Camerons in the Economist

[I'm way behind in blogging, trying to catch up...]

Cameron brings some data to this article in the most excellent Economist regarding some of the behaviours in Facebook. With the pointless rush for many to friend the entire online population, perhaps the most salient point is:

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Another interesting thing about this article. When I searched in Google for 'cameron economist facebook', it clustered the article quoting Cameron Marlow regarding Facebook in the Economist with another article in the Economist about David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party. I understand the hit, but not the clustering. A basic understanding of Named Entity Recognition would protect the analysis from this type of error. Search has a loooooong way to go...

Comments

[Seth Grimes]

Pointless perhaps from your (and my) point of view. But really, the point depends on ones goals, no?

Hyper-friending (or hyper-linking in LinkedIn or hyper-following in twitter) for some people seems to be a matter of vanity or self-image, for others a blatant attempt to recruit reciprocal friends/links/followers who will boost the appearance that you have influence. Connectedness becomes the end in itself rather then a means of facilitating community communications.

[pwarden]

I'm pretty convinced that the days of binary friend/follow links are numbered. The great advantage of the classic model used by Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is that it's a simple UI. The only decision users have to make is 'Are we friends?'. To mirror your real social network you need a much more nuanced set of information on the strength, duration and context of every relationship. The barrier is that you could never expect people to explicitly enter that information and keep it up to date, it's just too complex and hard to articulate.

My bet is that Cameron's right, interactions should be measured instead to build the network from implicit data. The most promising source is email, but that's a minefield of privacy issues. I'm trying to demonstrate some of the promise using the public Twitter dataset at http://twitter.mailana.com/

To my mind it's like the switch from the easily-gamed and hard-to-rank world of explicit keyword metatags driving search before Google, and the hard-to-fake use of implicit data through PageRank.