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The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

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Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

#11

Post by curmudgeoned »

Does anyone remember Friendster and MySpace? (stupid question, I know)

But before Facebook opened itself to non-edu TLD email addresses (read: enrolled college students only), these were the only two major ground-breakers in terms of social media (or what I prefer to refer to as public AOL Buddy Lists).

There was a major difference between Friendster and MySpace though, and it's a big one that was hugely ignored:

  Friendster actually provided real social network graphs,
  that showed you your own Kevin Bacon relationship with every user 
  page you viewed.

  MySpace blindly declared that "EVERYONE" was in your network,
  because YAY! WE ALL USE MYSPACE, SO WE'RE ALL FRIENDS IN ONE BIG
  NETWORK: MYSPACE! SQUIDDLEY DOO! (especially wrt our big 
  buddy: "Tom")
Of course everyone flocked to MySpace because they could customize their CSS to look extra cool, and/or inject JavaScript and Flash objects that sniffed out IP addresses, and watch lurkers.

Meanwhile, technically competant scrapers, could still build out the actual Kevin Bacon degrees of separation for MySpace by scraping the public pages and re-compiling and aggregating the data themselves, but still... friendster gave it to everyone, and understood the significance of degrees of separation between people, but no one seemed to care.

Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

#12

Post by mathattack »

ececconi wrote: post #9

You're more likely to have a conversation with a friend of your friend. It's generally much less threatening than talking to a complete stranger. This is how cocktail parties work, people are connected mutually through a friend. I'd venture to say that most relationships are facilitated through a mutual friend. When I tell people I go to the bar by myself to see what kind of people I end up talking to, many of my pee…

"A friend of a friend" is enough for me to take someone's call if they're asking for a personal or professional favor. Lord knows I've been on the receiving end of enough of those gifts.

The thing I'm noticing lately is most of my LinkedIn invites nowadays are from people that I have never heard of, but have as mutual friends. It's almost as if that space has gotten big enough to let more folks in. Once you have 500+ friends, what's 501+? Though the impact of being so open is sharing less with your friends.

Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

#13

Post by ahoge »

Yea, "friends of friends" is a really weird concept when it comes to people you know from the internet. It creates connections between disjoint communities. Those communities are disjoint for good reasons. They don't have anything in common.

Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

#15

Post by jellicle »

Not sure that a business based on taking a photo of something and asking people "what is this?" is destined for success. Isn't that something that Google Now/Siri will probably automatically answer in the near future?

"It's a left-handed lug nut for a 1975 Vespa scooter. Click here to buy it now on Ebay!"

"It's a powdered doughnut, and judging from your location, you're at Acme Doughnuts on Main St. They have a 2-for-1 special after 5pm every day!"

"It's your friend Dave, shot through a red filter and wearing a hockey goalie's mask. He has an Android phone in his pocket, so I was able to check my geolocation records to identify him. Good one! You almost got me!"

Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

#16

Post by tokenadult »

The article kindly submitted here shows some interesting examples of assumptions not working right in social network algorithms. Certainly I prefer a narrower rather than a broader sampling in my Facebook homepage feed of posts that have reached the home page of one or another of my more than 700 (!) Facebook friends.

But I do like the "friends of friends" reach for one kind of purpose. By default, posts I post to my own wall are set for "friends only," and I have curated (trimmed) my friends list a few times to make sure it only reaches actual friends. (I am older than most Hacker News participants, and have lived in more than one place, and perhaps that's why 700 friends, not all of whom are active on Facebook, doesn't seem completely excessive.) When I see a new notice, often here on Hacker News, about a security breach in some commonly used online service or software product, I will often share the link about that with "friends of friends," precisely so that the personal information of my direct friends will be at less risk of leaking out through lax security practices on the part of their other friends. I like to keep my extended circle up-to-date on sound online privacy practices, so that my inner circle can surf and discuss with less hassle from spammers and other criminals.

Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

#18

Post by msluyter »

ececconi wrote: post #9

You're more likely to have a conversation with a friend of your friend. It's generally much less threatening than talking to a complete stranger. This is how cocktail parties work, people are connected mutually through a friend. I'd venture to say that most relationships are facilitated through a mutual friend. When I tell people I go to the bar by myself to see what kind of people I end up talking to, many of my pee…

I met my wife at a friend's birthday party, so I'll vouch for that. But there's a difference between and . I'd venture that for most people most of the time, we just don't care much about the latter[1], which is I think the OP's point.

[1] One time when we may care very much is when we're actively looking for a relationship. I've found that my interest in social networks is highly correlated with those times...

Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

#19

Post by TeMPOraL »

ahoge wrote: post #13

Yea, "friends of friends" is a really weird concept when it comes to people you know from the internet. It creates connections between disjoint communities. Those communities are disjoint for good reasons. They don't have anything in common.

> disjoint communities

Really? Think about it: when you befriend a new person, was that person usually a complete stranger to you before, or maybe rather a friend of a friend?

Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

#20

Post by georgemcbay »

In a Facebook context, friends of my friends often aren't even really friends of my friends, let alone me.

It is very common for sorta-random people to be marked as "friends" because one of them clicked "Yes I know this person" when the creepy suggestion algorithm made a tenuous link based on some shared history and the other person either didn't have the heart to deny the request or clicked confirm just to pad their own friend number or whatever else.

I still haven't even tried jelly, not because of the OP's concerns, exactly, but primarily because if I want to know the answer to a question, I have the internet already with its many sources of forum/stackexchange/whatever expertise on various topics. I'd much rather ask a question in one of those contexts and get an answer later that is well reasoned and knowledgeable than get a bunch of people guessing, joking and/or throwing in random nonsense opinions simply because of social pressure to provide some sort of quick answer.

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