My thoughts on article about Facebook

A co-worker recently forwarded me the article "It's hard to make close friends on Facebook, study says" (http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/09/10/science-websites.html).

I thought it was an interesting read, and it got me thinking a bit...

The reason this co-worker sent me the article in the first place is because I recently joined facebook and I've been suggesting to him that he should also join facebook, but he hasn't wanted to. I mentioned to him that even so and so is on facebook.

He thought I should look at this article.

This article makes a few points, among them:

• it mentions studies that have found that social networks like facebook don't typically lead to people having more intimate friendships
• it mentions that some people are misusing facebook (i.e. by just being "friend collectors")

I generally agree with these points... but even given these things I'm still planning on using facebook for a couple of reasons:

• Facebook lets you interact with people in a neat way - (I'm pretty sure) you can send a message to anyone on facebook. To me, what's neat about it is that unlike a traditional email client, to send a message, you click on someone's picture, and then start typing a message. You don't have to think about whether you are going to send them a message to an email account they check regularly or not, you can just trust that they will eventually get your message
• if it's not already available, features could be added to facebook that lets you record things like how important to you your relationship is with a particular person, how strong you think the relationship is, and so on
• Facebook enables interesting feedback loops to be created between yourself and other people in many ways... someone updates their status (a la twitter), maybe you wish them well or send them a note... you post that you are interested in so and so, and someone may ask you for help based on that... You may be invited to interesting events, or become aware of events around you that you weren't aware of... You can easily find people with the same birthday as you.. There are many possibilities...

With respect to facebook enabling you to essentially only be a friend collector, that is a person's choice, and will be perceived differently by different people (in both positive and negative ways). To me a friend collector might be motivated to build up a lot of weak ties with a lot of different people, or may simply be trying to reach some goal (being the person with the most friends on the network for instance).

If you think about it, people depend on weak ties all the time in different ways:

• in a way, sports figures, movie stars and singers make money by fans supporting them
• job seekers and salespeople are always looking for interesting leads which are easier to get from people who are weak ties to them
• we all depend on people with different talents all the time - to help you eat, travel, do your job etc.

I will have to search around but there were a few magic numbers mentioned in this article that caught my eye - If I remember correctly, both of these numbers were discussed in other contexts as well in Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point"

• 5 - in this article, it was cited as the typical number of core friends a person has - is it a coincidence that this is the number of things a person can remember using their short term memory?
• 150 - in this article it was cited as the average number of friends a person has in their social networking profile - in Gladwell's book, I believe it was the optimum size for the number of people that should work in a division in a company (and I believe also the number of people that should work together in one building)

Are these coincidences? Are conclusions being drawn from similar facts? That's something worth looking into and thinking about.

To me, I like that I can quickly message anyone in Facebook (whether they are in my friends list or not). Also, it's neat that I can use it as a central places to keep in touch with people - hopefully improving the quality of all my relationships.