

Facebook in a crowd - amrithk
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26lives-t.html?ref=technology

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tdonia
+1 savrajsingh

what's the difference between a social network and a social utility? and
what's the difference between a social network and a community? in many ways,
they're different words for the same things - but there are gradations that
i've noticed:

i'll start with what i know - communities form from commonalities, through the
shared assumptions & interests that connect people. HN works because we all
feel that there are like-minded people here that will appreciate our ideas on
hacking (or take an interest in arguing with them).

social networking is a bit more ambiguous as it's a newer term, but i'll
venture that most people use it to mean a collection of connectible
communities. social networks are a community of communities, making a more
basic assumption/interest commonality that allows for a much wider/diffuse
audience. myspace connects those that feel it provides a creative conduit for
representing their personality, whatever that personality cares about.

social utility is even newer & is the carrot facebook is dangling for its
investors. a social utility, by my understanding, is a meta-social-network.
that is, almost purely a boring infrastructure play that could be successful
even if it becomes invisible. it's a set of components/tools, sort of like
ning, that allow people to create their own social networks - and by
extension, communities - on the fly. that said, they aren't invisible yet -
facebook.com is still what people know as facebook.

so how does this connect back to the parent? savrajsingh made an excellent
point that the difference between a HN meetup and Hal's facebook meetup was
shared interests/assumptions. an HN meetup operates at a community level,
where the participants feel confident that if they attend, they will have
something to agree or disagree with. a facebook meetup (and granted, i can
only take this so far as i did not see Hal's original event invite) doesn't
necessarily imply that commonality, rather, they leave it up to the event
organizer because they intend to support any type of event. this approach
lacks guidelines/constraints for people in Hal's position - someone who wants
to make is 700+ friend list more meaningful. from the article, i can only
guess that his invite said "i'm bored & in toronto - we know each other
somehow, so let's play" - which is a rather generic call to action.

my speculation is that he did not offer a lot of his personality in the
invite, rather, assuming people would show up & they'd figure out stuff to
talk about. which is fine when you're reaching out to friends who trust you to
be interesting, but he wasn't. that said, there were (hopefully) plenty of
commonalities that could be leveraged within his friendset and were he to pick
one shared by enough people also bored, he'd have much more luck the next
time. given that he was in toronto doing this around election time, it seems
inviting people out to talk about politics (sports, tv, books, ad infinum)
would be one way to create a commonality with his stranger-friends. the key is
finding something to fall back on so when the small talk runs out, the
conversation doesn't languish in disconnected/unfamiliar silence.

^that last bit is something important to keep in mind when building a product
that you're trying to market, too, if you intend for people to talk/form a
community around it. give them a seed to respond to.

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waleedka
When I see someone with 700 Facebook friends or more, my first thought is that
they're most probably friend collectors. They either add every profile they
come across, or they accept every invite they get (usually from other friend
collector). For these people, the Facebook experience probably sucks because
there is very little personality to it. And, obviously, he shouldn't have
expected people to show up to meet someone they don't even know and have
nothing in common with.

~~~
brandnewlow
I have nearly 900 friends. I wouldn't call myself a friend collector though.
The last 300 of these or so have all been initiated by the other party as I've
moved and connected with different circles. This does prompt an interesting
thought exercise...

My facebook timeline:

-May 2004 College Friending (200 friends): I finish senior thesis. Am bored. Hear about facebook hitting Princeton. I check it out. It's cute. I add my college friends. Zuck friends me as an early adopter. This probably gets me to 200 friends: the 40 or so people I considered friends, the 100 or so people I'd spent time with and then another 60 were people I knew through students groups, church or student government stuff. I believe at this point I had a detailed profile, was sharing my dorm room phone number and e-mail address.

-September 2004-August 2006 (200 friends): I worked as a summer camp counselor for three summers during time off from my first job, as a college admissions officer at Princeton. Facebook opened to HS students so my campers and fellow counselors wanted to be friends. It was at this time that I stopped sharing so much personal info, having begun to see FB as my personal address book, rather than an intimate conversation. I probably added another 200 friends during this period.

-September 2006-March 2008 Grad School (200 friends): I started at Northwestern J-school and we all friended eachother up on FB as an overture to getting to know one another. Subsequent arriving groups of students also friended me. It's not a huge program and networking is everything in journalism. This was probably another 300 people, 60% of them are people I've worked with. The rest are people I've had class with or corresponded with in some capacity. Being able to get on the horn with a reporter at Time or Newsweek is just plain useful.

\- Late adopter pickup (150 friends) - Over the last two years or so, as
Facebook has become ubiquitous, people I knew in middle school and high school
have surfaced to friend me. Even a few from elementary school. During a moment
of absolute boredom, I tracked down my 6th grade crush on FB and friended her.
So FB became a bit of a link to my past. Friending these people would prompt a
short exchange of updates, followed by radio silence as we followed from afar.
It's fun to know I've got ooooold friends in places like Turkey and London.

\- March 2008 - Present, Readers, local bloggers in Chicago (150 friends): The
last phase of this has been recently as I've published an online magazine
about Chicago news and politics. Readers have friended me as have other
bloggers and writers in Chicago.

At this point, while I share about 200 photos on my profile (none sketchy in
the least) I haven't really updated it in years. It lists my professional
background and interests, and that's about it. I don't go on there a whole
lot, maybe once a week for 20 minutes or so.

That's how I have 900 friends, for what it's worth.

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amrithk
Perhaps it is true that people don't take invites on facebook seriously as
they can see the list of people. If there are too many people invited, they
might not feel obligated to respond. What if you had a dedicated invite
service and you could not observe the number of people coming (say to a dinner
or a party etc). Would you feel more obliged to respond?

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timcederman
Ouch. Unsurprising though, when you consider how hard it is to organise your
"real" friends to head out for drinks.

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nickb
Maybe calling it a "social utility" and not a "social network" is a stretch
since people use it as a social network?

Clearly, your customers almost always define your product for you no matter
how hard you try to paint it as something else.

~~~
amrithk
Thats interesting. By that token, Facebook or other social networks are in
some ways, restricted by what they can do because of the way people use the
network

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woodsier
You have to send out reminders essentially every day the preceding week, duh.

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markessien
If you want people to show up, you need to phrase it as a neutral event. If
you invited people to an art gallery or a concert where they are not forced to
sit accross from a stranger, more would show up.

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josefresco
My Facebook friends .. let me show you them, My Facebook friends.

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rokhayakebe
Enter Hacker News. I posted an open invitation to meet with Atlanta based
hackers (btw I am not a hacker) more than one year ago. Now this is when HN
traffic was probably 1/7th of what it is today and surprisingly about 15-20
responded and close to 10 showed up.

~~~
savrajsingh
When you get together for an issue (talk about hacker news, startups, etc)
people have some motive for showing up. Your real friends are the ones that
don't need a reason to hang out with you. :)

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alexandros
file under social-network-phobia

