How friend clusters could make Facebook intimate again
It is a real problem with not wanted friends in Facebook. There are hints in Facebook that shows us a better future.
A post from VentureBeat by Peter Yared has the whole story. Here is a part:
A post from VentureBeat by Peter Yared has the whole story. Here is a part:
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The next attempt, Facebook Groups was a resounding disaster. Since anyone could add friends to a group, they quickly grew into large, amorphous collections of people. Your entire high school class may now be a group, but not your real friends.
So here’s the fix, according to my sources: Facebook engineers, longtime fans of graph theory, are starting to derive “friend clusters,” or tight interconnections amongst a group of friends. F or example, Facebook knows when a substantial number of coworkers have friended each other, and even knows that there are more people on the periphery that are close to parts of the company. Facebook has been incrementally adding this friend clusters feature in subtle ways. When you pull up a photo album from a friend, in the “people you may know” section to the right will often recommend people that you probably know in common with that person. This is because Facebook knows not just that you have friend in common with the person you are looking at, but who else has a lot of commonality but is not currently in your friend list.
It is likely that Facebook will soon introduce automated lists, and present user with lists of people and ask them questions like “Are these your coworkers”? By adding heuristics like how often users message, comment, and tag each other in photos, it will figure out who are tight friends of clusters. Even further, as evidenced by Facebook’s acquisition of the group messaging service Beluga, by watching how quickly people respond to each other — a feature I like to call “response velocity” — Facebook will start to figure out who your real friends are.
There are people you answer the phone for, and write back to immediately, and there are people you don’t do that for. Facebook is uniquely positioned to learn which is which — an advantage Google and other rivals can’t match.
Now that’s a real social utility.
