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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."
No. The presentation is suggesting that social networking applications should be designed around the fact that people tend to have a small number of clearly defined silos of friends, and make different distinctions within those groups. It mentions some of the kinds of distinctions made within groups.
Nothing in the presentation suggests that social networking applications should automatically identify either the basic groups or the distinctions within the groups (although some of the distinctions, particularly the distinctions based on things specifically shared through the social network, are obvious candidates for automated tracking, and some -- e.g., strong/weak ties -- one can imagine might be roughly detectable using heuristics.)
but the rest of the world?
Partially, its a grind game. I recently deleted my account, but one behavior I saw was some of my female acquaintances competing to see whom can collect the highest number of male friends, by any means. I enjoyed some of their pictures at least (hope my wife doesn't read this). The middle school girl game of seeing whom has more friends on the bus, minus (most of) the teasing. A nice looking young woman can easily acquire 4 digits of admirers, if not friends.
Also whenever you hear a trite explanation of why someone is on facebook, always assume the result is the opposite of their goal. Unemployed people claim they are on FB because its a great place to find a job, although they never find one, at least because of FB. I'm at the age where former schoolmates and coworkers are now very lonely stay at home moms, so they claim to be on FB because they're looking for adult interaction, but they post stupid stuff all day, so no one reads them. Single guy friends claim FB is a great way to get some, so they post every freaking benchpress set and every mile on the bicycle, and every time they enter or leave a "trendy bar", yet, they remain single. Everyone in America has heard of "someone" whom got a job or rekindled old friendships or got some because of FB. However, for 99% of the population, FB just simply doesn't work, but as long as there's people who have convinced themselves that it works, its all good, for FB anyway. Its a religion, basically.
And the final reason is simple curiosity. Whatever happened to that stoner dropout dude that I hung out with in 8th grade study hall? Oh, thats interesting. One of my coworkers was going on and on about some girl whom would never date him in high school, turns out she now publicly prefers other women, which explains that, or maybe it's his fault, whatever. Well, that was fun for a little while, goodbye facebook.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger