in having my web browsing at work be a social experience - I prefer to keep my "social experiences" sandboxed to the websites they originate from, thank you very much.

Re:Great.

[Rhaban]

Easy solution: remove all your facebook "friends" who are not real friends.

Re:Great.

[FreonTrip]

I'm in the same boat. This was originally a site designed to help people stay in touch with one another, but the company's desire to monetize its data is making them drift further and further from that goal. I don't care that a friend of mine became a fan of Fluffy Bunnies and Toe Socks, or that they befriended a number of people I've never heard of, and I really won't care that they visited musicalclusterfuck.net and Liked a pop country band, or that they frequent Fox News. It's well on its way to becoming a malware-crawling, adfotainment hellhole... really the ultimate manifestation of Eternal September, with lots of well-moneyed players swarming on its back like a Surinam toad of e-commerce.

Re:Great.

[gclef]

I ended up AdBlocking a bunch of facebook URLs to solve this. Annoying, but it did work. The ones I blocked:

http://connect.facebook.net/*
  http://www.facebook.com/connect/*
  http://www.facebook.com/plugins/*
  http://www.facebook.com/ajax/connect/*
  http://www.facebook.com/connect.php/js/FB.SharePro/
  http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?*

(PS: why does slashcode convert text-only URLs into hyperlinks inside a blockquote?)

Quote FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, fuck Facebook. Seriously. - Stan Marsh

Social Spam

[cosm]

I find it easiest to not participate. When I was in high-school and Facebook was just a whisper, during the times in which the only allowed users had to have educational email addresses, it was a platform for communication. Now it has become a micro-blogging service on the public side, so people can quantitatively spew their opinions via 'like' or, well, frankly, 'like'. Facebook is a platform of subjective opinions, coalescing, as a previous poster states precisely, into a a very large amount of noise compared to a very small amount of signal.

In theory, a 'clean' social networking site would simple allow people to communicate with exactly who they want in a manner that is explicitly controllable, giving that user the ability to control the exact verbosity of their messages and their communication scope. Facebook is eliminating the paradigm of private opinions, and the more laymen that sign up, more noise pervades the wire.

The draw, the appeal have you, is simple. If you can quantize 'friendships' and social-connections, people now have a semi-definable metric that they sub-consciously always try to improve, this is human nature. People seek others to listen to their opinions, and therefore the underlying motivation on Facebook is that drives people to produce so much noise is this need to be heard, even if what they have to say is completely worthless from a societal contribution standpoint. Its easy. You just post, and Facebook does the rest. If I am giving a speech to room full of empty people, I know nobody will hear it. But if I am printing my speech on millions of fliers and jetting them all over the world, their is that chance that somebody will effectively 'hear' me. Facebook provides, the pen, the paper, the microphone, the jet, and fuel, they own the airlines, they own the airports, and now they want to connect their 'communication hub' to every-other preexisting communication hub so that you can see that Joe Schmoe just mowed his lawn or Pookie made a cute face while she crapped on the apartment floor.

Fuck. That. Shit.

Re:The Newest and Social Way to Exploit the Masses

[icebraining]

This new vision leaves me troubled. The way he envisions it, it will be a wet dream to advertisers.

You don't use NoScript, do you? Because if you did, you'd see that his "dream" is Google's reality. google-analytics.com is *everywhere*.

Facebook is really a "casual gaming" site.

[Animats]

Facebook does a good job of being a "social network" for keeping up with your real-world friends. But if that's all you use it for, Facebook doesn't make any money. It's all that "casual gaming" and "fanning" that brings in the revenue. Connecting up with a game or becoming a "fan" of some commercial content sucks all your private data into some game operator's system.

Google conquered a similar problem. Organic search makes Google no money. Google's business is being an ad agency.

how to define friendship:

[circletimessquare]

someone you actually spend time with

anyone you only share stuff on the internet with: they are just an acquaintance, not a friend

and if you insist that such acquaintances really ARE your friends, then you are a shallow person who has no real true friends, whether you realize it or not

lose facebook and gain real friends and real depth of character. or continue with the empty mask and the fake charade and the pointless surface level chatter and call that a "life". your choice