
The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends - minimaxir
http://minimaxir.com/2014/01/farcical-friends-of-friends-folly/
======
michaelhoffman
I refer to Facebook's "People You May Know" feature as "People I Hate." For
some of them, Facebook is quite right--I do know them. And I don't want to be
friends.

~~~
aestra
Facebook suggests I be friends with my high school chemistry teacher. No
thanks.

~~~
Caturday
Nice try, Pinkman. You are not fooling anyone.

------
jellicle
Not sure that a business based on taking a photo of something and asking
people "what is this?" is destined for success. Isn't that something that
Google Now/Siri will probably automatically answer in the near future?

"It's a left-handed lug nut for a 1975 Vespa scooter. Click here to buy it now
on Ebay!"

"It's a powdered doughnut, and judging from your location, you're at Acme
Doughnuts on Main St. They have a 2-for-1 special after 5pm every day!"

"It's your friend Dave, shot through a red filter and wearing a hockey
goalie's mask. He has an Android phone in his pocket, so I was able to check
my geolocation records to identify him. Good one! You almost got me!"

~~~
rhizome
_Not sure that a business based on taking a photo of something and asking
people "what is this?" is destined for success. Isn't that something that
Google Now/Siri will probably automatically answer in the near future?_

These services require data-entry on the part of their users in order to seed
these identification engines. I see this data-entry as a hidden value of the
user, and part of why network effects are so valued by VCs/the market.

~~~
jellicle
Doesn't Google have a sort of "index" and "search engine" of billions of
photos with captions, link headings, title text, alternate text, and so on?

[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=lug+nut](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=lug+nut)

You're telling me it only works one way, from text to images, and doesn't work
the other way? But Google already lets you upload an image to search...

[http://www.google.com/imghp](http://www.google.com/imghp)

In any case, Google can simply say "I think it's a lug nut. Do you agree Y/N?"
And in effect, play 20 questions with its entire userbase. In _very short
order_ it would be capable of identifying anything.

~~~
rhizome
The lug nut question is an important verification step and indeed data-entry
on the part of the user.

------
tokenadult
The article kindly submitted here shows some interesting examples of
assumptions not working right in social network algorithms. Certainly I prefer
a narrower rather than a broader sampling in my Facebook homepage feed of
posts that have reached the home page of one or another of my more than 700
(!) Facebook friends.

But I do like the "friends of friends" reach for one kind of purpose. By
default, posts I post to my own wall are set for "friends only," and I have
curated (trimmed) my friends list a few times to make sure it only reaches
actual friends. (I am older than most Hacker News participants, and have lived
in more than one place, and perhaps that's why 700 friends, not all of whom
are active on Facebook, doesn't seem completely excessive.) When I see a new
notice, often here on Hacker News, about a security breach in some commonly
used online service or software product, I will often share the link about
that with "friends of friends," precisely so that the personal information of
my direct friends will be at less risk of leaking out through lax security
practices on the part of their other friends. I like to keep my extended
circle up-to-date on sound online privacy practices, so that my inner circle
can surf and discuss with less hassle from spammers and other criminals.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I am older than most Hacker News participants, and have lived in more than
> one place, and perhaps that's why 700 friends, not all of whom are active on
> Facebook, doesn't seem completely excessive.

People younger than me routinely have hundreds or thousands of facebook
friends (I have 28, and could easily curate it down). To me it's an
introversion / extraversion phenomenon, not an age or mobility one.

~~~
tokenadult
Your comment raises the interesting question of what the distribution of
number of Facebook friends is among REAL users of Facebook counting other REAL
users as friends, and how the distribution changes for various user
characteristics. I have not seen good data on that.

------
ececconi
You'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.

~~~
mathattack
"A friend of a friend" is enough for me to take someone's call if they're
asking for a personal or professional favor. Lord knows I've been on the
receiving end of enough of those gifts.

The thing I'm noticing lately is most of my LinkedIn invites nowadays are from
people that I have never heard of, but have as mutual friends. It's almost as
if that space has gotten big enough to let more folks in. Once you have 500+
friends, what's 501+? Though the impact of being so open is sharing less with
your friends.

~~~
ececconi
For some reason, denying a FB friend request feels normal, but denying a
LinkedIn request makes me feel like a jerk.

~~~
hatu
I just ignore the ones I don't know. Then I can pretend like I didn't see the
request

------
jds375
I'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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triadic_closure)

------
nobodysfool
It 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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Facebook 's limited notion of social relationships creates a poor (and
> sometimes creepy) user experience_

That's the thing I kind of wonder about every time there's a discussion
related to Facebook here - I personally can't see neither the "limited notion
of social relationships" nor a "poor/creepy user experience". I'm curious
where that difference of perception comes from.

> _Facebook model works great at college, kinda just after, and then not so
> much._

I had an exactly opposite experience. While in college, I didn't need to use
Facebook much, because I'd see my friends pretty much everyday
on/between/after lectures. But now, as I my day bouncing between work, familiy
and a local Hackerspace, I find myself having 90% of my social life channeled
through Facebook - there's simply no easier way to talk and share information
with people you want to stay in touch with, living in different cities, with
different work schedules and family responsibilites.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The way I was using it is that I have many different social interactions, from
people whom I've grown up with and known all my life, to people who happen to
ride the same train I do when they commute and prefer the same car. There are
a lot of differences between how I might interact with the former and the
latter, and what I might share with them.

At one level they are both 'friends' (as defined to be 'not unknown', 'not
threat') but my buddy from Junior High is a 'lifetime friend' and the person
on the train is 'a friendly person who rides the same train I do'.

In today's connected world, both of them might want to be 'friends' on
facebook. In my actual life they are 'different' kinds of friends. And of
course that friendship changes over time, I may develop a deeper relationship
with the person who rides the train, I may drift apart from my childhood
friend, but none of the subtleties are expressible in the vocabulary of
'friendness' on Facebook.

I've chosen to link with social friends on Facebook and people with whom I've
worked professionally on LinkedIn, but I don't generally 'LinkIn' with friends
who I'm not going to interact with in a professional context, nor 'friend' on
Facebook people for whom I would not feel comfortable inviting over to share a
beer by the fire pit and discuss comparative theology.

~~~
derefr
> At one level they are both 'friends' (as defined to be 'not unknown', 'not
> threat') but my buddy from Junior High is a 'lifetime friend' and the person
> on the train is 'a friendly person who rides the same train I do'.

The latter are "acquaintances." I don't think they're "friends" at any level.
A social network that understood what acquaintances were would be pretty
great.

------
philwelch
I wish you could designate enemies on Facebook, so that they could suggest the
enemy of your enemy as your friend.

~~~
cobrausn
Baby steps. First we need a 'dislike' option.

------
curmudgeoned
Does anyone remember Friendster and MySpace? (stupid question, I know)

But before Facebook opened itself to non-edu TLD email addresses (read:
enrolled college students only), these were the only two major ground-breakers
in terms of social media (or what I prefer to refer to as public AOL Buddy
Lists).

There was a major difference between Friendster and MySpace though, and it's a
big one that was hugely ignored:

    
    
      Friendster actually provided real social network graphs,
      that showed you your own Kevin Bacon relationship with every user 
      page you viewed.
    
      MySpace blindly declared that "EVERYONE" was in your network,
      because YAY! WE ALL USE MYSPACE, SO WE'RE ALL FRIENDS IN ONE BIG
      NETWORK: MYSPACE! SQUIDDLEY DOO! (especially wrt our big 
      buddy: "Tom")
    

Of course everyone flocked to MySpace because they could customize their CSS
to look extra cool, and/or inject JavaScript and Flash objects that sniffed
out IP addresses, and watch lurkers.

Meanwhile, technically competant scrapers, could still build out the actual
Kevin Bacon degrees of separation for MySpace by scraping the public pages and
re-compiling and aggregating the data themselves, but still... friendster gave
it to everyone, and understood the significance of degrees of separation
between people, but no one seemed to care.

------
VLM
It 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.

------
rm445
I wouldn't go so far as to say the author or his 'friends' are misusing
Facebook - they can use it however they please. But people with massive
numbers of friends are going to break whatever expectation there was of nearby
members of the network being meaningful.

For those of us less entwined with social networks, our 'friends' are actually
our friends, and family, colleagues, neighbours and people we know through
shared interests. The friends of our friends will be likewise, with a
perfectly good chance we will have things in common with them, together with a
few distant links that could provide interesting or unexpected connections. It
can be a useful network.

Of course, Facebook has been complicit in every development that has made it
more general and less a reflection of our real social networks - as it has
tried to acquire every person as a user. There is a conflict between a social
network that tries to be a more convenient form of your real-life social
networks, and a 'social network' that is trying to be the whole Internet.

------
georgemcbay
In a Facebook context, friends of my friends often aren't even really friends
of my friends, let alone me.

It is very common for sorta-random people to be marked as "friends" because
one of them clicked "Yes I know this person" when the creepy suggestion
algorithm made a tenuous link based on some shared history and the other
person either didn't have the heart to deny the request or clicked confirm
just to pad their own friend number or whatever else.

I still haven't even tried jelly, not because of the OP's concerns, exactly,
but primarily because if I want to know the answer to a question, I have the
internet already with its many sources of forum/stackexchange/whatever
expertise on various topics. I'd much rather ask a question in one of those
contexts and get an answer later that is well reasoned and knowledgeable than
get a bunch of people guessing, joking and/or throwing in random nonsense
opinions simply because of social pressure to provide some sort of quick
answer.

------
clarky07
It doesn't matter that "friends of my friends are not my friends" for Jelly.
Jelly isn't a social network, no matter how it is being marketed. It is much
closer to Quora than it is to Facebook. Whether there is a market for what it
actually is, is an entirely different question. The reason for going 2 degrees
is simply so it isn't a ghost town at launch. The questions being asked aren't
things that it matters if the person is your friend or not.

Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, it could be simply everyone on Jelly as
opposed to just my twitter followers and it would only make it better by
extending the people that see the question I want answered. I suppose I could
just follow obama or beiber or something on twitter to get effectively the
same reach.

------
nostromo
It depends on the context.

I don't want to wish friends of friends happy birthday.

But, friends of friends is the absolute ideal way to meet someone to date or
to find a job.

~~~
Roritharr
but ironically facebook is bad for both of these scenarios.

------
mmahemoff
It 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.

------
chavesn
The author has a fair point, but I was left hanging waiting for a "so, what?"
at the end. I was hoping there would be something more constructive to this
than just a complaint.

What should be done about it? What _are_ people really looking for? How can a
network with the goal of connecting more people deal with the inevitable
noise? How soon should they worry about that?

Was Facebook perfect 4 years ago, or is there a gap still left to be filled?
How can a social network really figure out who is most relevant to you and
link you to them?

I think these are great questions. I would love it for authors who know/care
about this topic to look at Facebook, Twitter, and Jelly with solution glasses
instead of just problem glasses.

~~~
hatu
I'd say it was better 4 years ago. Maybe because they weren't worried about
making money yet. Now with all the "optimizations" to the feed, it's less
relevant than ever. Or maybe people just stopped posting interesting things on
Facebook. Either way I don't see it anymore.

------
fit2rule
Sure - 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.

------
codezero
Hell, a connection on Facebook is hardly a friend in the first place. Are
people I went to high school with and reconnected briefly with my friends? Not
by my definition.

------
donutz
The only way I use "Friends of Friends" on facebook is for setting a post's
audience so the grandmothers can share the grandkid photos I post with their
circles of friends. Pity I can't set this from the Android app (Facebook, are
you listening??).

Anyways, like the author I'm not much interested in what my Facebook friend's
friends are doing.

~~~
DanBC
You remind me of a frustration I have with. Urrent facebook UI.

I only ever share posts either publicly or to a named small group. ("Photos of
Bob").

It's gently frustrating that the list for sharing is populated with auto-
generated groups that I have never, and will never share things with, and that
getting to "photos of bob" takes extra clicks.

------
gedrap
No one has mentioned this one yet but maybe they (FB) have found out that
doing this, will increase the growth of number of friends? Because from time
to time someone (possibly) will be like "oh wait I know him!". And more
friends -> more updates and notifications -> checking FB more often -> more
time to click the ads.

------
ahoge
Yea, "friends of friends" is a really weird concept when it comes to people
you know from the internet. It creates connections between disjoint
communities. Those communities are disjoint for good reasons. They don't have
anything in common.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _disjoint communities_

Really? Think about it: when you befriend a new person, was that person
usually a complete stranger to you before, or maybe rather a friend of a
friend?

~~~
ahoge
The important bit is "people you know from the internet".

For example, I really like survival horror and horror-themed action games.
That's what connects me with one particular woman who shares these interests.
However, she's also into My Little Pony and other furry stuff. I don't care
about those things or people from those circles.

All those communities are very narrow in focus. They only share one particular
interest.

------
pearjuice
In a not so distant future you will see Facebook recommending friends based on
shared data points. The weird thing is that due to to their massive backlog on
people their likes, website visits et cetera, they might actually do proper
recommendations.

------
fudged71
It's simply a way to populate your feed with more content. They seem to
think/know that you will use the service more if there is more content.

I too dislike how much extended network is being utilized these days.

------
D9u
There is so much more interesting content on so many other sites, that I
really don't miss my deleted (a year ago)Facebook account.

------
Awwan
The friends of my friends are not my friends. If they were my friends, they
would already be my friends...

------
ender89
where's the "enemies of my enemy" social network? that would actually be
useful.

