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New Google Research On Social Networks
mantis2009 writes "Paul Adams, a senior user experience researcher at Google, has posted a slideshow from a recent presentation that shows insightful research into how people use social networking technologies. The presentation describes several shortcomings of existing technology, and it highlights specific modalities that current technology (ahem, Facebook) gets wrong. Adams concludes that social networking applications are a 'crude approximation' of real-life social networks. 'People don't have one group of friends,' Adams research in several different countries shows that in reality, most people have between four to six groups of friends. He argues that social networking applications need to be built with that reality in mind."
So what, you can group on facebook, even tag different people into different groups and then adjust privacy and broadcast setting accordingly. May be because they are not separated on you provife where it says 358 friends in stead of 358 friends in 12 groups, average members per group 18.....
Facebook DOES support multiple groups of friend -- you can create separate friend lists and subdivide what permissions different sets get.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
I completely agree. I have to refuse friend requests from family and co-workers because I don't want them viewing my status/pictures. It would be great if I could post a status update to my "New York Friends Group", or share a picture album with my "Family Group".
You might say that facebook is killing independent george?
I use multiple SN's. For professional contacts I use LinkedIn. For personal contacts I use Google Buzz (or at least did until recently). For imaginary contacts I use WoW.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
It's a bad thing when worlds collide!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPG3YMcSvzo
Hopefully this is the right clip (work pc / no audio)
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Facebook as a tool is very limited to imitate real life social networking. For example I have different categories of friends on facebook and I would like to be able to literally have different profiles for each of them in FB. Yes, FB does support something like that, but it is a pain to set each post or album differently for each individual. I still have not added anyone from my work to my FB account because I am scared what they might end up seeing on my account. Ofcourse, FB also has this ridiculously bad privacy policies in which your tagged pictures get shown to everyone depending on whoever has the least restrictive privacy settings!
the points this guy makes make sense, but it seems like he is just asking for the re-creation of USENET
I really don't get it. why is facebook a big deal? I understand the companies that want facebook-like things to work: they want money. but the rest of the world? how does it make people better persons?
don't tell me it's easier to keep in touch with people you knew in highschool/college whatever. if you're doing it just because it's easy, it doesn't mean you actually need to do it, and it doesn't mean you care about those people more.
new sig
...that tired, clever-maybe-once-upon-a-time "ahem"/"cough" convention?
Thanks in advance...
Each person is the 1-person intersection of a lot of circles of different sizes, potentially having a different personality in front of each of them. And some of those circles are totally contained in others (as in class colleages, and small group of closest friends in that class).
Is not just 4-6, are a lot, and is very dynamic too.
They seem to go in the right direction, but falling short on the real problem.
This makes a lot of sense but I don't know how you would implement this into social networking on the web. Have multiple groups of friends setting who could see what that could get to be a lot of work. Unless you had friends that are just Facebook friends then friends that were just Myspace friends. That is dependent on the other person to have a Facebook or Myspace would get kind of confusing keep all that straight. Facebook and Myspace only to name two there are hundreds of social networking sites.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
... girlfriends, wives.
Have gnu, will travel.
For Google Wave?
It goes beyond the problem of having different groups of friends. The problem is that in real life most people have many different personae. You would say and do things with your friends from college that you would never say or do in front of your boss, as the most obvious example.
IRL we put a lot of work into constructing and maintaining these different personae, and we do a lot of work to keep them separate.
With social networking as it is, that's all over. Even if you never participate in Facebook, you are probably tagged in dozens or even hundreds of photos, and the odds are pretty good that some of them show you doing things you wouldn't do in front of your boss.
So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?
I think many of us, particuarly the younger generation, are already doing the latter. In order to adapt to this, we have to adjust our expectations of people. Maybe as an employer, you just have to get used to being able to see pictures of your employees smoking weed at parties and so forth, and not let it bother you. However, until we adapt, it creates the problem that suddenly everything you say and do is potentially public (whether you participate in social media or not).
My site: Free Nature Pictures
And again, simple decades old technologies (in this case IRC) solved the problem from the start.
May we live long and die out
The author is playing the game and is constantly asked by each of the 3 girls he's going out with:
"Why won't you confirm on Facebook that we're going out?"
I read through the whole slide set, and it was very insightful as to the subdivisions of the network and the influences therein. The conclusions were pretty strong, however there is one issue that could make it difficult to create tools that will be the next Facebook. The problem is that although people in the studies privately categorized their "friends" into different groups and different closeness, I don't think they would be willing to share information on the closeness-level of relationships and the categories in some cases. In fact, I would be hesitant to do that on my own facebook profile if there were options, as people might see my computer. Furthermore, I would also be hesitant to post status updates that were addressed to a specific group of people, for fear of leaving the others out. What if I had to confess to someone I like that I do, in fact, use Facebook a lot, but I simply don't include them in my interactions there? The slides mention that people have workarounds like using entirely different networking services to comunicate with different groups, and I don't see this changing without an innovative implementation of a social network.
Apparently they're not happy enough with what they know about you, they won't stop until your Facebook/Buzz/Yahoo/whatever profile is a 1:1 mapping of you. It all sucks badly when you think of how, a few years ago, having such a profile was kind of embarassing in the context of, say, a job interview, while now it's almost mandatory - "What, you're not on Facebook? How do you LIVE?" I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I always laugh at tinfoil hats, but all this looks like soon we won't be able to do anything without registering to a data mining website first. The other day I was reading an article which led me to the European Commission's website, only to find that part of the information that was supposed to be there was actually on Facebook: http://europa.eu/epso/apply/today/tra_en.htm Yeah, I know, it's just a link, but I think it's really lame that the Comission provides more information about an open position on some employee's Facebook page instead of its own. Hell, let's stop funding their infrastructure, they might as well move everything on Facebook. Or Second Life! Bleh.
I have some forums friends that know me as Tei, and for some weird reason have figured out that the Tei on that forum is the Tei on /.
Do I have to use different nicknames? seems so. Internet with his worldwide design broadcast my life in a tiny spot of the internet to all spots. Maybe I sould use something less unique, theres something called TEI, so I am somewhat safe, but is not enough.
Everywhere you "deploy" your internet persona, you are reducing your privacy. Even if we use a combination of random characters on every post, I fear It will not be enough.
I am one of these jerks that has managed to google the whole life of a person using just the nickname. A tool for that is "unique expresions". People can change nickname, but not how talk... so if the dude use some colorist word or misspell, you can use that against him.
-Woof woof woof!
they won't stop until your Facebook/Buzz/Yahoo/whatever profile is a 1:1 mapping of you .... while now it's almost mandatory
Don't forget the other aspect of 1:1 mapping from a mathematical sense. How hard would it be to have multiple pages, if there's no authentication and "everyone knows its mandatory". It's like requiring all of us to carry ID cards at all times, yet allowing all of us to hand craft anything that we feel like calling an ID card.
Maybe, purchase a carefully crafted page for a job interview (HR repo says: "Look! Mr. Someone is a FB friend of the world famous VLM whom has a /. UID with only 5 digits! We gotta hire this guy!!"). This doesn't work so well for rare names. But a sufficiently expensive FB campaign can make any name common. Which might be a valuable service for people with tarnished FB reputations.
HR will check to verify my PHD. Probably. So I probably should not fake a doctoral degree. However, HR can not verify the PHDs of my artificially created FB friends whom sing my praises. Nor my executive and CEO friends. The key is not to go overboard. In my infinite spare time I have been working on a plan to implement all the characters of a certain book inside FB with myself as the main character. Kind of a performance art display. If you must steal my idea, at least credit my post here. It all boils down to the cost of multiple one year domain registration and email hosting.
I have also in my devilishness been contemplating generating a big connectedness graph of a 5-D hypercube, or perhaps several other shapes, and instead of naming the vertices (1,0,1,1,1) or whatever, I'd pull random names, and register and link them in FB-space. I wonder how far I can take this before getting caught. Someone out there is buying connectedness graphs from FB and is bound to notice.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The proper way to express your feeling is to say "Dude, fuck Facebook. Seriously."
would be awfully nice. We have these with email, and at parties, the water cooler and so on. I guess the message system can be used to simulate this, but it doesn't feel the same.
well congrats then!
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Why not just use other sites for different types of friends. Multiply.com and http://vk.com/index.php for instance. Orkut is still around too.
Spread things around and save Facebook for miscellaneous general relationships like people that you haven't seen in years and years. Choose Multiply.com for your intimate friends, get your family to all join VK.com and so on. And for professional friends LinkedIn is the place to be.
The future is diversity. We have tried the one big site model with Facebook, and found it wanting. So we won't do that anymore.
I vote that we all start a society on facebook, comprised of only fake accounts. We will exist in the shadows, not interacting with any real people. All accounts can have a common shared password, and the recovery email can be passed around a ring of admins whose job it is to protect against vandalism.
Well, duh. That's what you get when you "favor ability over experience".
Clearly facebook is a book of faces, not a book of friends. Friends just means you are connected to someone really, and that's it. That usually just means you came in contact with them.
Google will obviously have an invested interest in anything online, and the slides are very good. Two thumbs up!
Will it matter though? Seriously, 90% of the reason why facebook and dreaded myspace became so huge are because of referrals and because of their simplicity. Even with facebook a huge part of the user base are clueless about most of the features as demonstrated every time they introduce new ones and it leads to privacy catastrophy.
The moment you start geeking out you are making it harder for people to adopt, and although the author acknowledges this and avoids geeking out on technical details, clearly he has geeked out on the social ones.
That's a good idea, vlm.
I have had an idea I want to try:
Create an application and use this to represent yourself (give it my name). Essentially you can collect all the data about your friends with less of the risks.
You can use it to message your friends and write on their walls. hopefully your friends are dumb enough to give permission "Your Name wants to write on your wall".
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Danah Boyd had a lot of very similar things to say at www2010, and it is worth mentioning:
http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/futureweb2010/danah_boyd_www_keynote.xhtml
And I am sure others have reached similar conclusions also, but Paul Adams is definitely not the first to mention the problems of having one "public". Danah goes further and challenges the common notion of privacy more generically than just focusing on social network systems.
Why is this not modded insightful?
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Not enough people watching South Park, I guess.
When one friend group only sees itself on your site. I do not click on the sites of people I know on FB. I'm checking out the ones I do not know. Thats how you find other people. Which was the selling point of this data identity theft corporation. "Keep in contact with people who chose not to keep in contact with you".
They exist for a very different purpose, but that reminds me of the QC cast Twitter accounts. The author of the webcomic Questionable Content maintains Twitter accounts for the characters which are only connected to each other. I suspect there are a good number of other "fake" Twitter accounts. I know I have seen a few Facebook accounts for fictional characters.
Is there any web site which provide a single interface and integrated to all the social web site? I'll always prefer a single interface for all these web site instead of going there and remember my ids. Currently, I'm usinga mobile web site http://fonet.mobi/ which provide a single interface for Facebook, twitter, linkedIn, friendfeed, google docs etc. I have to login to this web site only and link my accounts. Once I links my accounts, I don't have to login anywhere and I can see all the friends comments/feeds. It has lots of ohttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/07/12/1635200/New-Google-Research-On-Social-Networks#ther features also like centralize address book, grocery card management etc.
We will exist in the shadows, not interacting with any real people.
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your journal.
Under an assumed name and post office box number, of course.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
GeeWhizz. A goog UX head telling fb what doesn't work. Are fb being billed for this service?
"Adams concludes that social networking applications are a 'crude approximation' of real-life social networks. 'People don't have one group of friends"
There's a hidden assumption here that I don't subscribe to: If real-life networks differ from online networks, then real-life ones are better. I mean, try that hat on with respect to other communications and data-processing systems.
Personally, there's no way in hell I'd want the complexity of managing N different defined social groups and who's in each, who's in multiple, who sees every step or picture or comment I put on a given site. It would be egregiously overwhelming. I'd rather focus on integrating my different contacts together, honestly. There's lots of cases where I might say "A and B would totally have a blast, if it weren't for the fact that A is at work and B is back home". It seems ridiculous to put up a Tower-of-Babel-like amount of effort just to keep friends walled off from each other in a simulation of real-life geography.
Moreover, the Adams presentation has even more, much bigger bad ideas than that -- like salivating all over the idea of unavoidable identity-linkage to every website and interaction on the web (Facebook keyed to every site you visit, etc.)
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes