New Google Research On Social Networks 95
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."
Agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Agree (Score:3, Interesting)
I 100% agree and would love nothing more for my SN account to have 'multiple personalities' and aggregate it into one place instead of having to maintain multiple profiles. I can obviously see issues arising involving posting to an incorrect profile and so forth, but that's unavoidable no matter the multiple SN profile set-up.
Actually, I think these will be important features in a future 'facebook killer', although I suspect that facebook cannot be killed and it will take years for someone to catch up to it - A good analogy would be Hotmail & Gmail. Hotmail was first, was number one for a long time and even if it is #2 behind gmail, it is STILL huge.
Re:Just to point out... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
and the point is? (Score:3, Interesting)
I really don't get it. why is facebook a big deal? I understand the companies that want facebook-like things to work: they want money. but the rest of the world? how does it make people better persons?
don't tell me it's easier to keep in touch with people you knew in highschool/college whatever. if you're doing it just because it's easy, it doesn't mean you actually need to do it, and it doesn't mean you care about those people more.
One thing missing... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:and the point is? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's the first time when they admit they want m (Score:3, Interesting)
they won't stop until your Facebook/Buzz/Yahoo/whatever profile is a 1:1 mapping of you .... while now it's almost mandatory
Don't forget the other aspect of 1:1 mapping from a mathematical sense. How hard would it be to have multiple pages, if there's no authentication and "everyone knows its mandatory". It's like requiring all of us to carry ID cards at all times, yet allowing all of us to hand craft anything that we feel like calling an ID card.
Maybe, purchase a carefully crafted page for a job interview (HR repo says: "Look! Mr. Someone is a FB friend of the world famous VLM whom has a /. UID with only 5 digits! We gotta hire this guy!!"). This doesn't work so well for rare names. But a sufficiently expensive FB campaign can make any name common. Which might be a valuable service for people with tarnished FB reputations.
HR will check to verify my PHD. Probably. So I probably should not fake a doctoral degree. However, HR can not verify the PHDs of my artificially created FB friends whom sing my praises. Nor my executive and CEO friends. The key is not to go overboard. In my infinite spare time I have been working on a plan to implement all the characters of a certain book inside FB with myself as the main character. Kind of a performance art display. If you must steal my idea, at least credit my post here. It all boils down to the cost of multiple one year domain registration and email hosting.
I have also in my devilishness been contemplating generating a big connectedness graph of a 5-D hypercube, or perhaps several other shapes, and instead of naming the vertices (1,0,1,1,1) or whatever, I'd pull random names, and register and link them in FB-space. I wonder how far I can take this before getting caught. Someone out there is buying connectedness graphs from FB and is bound to notice.
Re:The construction of persona (Score:3, Interesting)
I think many of us, particuarly the younger generation, are already doing the latter. In order to adapt to this, we have to adjust our expectations of people.
According to the slides, at least, that's not the case. The presenter claims that younger users are more likely to actively manage their privacy settings. He seems to be implying that people opt for more control over who sees their profile when they understand how to do so, and stop using the service (or have a bad experience) when they don't.