Facebook Friend Wheel. ⇒
17 August 2007, mid-morning
Another reason I find Facebook kind of dumb is that it encourages collecting friends like you collect trading cards. This wheel of "friends" is ridiculous.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
Actually that’s one of the few spectacularly cool applications written for Facebook. You see a wheel that shows off your friends, but if you had that installed on a profile with people you actually know, you’d see that it shows you a pretty cool series of relationships among your friends. It shows you which of your friends are connected to each other. What surprised me was that it basically grouped my friends by how I know them – hometown, high school, college, and work since college. Though the application knows nothing about how I know those people, the way that they are interconnected automatically separates them out fairly cleanly into specific groups. I thought it was really cool to see this displayed graphically, and to see who in my particular social circle knows a lot of the people that I know.
But then, if all you want to do is hate on Facebook, you’ll be able to find something to hate in every piece of evidence you pick up.
by Ben on August 17 2007, 11:00 am #
But then, if all you want to do is hate on Facebook, you’ll be able to find something to hate in every piece of evidence you pick up.
Word up.
Though the application knows nothing about how I know those people, the way that they are interconnected automatically separates them out fairly cleanly into specific groups.
Also, although that is very cool, it’s also kind of scary if you think about it. I wonder how much data mining takes place on Facebook.
by Ramanan on August 17 2007, 11:19 am #
I haven’t checked this one out yet, but I’m usually pretty down on Facebook applications in general. I have a bunch of invites to photo applications and zombie games that I should really get around to turning down.
by Matt on August 17 2007, 11:25 am #
And for the record, I’m not an unabashed Facebook apologist. Most of the applications suck, and some are outright malicious. And yes, the data mining possibility does worry me. Quite a lot, actually.
by Ben on August 17 2007, 10:24 pm #