

See How Well Google Knows Your Circle of Friends - sidwyn
http://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social#socialcircle

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jws
_Your social circle as determined by Google is currently a blank slate._ –
excellent.

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MarkBook
A well aimed arrow if ever there was one

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bootload
Google is missing the thing that Facebook does well here, _"identifying real
people"_. [0] When I looked at the _"Friends"_ google identified it was really
just connections I'd made with Twitter, flickr and various other services.
Very few I'd met or consider a friend. Parsing data to find friends isn't as
good as being sucked into the human _"social graph"_.

Identifying real people is a core concept at Facebook. and something they have
got right (identity) and google will find difficult to replicate.

[0] I wouldn't have realised this point as quickly had I not read _"The
Facebook Effect"_ ~ [http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-
Connect...](http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-
Connecting/dp/1439102112) which despite its flaws gives some useful insights.
Excerpt: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/facebook-david-kirkpatrick/>

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txxxxd
The title of this post probably mislead you, but identifying friends is just a
subset of what Google is trying to do here.

If I'm searching for a good online backup service I care more about the
opinions of people I follow on twitter than those of my non-technical friends
and family, etc.

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bootload
Good point I hadn't considered the real purpose of the service. But one thing
I can't understand is why google - the kings of simple - want to include such
messy data? When I see _"do more"_ I smell failure.

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bkudria
Google doesn't mind messy data at all. Their goal is to get _more_ data, even
if it's not perfect. If they can get massive amounts of data, their
statistical accuracy will improve.

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holman
Not much, apparently.

It knows my Twitter network, of course, and that's helpful for search results
(someone I follow on Twitter blogging about some arcane JRuby tidbit I'm
searching for is great).

If this is what Google's leaning on for their new social graph stuff, though,
they're in trouble: it knew very little about my real-life friends. In other
words, the friends that Facebook knows about. You can't glean that from Gmail
contacts necessarily, since I don't really use email for that type of
correspondence. If they really do want to flesh out a social graph of their
own to combat Facebook, they have to roll their own social network. Maybe it's
coming, maybe it's not; I just think they're only getting part of the picture
right now.

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tiredandempty
My Facebook network is not my real social network. It mostly contains people i
know, not the ones i interact with. My real social network is in my Android
powered phone. I am waiting for a better merge with the contacts on my phone
and the rest of social circles.

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RossM
Returns the same old bogus "I emailed them once" people listed in my Google
chat, apart from one person. Since I haven't given Google or YouTube my
Facebook info it can't be so accurate.

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buro9
128 Direct connections that include all of my close friends.

121 Direct connections from links... which duplicate some of my close friends
and then contain a load of bogus entries I don't recognise. These are all
based on Flickr apparently.

3905 Secondary connections that do contain acquaintances, some good friends
and lots of people I don't recognise.

It didn't do a bad job, but given that I use Google Chat and Calendar to
organise stuff, that I use Google Contacts because of Android and that I have
a lot of history in Google (email loaded from 1996) I'm not surprised that
they have such a complete picture.

Edit: Just read up on it... it's figured out so much as I'd added sites to my
Google Profile and it's followed those to determine the rest.

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swankpot
Google doesn't have a lot of content about my friends. In fact, none, other
than some names, many of which I don't even recognize.

But, interestingly, I got a 404 when I logged out.

[http://www.google.com/s2/u/0null?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.g...](http://www.google.com/s2/u/0null?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F)

Edit: actually, I can't log out. Fascinating, I know.

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groaner
Yep - logout is broken for me there.

Just go to some other Google site (docs, gmail, maps) and logout from there.

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stilist
My problem with the Social Circle stuff is that it apparently never ever
removes anyone that it’s pulled in through external services.

People I haven’t followed on Twitter or Flickr in a year still show up in the
‘Direct connections from links that appear on your Google profile’ section.

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js4all
386 secondary connections. Impressive. Is there an API to access these infos?

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adewale
Yes, it's the Social Graph API:
<http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/>

~~~
js4all
Great, thanks!

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pbhjpbhj
So, my questions are will this be used to alter search results - eg this
person is well connected in this field and regularly visits these domains,
hence we'll add a bit of authority to those domains? Seems they should
probably try it.

Also are they using meta data like XFN and microformats to garner some of the
data or is it just internal Google social links?

~~~
adewale
The part that uses the Social Graph API:
<http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/> is based on crawling XFN
rel="blah" links from all over the web. The canonicalisation layer that's used
is opensource: <http://code.google.com/p/google-sgnodemapper/>

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Detrus
It doesn't know much and what it knows is based on one other person who is
connected to many other things. Poor Google.

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alexbosworth
I wish I could turn this off or edit it, it's a bit creepy and never really
shows me anything relevant.

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adewale
It's all based on public data gathered using this:
<http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/>

You can always just edit your contacts on the original sites where the
information came from and either wait for a recrawl or force a recrawl using:
<https://sgapi-recrawl.appspot.com/>

~~~
alexbosworth
Some of it is from people I've exchanged emails with over GMail, which
shouldn't be public data, unless Google has leaked it out somehow.

~~~
adewale
Did you see this:
[http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228)
especially the bit about the difference between Public and Private
connections?

~~~
alexbosworth
I'm sorry my point is that I don't want to see private connection results
myself in addition to no one else seeing them.

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willheim
Yeah... I just stumbled on that recently (like 5 minutes before) in a google
search was doing. Wild. Too bad google seems to really only know one of my
connections and all that they are linked to. Also too bad that that connection
is really a weak one to me.

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jberryman
My "secondary connections" seem to be a bunch of cosmetic companies.

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portman
Mine are a bunch of restaurants, again all through one primary connection.

Considering that I am the ONLY person on Facebook with my firstname/lastname,
and that my 522 Facebook friends are publicly accessible, how and why is
Google _not_ indexing Facebook? Is it just a matter of pride?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Do FB allow that sort of indexing in their ToS?

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ohashi
6 people... not impressive at all.

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yanw
[http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228)

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agentakki
Testing...

