Google researcher says friend groups may give it a window to best Facebook

http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/07/01/google-researcher-says-friend-groups-may-give-it-a-window-to-best-facebook/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Venturebeat+(VentureBeat)

by dyc • 16 years ago

22 19 16 years ago

social.venturebeat.com

martythemaniak• 16 years ago

That's a very accurate observation, and there seems to be an opportunity for Google to make a great social networking product here. Current social networks are all pretty terrible at solving the problem of different groups of friends/identities, so people end up using twitter for some stuff, facebook and linked-in for other.

theBobMcCormick• 16 years ago

That's an excellent point. I know I tend to use Linked-In for professional networking, and FaceBook only for personal friends. I actually get rather annoyed when work contacts that I've never associated with in a social setting try to "friend" me on Facebook.

ja27• 16 years ago

"One teacher the company interviewed, for example, realized that photos of her with her close friends at a gay bar were being exposed to her 10-year-old students."

Why are the 10-year olds on Facebook (violating COPPA)? More importantly, why is the teacher Facebook friends with her 10-year old students?

bbatsell• 16 years ago

That doesn't violate COPPA if they have their parents' permission.

ostso• 16 years ago

At any rate it violates Facebook's terms (http://www.facebook.com/terms.php, 4.5): "You will not use Facebook if you are under 13."

onewland• 16 years ago

`More importantly, why is the teacher Facebook friends with her 10-year old students?`

I'm pretty sure photos of you are by-default public. If you don't change any settings and you have friends, they can tag you in photos that show up in "Photos of ja27" and people who aren't your friend on Facebook can see them. In fact, the person posting the photo might not even realize the photo is public; they didn't have to opt-in either.

naner• 16 years ago

This does seem obvious, but managing several groups of friends on the computer screen seems like it would be cumbersome and possibly confusing. The implementation has to be pretty damn good for this to work well.

Especially considering that many Facebook users are not very computer literate. (Remember the ReadWriteWeb/Facebook login fiasco?)

JohnnyBrown• 16 years ago

Remember when facebook introduced the option to show limited profiles to certain people? I liked the concept but it was clumsy to use and it was clear to the other party what I was doing.

In fact, the reason I switched to facebook originally was it looked like a myspace for just my school friends.

Getting this right would be a big selling point for me.

wake_up_sticky• 16 years ago

It definitely should not be clear to anyone what category (close friend, friend, coworker, acquaintance, etc) you place them in. Just like, in the real world, you don't automatically know whether I consider you a close friend or just a coworker unless you ask me.

c1sc0• 16 years ago

Let's hope this feature makes it in Diaspora, then! Given how Google botched the Buzz launch with privacy issues, I'm not expecting too much from GOOG.

amalcon2• 16 years ago

Wouldn't, you know, owning the world's largest search engine be a bigger factor? Imagine if you googled "Bob Smith", and the first result to come up was the Bob Smith you actually know?

Raphael2• 16 years ago

Facebook does this.

amalcon2• 16 years ago

How? Does Google have your Facebook login cookie?

nerme• 16 years ago

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Actually, Zuck, that has nothing to do with integrity. I would hope to hell that there are things that you feel comfortable saying around some people that you don't feel comfortable saying around other people.

I completely agree with the writer. By having this "all people must act the same to everyone else at all times" mantra coming down from the top, they are ripe to be overtaken by another product that simply has at its core the exact opposite philosophy.

There ARE ways to split people in to groups based just on the social graph. Of course, you need a very large and almost complete social graph in order for this type of clustering to be accurate. I'm a huge fan of the linear algebraic techniques used in network analysis. There is definitely a way to have most of the hard work done algorithmically, presenting the user with an analysis of his own social network, lumping people in to suggested groups, for example. It wouldn't work 100%, as no algorithm is going to properly be able to handle the subtle nuances of a given individuals rationale for grouping people together, but it could get very, very close.

You could add further inputs to the clustering mechanism by taking in to account each node's own reclassification of its social groups. Run the algorithm, give all the users a generated list of social groups, and as each user updates and fixes the lists, re-input those updates in to the clustering algorithm. By giving the nodes in the graph an opinion, the algorithm could be refined and made to be more accurate when there are future changes to the graph.

Oh the weeks of fun I could have with access to Facebook's social graph...

indigoviolet• 16 years ago

Are you interested in actually working on it? If you are, send me a resume.

kwamenum86• 16 years ago

This sounds good on paper but in practice I think this could be problematic. There is some value in ambiguity. Segregating friends into a hierarchy feels like partly a social problem. Sure internally you may maintain such a hierarchy but what use is there in making it public? Don't you risk hurting peoples' feelings? What happens if they start off as a work contact and you become closer? Do you have to move them in a timely fashion or risk being offended? Seems to raise more issues than it actually solves. Seems like increasing the complexity of the interface for the social web has never worked out if the change did not also bring tremendous value e.g. newsfeed gives you updates on all you friends in one place - more complex but also very useful. More privacy controls was more complicated but didn't bring nearly as much value as fb thought it would.

lftl• 16 years ago

I think Facebook has basically gotten the visibility of the hierarchy correct with their setup of friend lists. I assign my friends to different groups, but they don't know what groups I've assigned them to.

The biggest things FB needs to change in my opinion are to make it simpler to post updates to different groups (it's there now but it's clunky), and allow me to segregate access to my information by group. So for example I can set it up so that my college friends can see what my college friends write on my wall, but not what work friends write.

I think there might also be some value in having a somewhat public hierarchy, like you initially mentioned, but I think that makes more sense on Twitter than FB. It'd be nice if Twitter let me have explicit topic-based channels for me to publish to, and for people to subscribe to. So I could subscribe to some people's programming related tweets without hearing about what they ate for breakfast.

aresant• 16 years ago

Lots of what's in that presentation could be applied to more intellegent sorting of contact "authority" to build something truly useful in the email space.

We inherently know when looking at an incoming email how important / timely it is to respond - in my personal experience a huge part of it is related to the sender.

Google researcher says friend groups may give it a window to best Facebook

Related Stories