The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
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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
#2It has to do with international expansion. If you google for family trust vs general trust or similar you'll just get clouds of financial advertisements for financial/legal trusts.
Some societies are familial trust oriented, some general trust/rule of law. USA is pretty high in general trust so something designed to appeal to familial trust cultures is going to look weird. We pick our tax accountant based on location or skill or advertisement, in a familial trust oriented culture you pick an accountant because they are a (possibly very distant) cousin or maybe friend of friend.
Likewise the familial trust oriented cultures probably think the american concept of selecting a business by mere geolocation to be totally bizarre unless its also got a genealogical overlay mode or something.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#3It seems to me the problem is that his 'friends' aren't really friends at all. He lists 'Robert Scoble' as a friend? He's a news source... he's going to have thousands of 'friends' that aren't really his friends.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#4It seems to me the problem is that his 'friends' aren't really friends at all. He lists 'Robert Scoble' as a friend? He's a news source... he's going to have thousands of 'friends' that aren't really his friends.
The author is aware of this and makes this point multiple times in the article. "Friends" in "Friends of Friends" is capitalized deliberately.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#5I'd actually venture to say that Facebook's 'friends of friends' algorithm isn't all that bad. It seems to be loosely based on the idea of triadic closure (except there is only a single kind of tie). If 'A' is friends with 'B' (you) and friends with 'C' (them), it is often natural for a friendship to form between 'B' and 'C' due to shared interest in 'A'. Obviously this property is a bit extreme and over-simplified to hold in large networks, but it is a decent heuristic. I think if Facebook included filtering by location and other strong features then their algorithm would be much better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triadic_closure
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#6It seems to me the problem is that his 'friends' aren't really friends at all. He lists 'Robert Scoble' as a friend? He's a news source... he's going to have thousands of 'friends' that aren't really his friends.
That is the author's point as I read it. Once again Facebook's limited notion of social relationships creates a poor (and sometimes creepy) user experience. The Facebook model works great at college, kinda just after, and then not so much.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#7It seems to me the problem is that his 'friends' aren't really friends at all. He lists 'Robert Scoble' as a friend? He's a news source... he's going to have thousands of 'friends' that aren't really his friends.
I agree with his basic point that friends-of-friends aren't necessarily friends--although you may or may not be interested in something they have to say in the same vein as attending a party. To your broader point, a lot probably depends on how you use Facebook. For me, it is almost exclusively people I've at least met multiple times and real life at a minimum. And, in most cases, people I get together with when I'm in their town and vice versa. Others use Facebook more broadly which makes filtering more difficult given symmetrical following.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#8Sure - in this day and age of the non-religious: f-o-a-f != f
But actually, in the set of people who are 'devout', this fact isn't so true. The religious are connected in this way.
And the thing is .. this foaf thingy .. Its not actually supposed to be a useable metric for you - its a metric for people who want to get to know you without .. getting to know you. If I know all your friends, and all your friends'-friends', then I can assume a few things about you that might be very true.
If I'm a marketer, then great that there are services that get people to self-organize in this way, so that they can be sold things, better.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#9You'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 peers are shocked I would do such a thing.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#10It depends a lot on (a) whether friendship is symmetric (Facebook) or asymmetric (Twitter or Facebook subscriptions); (b) whether friendship is IRL (more often the case with Facebook) or knowledge-based (Twitter).
The best scenario is an asymmetric network where I follow X and X follows Y. There's a good chance I'm interested in Y. The worst scenario is an asymmetric network where the opposite is true. X follows me and Y follows X. Good chance Y isn't even human.
So when I'm shown a Twitter FoaF, there's a 2x2 matrix of possibilities. Jelly seems to use at least 3 of them, since one label says "From X, follower of Y" while another says "From X, followed by Y" and another says "From X, friend of Y". I'd guess their stats will shown "From X, followed by Y" to be the most useful.
Also networks based on social/URL/family connections are probably less likely to be useful when it comes to FoaFs. Just too much variation and a lot of content being shared like random photos is only intended for immediate connections.