Did social games kill Facebook’s social graph? | Hacker News Reader

Did social games kill Facebook’s social graph?

colinsidoti.com

36 pointscolinsidoti18 comments

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.

Is it just me that finds this creepy?

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.

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

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)

Nope, but realize: they have exactly whatever you (and people who talk about you) have given it. I'm constantly amazed that people are surprised to discover that "Facebook knows all these things about me!"

I'm not sure you'd necessarily get the answer you think you'd get, or the quality you're expecting when you think about it. Do you continuously visit all your actual friends walls, or just wait for the feed to stream in, with Facebook unable to tell whether your eyes jump over it or actually read it? Are there "game" friends that you pay more attention to than, say, your uncle?

Plus a lot of the immediate answers you might think of if you don't know the shape of the social graph won't work. You can't just look for "distant" friends (i.e., break the friend link and measure the new friending distance), because even before Facebook it was "well known" that six links can get you anywhere in the world; Facebook must be large enough by now that they are subject to the same principle.

I would not leap to the conclusion that they actually can tell. The data is noisy and ambiguous, the graph's shape is amorphous and relatively homogeneous (everybody's pretty much the same basic distance from everybody else, Distance(RandomPerson1, RandomPerson2) will have surprisingly small variance), it's a hard problem. Possible not solvable even in theory, even if you could precisely nail down what exactly it is you were looking for.

Facebook has mechanisms for defining both familial and romantic relationships

Facebook has a mechanism for defining a romantic relationship.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

> 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.

Sure, that's the value of Facebook for users.

But the less the graph actually reflects a person's true identity, the less Facebook is a person's single home on the Internet. I mean, I think it's to a person's detriment to make Facebook their single home BUT Facebook's valuation reflects the assumption that it will remain most people's unique home on the Internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com