

The Boolean Graph - olivercameron
http://kevinrose.com/the-boolean-graph

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jhuckestein
I find it hard to sympathize with most things Kevin Rose writes. Pardon my
french but this sounds almost a little... childish? irrelevant?

He thinks it's socially awkward to unfriend some of his several thousand
friends? Why did he friend them in the first place? How can he say with a
straight face (I'm assuming) that apps like Path and Instagram have shown him
that rebuilding his social graph every few years is a "must"? Because of
fights with friends? Do adults really fight with their friends and then
unfriend them on Facebook? How about just hugging it out afterwards?

These are contributions I'd expect from a mainstream celebrity, but I don't
feel like this represents the hacker culture (call it whatever you want) very
well.

Sorry for the off-topic. I do like the dynamic, perhaps even implicit, graph
idea though.

~~~
fusiongyro
Honestly, I thought that was the whole point of circles in Google Plus. You
make a "Siberia" circle, and the friends you don't want to have anything to do
with, you put in that circle, and you crank down the visibility on their posts
and don't share stuff with them. The effect is the same, but without them
finding out that you unfriended them.

~~~
jhuckestein
True. At campfire labs we were working on similar asymmetric friendship groups
before we got acquired. The problem is that you still have to manage those
circles though. In real life, you don't have to put in work to manage your
friends. You just know how they fit into the ever-changing friendscape.

~~~
fusiongyro
Yes, but in real life we don't have ways of broadcasting to this ever-changing
landscape. In fact, we tolerate quite a bit of collateral damage: you tell
your brother something in confidence and he goes and tells your mother.

Socially, yes, this is insufficient. But this isn't really about social
reality, it's a technical solution to boredom, which means people enjoy
putting work in to manage their friends. It's the whole reason they're there.

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karpathy
The relationships on Facebook appear boolean, but they are hardly treated as
such by Facebook. They have many ways of determining how "close" I am with any
one of my friends by looking at the number of times I interact with them, view
their pictures, etc. They also let you explicitly mark how much of each friend
you want to see in your news feed. Then it is only a matter of weighting their
updates accordingly. So I would argue that Facebook knows about this and does
the right thing (or at least tries to).

~~~
mbell
> They also let you explicitly mark how much of each friend you want to see in
> your news feed.

Part of the problem is the lack of a reverse of this function. That is there
is no(easy) way to turn down what you share with them. This is the problem G+
circles tries to solve.

~~~
ivankirigin
FB has a notion of close friends and you can set your default publishing
setting to be that. This isn't exposed anywhere, like some close friend list

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davidw
I thought Facebook was mostly just for those people who you don't interact
with a bunch. People who are my friends who I see often... well, I see them. I
don't need to poke them on Facebook. Where I find FB interesting/somewhat
useful is in that set of people who I otherwise would not be able to track
much.

Somewhat distant relatives, friends who no longer live close by, even one of
my elementary school teachers... that kind of thing.

~~~
tokenadult
_I thought Facebook was mostly just for those people who you don't interact
with a bunch._

David, the use cases of Facebook vary quite a bit. I have had a lot of fun
over the last few years talking in person with friends at regular meet-ups
about things we each saw on Facebook pertaining to other friends of ours. I
think whenever there is a group of friends who have local meet-ups frequently,
but also connections with people in far-away places (which might happen for
the mutual friends who are all members of some national organization, the case
I have observed), then there is a chance for Facebook to ENHANCE in-person
interaction with people you see regularly. As I recall, you are an American
currently living overseas (a situation I have been in twice in my life), and
it may be that for you the local versus distant distinction among people in
your circle of friends is more salient. I think one of the geniuses of
Facebook's "friend" model is that everyone constructs a different network of
Facebook friends, and enjoys it in a different manner. I STILL can't figure
out how Facebook will monetize, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how much
Facebook has added to rather than subtracted from my in-person social
relationships.

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AtTheLast
For the most part social networks give you the tools to manage friends fairly
well. I know on Facebook you can change a setting to only view important
updates from people. I like this option because you don't have the social
awkwardness of unfriending someone. But, you don't have to constantly see what
they at for lunch.

Also, I think we just get bored with things. That's human nature. We like new
things. We want to be part of cool new trends and technology. So once
something hits mainstream and stops being cool, we start looking elsewhere for
the next cool service to try.

~~~
rsl7
Having to manage an externalized representation of your relationships is what
is against human nature. Feeling social pressure to check daily, weekly, or
even monthly on the activities of every person you may have ever met is what
is against human nature.

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tylermauthe
+1 for "*Full disclosure: I own a metric shit ton of Facebook stock, so it
pains me to write this."

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aroman
I have the opposite experience. I have no incentive to use new networks -- all
my friends are on Facebook. Facebook is actually very good at (at least in my
experience) showing me information from friends that I'm actively being
friendly with. People from some event a few years ago fade out, while people
I'm going to school with now are in full-swing. When I change my involvements
during the summer, Facebook in turn fades them out and favors the other people
I'm currently working with.

For me, Facebook does exactly what Kevin Rose desires.

I think his problem is that he, as he put it, friends people "in passing [he]
hardly knows".

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BruceIV
I can definitely see his point about new social networks - probably the
biggest win Google+ has given me was the ability to start my social network
fresh, with only interesting people (also, mainly nerds, so I now post geeky
stuff to Google+ and stuff my family/non-technical friends would care about to
Facebook).

~~~
BruceIV
That said, this is also a problem of his own creation - I keep a fairly lean
Facebook friends list (which I'll purge of local contacts I'm not close to
after I move next week), and fairly often unfriend people who I'm not close to
and consistently post things that don't interest me.

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benofsky
I think there's a big difference between how [my generation and] I (19 y.o.)
use Facebook, and how older generations do.

For me, it is 80% keeping up with my current friends and 20% older friends. I
think these ratios are perhaps flipped after a certain point, perhaps the
people for whom their FB graph wasn't created organically from the age of
14/15 but rather, had to go and create it posthumously.

Yes, there are people I'm friends with who I'm not friends with anymore. But,
if you use Groups + Lists (which all my non-techy friends use too), this isn't
really an issue.

Anyway, I just see a lot of commentary on things FB is doing wrong by people >
25/30 y.o. But, for people below that age bracket (who tend not to be
commenting in the media) it has (from my observations) replaced
texting/phone/skype/letters/etc.

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stcredzero
_> No one has yet created a dynamic social graph. Facebook and other social
graphs represent a rolling set of relationships that are out of date the
instant they are created._

One thing that could be tried, that hasn't yet been done, is for a company to
try and own the "dynamic edges" of the social graph. The active borders of the
social graph embody a lot of value. If a bit of software could become the
killer app for networking and meeting people, it would enable another party to
own those "dynamic edges". Meetup.com is well positioned to attempt this. So
is Facebook. Apple and Google are as well through their mobile operating
systems.

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olivercameron
I'm surprised Kevin has forgotten about Google+ and Circles (considering he
works there).

Everyme (excuse the shameless plug) would also work very well for him. Both of
these products seem like a good solution for his problem.

~~~
spullara
Facebook has circles but much better anyway. People just don't like to manage
their graph.

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T_S_
If you make me grade my relationships with people (friend/defriend/link/put in
circle etc.) you are making me work. You must reward me for that. On all these
social networks my reward for that exercise is actually some negative
feelings, netted against the positives of getting my message out properly.
Maybe that's one reason Twitter is so popular among some, you don't really
need to drop followers, you just tweet.

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rmckayfleming
Which gave me the idea: what would the response be if facebook culled your
friends if you haven't interacted with them (by commenting or liking their
posts, or messaging them)? They wouldn't need to announce the change. You just
wouldn't see those people anymore. As is, I have friends whom I never see in
my feed.

~~~
pc86
IIRC that's already something Facebook does with regard to the feed (as you
mentioned). Say you get a friend request from someone you went to HS with, but
outside of accepting the request you never interact with them on FB. They
could post every day but you'd likely never see it.

I would imagine that the strength of the intersection of their graph with
yours would play a role in this as well. Can anyone who works at FB comment on
this? I'd imagine this is one of the back-end engineering problems the
developers there would enjoy working on.

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icebraining
I don't use these services, so I'm probably wrong, but don't lists and circles
solve this problem? While "friending" may be binary, you can adjust the
connection to the other person/profile by moving them from e.g. "close
friends" to "acquaintances" and therefore give them less or more access to
your profile.

~~~
citricsquid
I think the issue Kevin has isn't their access to his profile, but his
exposure to their content. When you're in high school you care about what your
high school friends have to say, but 5 years later you don't care about what
most of them have to say any more, but manually removing them is inconvenient
and not caring what they say is not directly tied to being "friends" or not.

I think the solution he's looking for is something that analyses your
interactions with a specific friend and the common interests and hides /
reduces exposure to their content over time. Although I was under the
impression Facebook already did something similar to this.

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megrimlock
If you find this observation interesting you will definitely enjoy Maciej's
analysis, "The Social Graph Is Neither":

<http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/>

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lowglow
I wonder if some part of the answer isn't trimming friends, but instead trying
to reconnect you with the people you shared moments with at some point in your
life. Perhaps this is just fleeting nostalgia speaking.

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dm8
Answer: Twitter & asymmetric friending/following model.

