

Facebook Revamps Friend Lists - tilt
http://mashable.com/2011/09/13/facebook-revamps-friend-lists-pics/

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stellar678
I always wondered why they didn't just apply a clustering algorithm on your
friends to auto-generate friend lists.

If you ever ran one of those "friend wheel" apps, it was easy to see that data
about interconnections provides an almost-perfect way to group connections
from different facets or stages of your life.

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liuliu
IMHO, cluster algorithm is not perfect, and the penalty for false positive is
simply too high. In that sense, a manually devised algorithm would more likely
give you a controllable result. I believe that is the same logic why Google
was resistant to machine learning algorithms on ranking for the first few
years.

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stellar678
Sort the list by confidence when displaying it to the user, and make it easy
to remove members - the potential false positives are most likely to show up
with the least confidence.

After that, the incidence of false positives would be very very small.

Plus, what really is the penalty of false positives? FB already surprises
people (at times in a bad way) by sharing things in ways they don't expect it
to.

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littlegiantcap
The thing that stuck out to me is their move to try and group friends and what
they're doing based on location. They already have the ability to add your
location on the status updates, and this kind of takes it to another level. Is
it just me or are they moving to try and directly compete withe companies like
foursquare and other companies like that?

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tomlin
Great and all, but I really just wish FB would stop assuming I need the
side/chat bar thing. It seems like every 10th visit or so I have to "go
offline" and close that damn bar.

I really, really feel that it's being pushed on users for no other reason but
to force us to realize that, they too, have a chat feature like Google+.

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eitally
It's only going to take a few instances of the algorithm guessing wrong or
users not paying attention and having something bad happen IRL before this
bites them. At least with Plus it's still a manual association into Circles,
which puts the full onus on the user to do it carefully.

~~~
nbm
The only lists that are automatically maintained are those for your
schoolmates, your work colleagues, where you live, and your family.

The family one is the one where the most sensitive information might be
shared, and that requires a confirmation for one of your friends to claim to
be in your family. (Or, you can manually add that friend as a member of your
Family list, which won't add you as a member of their Family list.)

~~~
eitally
That makes more sense but I do question the colleagues list, since a lot of
people carefully sort which coworkers they fraternize with and prefer multiple
lists, especially at large companies.

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spdy
I hope i got this right. Its possible to create a list and they will
automatically put friends inside this and suggest other people who could match
too?

But they do not force this upon me or change existing lists.

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nbm
There are two types of lists based on how they are managed - smart lists, and
standard lists.

Smart lists are built based on information you provide - the places you
worked, where you went to school, where you live, and your family. These get
maintained automatically - when you become friends with someone who lives near
you or who went to the same school, they will be added to those smart lists.
Same thing if one of your existing friends adds new information such as what
school they went to, or if your friend moves to a new location. You can also
manually remove and add people to these smart lists.

Standard lists (ie, the type you have right now) are entirely managed by you.

When managing either type of list, you will get suggestions for who to add to
the list.

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awj
> While these changes feel like an answer to the rise of Google+, the search
> giant’s social network, Ross says that’s not the case. “We’ve been iterating
> on this in the last four years,” he said.

Then this is going to be a revolutionary feature, because four years is a damn
lot of time to spend of friends list management.

Just for once I'd love to see a company say "yeah, our competitor released
something that _really_ made us get off our asses." It would be something
refreshingly close to honesty, and at least in this case the turnaround time
on the response isn't really embarrassing.

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haydenevans
Facebook has made some weird UI design choices lately to say the least.

