

Did social games kill Facebook’s social graph? - colinsidoti
http://colinsidoti.com/2011/01/did-social-games-kill-facebooks-social-graph/

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gyardley
Doubtful.

Facebook has mechanisms for defining both familial and romantic relationships,
as well as usage data in the form of profile visits and wall comments and
likes.

It might be a little more work, but I'm sure they can take a large friend list
and still figure out who's family, who's a close mutual friend, who's
disproportionately interested in who, and who's a fake friend just there for
the purposes of social gaming.

Even better, since this true social graph depends largely on usage data, it's
available to Facebook but not to scrapers.

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motters
Is it just me that finds this creepy?

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DLWormwood
Nope. I avoided FB for a long time because of this, before family and career
roped me into signing up for dummy accounts about a month ago.

~~~
exit
what's a dummy account? pseudonym? same name / two accounts?

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derefr
I would imagine that it's an account that has nothing interesting happening on
it, but is just there so people can point to it. (Referencing the term
"dummied out" — <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut>)

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elvirs
News Feed is the reason I open facebook so many times a day. Games, apps and
pages (some of them) kill the value of content in the news feed with stuff
that I have no interst in. for some reason there is no option to hide all
posts from all games, apps, etc. I hide horoscope apps in my news feed but
there are so many of them thats it is impossible to mute all of them. so
basically I do think games and apps killed Facebook's social graph, though if
I was Facebook, I would not care at this point either as the valuation is
going through the roof and userbase grows so fast.

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jwatzman
One thing I noticed is that a lot of the app spam came from one of a few apps
(e.g. Farmville) or one of a few people (e.g. my aunt who doesn't know any
better). Blocking those app-heavy _people_ as well as a few more widespread
apps removed the vast majority of the crap from my feed.

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sanj
This article had me until:

 _Asking the game makers to remove features that help the games go viral
doesn’t seem to benefit anyone financially._

Sure it does. It benefits Facebook.

If the best way to get growth (ie, viral) goes away, most companies will fall
back on the second best way to get growth: ads.

Guess who controls the most effective ad network on Facebook? Facebook.

Every time a viral channel is removed, a developer ends up buying the installs
instead. It ain't pretty, or cheap, but you have to find them somewhere.

~~~
colinsidoti
That's true, and something I hadn't considered completely. I think you also
need to consider that removing these viral channels makes the game less fun,
and potentially decreases the amount of credits people will spend on the game.
Also, I imagine Zynga would be tempted to jump ship (as they've threatened
before) if Facebook starts to govern features they can include at such a
ridiculous level.

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hallmark
It is actually very easy to create a Friend List just for 'Game Friends.'

When you are adding a fake game friend, you can immediately add them to this
list. Facebook makes this step easy.*

And to my surprise, it is also somewhat straightforward to exclude this list
from your various privacy setting items. I assumed I would have to explicitly
include - piece by piece - sets of friends with whom I do want to share data,
but Facebook provides functionality to exclude a friend list. Bingo.

Now if I could only have a way to exclude a friend list from contributing to
my News Feed.

* Furthermore, by assigning a fake friend to an appropriate list in the same step that you send a friend request, you can avoid the security gap within which a fake friend would have access to your private data before you were able to manually add them to such a list.

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joe_the_user
The way I'd see it, Social Games just accelerate the "fake friend" problem.
The problem itself seems structural.

I have only so many real world, flesh and blood friends.

Once I've added all of my real who are willing to be on Facebook, what do I
do?

The fun of Facebook isn't getting the same thing from the same people but
getting more new stuff. So I'm tempted to add distant relations, random
acquaintances and so-forth. As the trend continues in general, the addition of
distant acquaintances become more standard, more socially accepted.

It is a real conundrum for any social networking site wishes to directly
reflect real world identities.

~~~
true_religion
"Friend" is a very generous term for facebook friends. Many people merely use
facebook friend status to keep track of their old schoolmates, acquaintances,
work buddies, and here's the ringer---people they have only _heard_ about.

The last category is the 'hidden' value of Facebook in my opinion. It is the
set of people that you are connected through via gossip. It's your friends
boyfriend that you've never met; it's "that guy who did something funny" and
you were told about. In the past, you'd have to actively gossip to find out
more information about these people, but now you just facebook friend them and
take in the info dump.

Also, having distant relations and old friends on facebook means that if they
are ever in town,and announce it on their facebook then you can meet up. Or if
you missed them, then you can say "Hey cousin, you came into town and didn't
say hi!" which might be the spark to reconnect.

~~~
colinsidoti
"but now you just facebook friend them and take in the info dump"

True, but does this guy I'm sending a friend request to actually want me to
see his profile? It seems that Facebook wants me to send him a friend request,
and Facebook wants the guy to accept it, but the guy doesn't have much
motivation to actually accept.

Facebook's quest for openness is interesting and I think they can do quite a
bit with it, but I also think it has left users with a desire for deeper
social interaction. I can make my status "girls suck," but I'll never make it
"my girlfriend cheated on me and wants me to take her back and I love her but
I feel like it's going to be a slippery slope"

I've always thought this is something Facebook would simply fix on their own.
But now, as I consider the potential financial impact on the company, I think
it might be worth contesting with a new product.

~~~
true_religion
> I can make my status "girls suck," but I'll never make it "my girlfriend
> cheated on me and wants me to take her back and I love her but I feel like
> it's going to be a slippery slope"

I agree, Facebook has lost its personal touch (if it ever had that), and has
become another form of public.

