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The Boolean Graph

kevinrose.com

68 pointsolivercameron29 comments

I find it hard to sympathize with most things Kevin Rose writes. Pardon my french but this sounds almost a little... childish? irrelevant?

He thinks it's socially awkward to unfriend some of his several thousand friends? Why did he friend them in the first place? How can he say with a straight face (I'm assuming) that apps like Path and Instagram have shown him that rebuilding his social graph every few years is a "must"? Because of fights with friends? Do adults really fight with their friends and then unfriend them on Facebook? How about just hugging it out afterwards?

These are contributions I'd expect from a mainstream celebrity, but I don't feel like this represents the hacker culture (call it whatever you want) very well.

Sorry for the off-topic. I do like the dynamic, perhaps even implicit, graph idea though.

Honestly, I thought that was the whole point of circles in Google Plus. You make a "Siberia" circle, and the friends you don't want to have anything to do with, you put in that circle, and you crank down the visibility on their posts and don't share stuff with them. The effect is the same, but without them finding out that you unfriended them.

True. At campfire labs we were working on similar asymmetric friendship groups before we got acquired. The problem is that you still have to manage those circles though. In real life, you don't have to put in work to manage your friends. You just know how they fit into the ever-changing friendscape.

What would be nice is the facility to share something with a friend, combined with software that asks if you would like to share also this with [X] circle?

Also, delay updates a bit so that people have the chance to think things like, "Oh wait, I don't want my mom to see this one..."

Yes, but in real life we don't have ways of broadcasting to this ever-changing landscape. In fact, we tolerate quite a bit of collateral damage: you tell your brother something in confidence and he goes and tells your mother.

Socially, yes, this is insufficient. But this isn't really about social reality, it's a technical solution to boredom, which means people enjoy putting work in to manage their friends. It's the whole reason they're there.

If we're talking about a choice between unfriending someone and moving them to Siberia, they're already committed to managing their graph in this case.

The relationships on Facebook appear boolean, but they are hardly treated as such by Facebook. They have many ways of determining how "close" I am with any one of my friends by looking at the number of times I interact with them, view their pictures, etc. They also let you explicitly mark how much of each friend you want to see in your news feed. Then it is only a matter of weighting their updates accordingly. So I would argue that Facebook knows about this and does the right thing (or at least tries to).

> They also let you explicitly mark how much of each friend you want to see in your news feed.

Part of the problem is the lack of a reverse of this function. That is there is no(easy) way to turn down what you share with them. This is the problem G+ circles tries to solve.

FB has a notion of close friends and you can set your default publishing setting to be that. This isn't exposed anywhere, like some close friend list

I thought Facebook was mostly just for those people who you don't interact with a bunch. People who are my friends who I see often... well, I see them. I don't need to poke them on Facebook. Where I find FB interesting/somewhat useful is in that set of people who I otherwise would not be able to track much.

Somewhat distant relatives, friends who no longer live close by, even one of my elementary school teachers... that kind of thing.

I thought Facebook was mostly just for those people who you don't interact with a bunch.

David, the use cases of Facebook vary quite a bit. I have had a lot of fun over the last few years talking in person with friends at regular meet-ups about things we each saw on Facebook pertaining to other friends of ours. I think whenever there is a group of friends who have local meet-ups frequently, but also connections with people in far-away places (which might happen for the mutual friends who are all members of some national organization, the case I have observed), then there is a chance for Facebook to ENHANCE in-person interaction with people you see regularly. As I recall, you are an American currently living overseas (a situation I have been in twice in my life), and it may be that for you the local versus distant distinction among people in your circle of friends is more salient. I think one of the geniuses of Facebook's "friend" model is that everyone constructs a different network of Facebook friends, and enjoys it in a different manner. I STILL can't figure out how Facebook will monetize, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how much Facebook has added to rather than subtracted from my in-person social relationships.

For the most part social networks give you the tools to manage friends fairly well. I know on Facebook you can change a setting to only view important updates from people. I like this option because you don't have the social awkwardness of unfriending someone. But, you don't have to constantly see what they at for lunch.

Also, I think we just get bored with things. That's human nature. We like new things. We want to be part of cool new trends and technology. So once something hits mainstream and stops being cool, we start looking elsewhere for the next cool service to try.

Having to manage an externalized representation of your relationships is what is against human nature. Feeling social pressure to check daily, weekly, or even monthly on the activities of every person you may have ever met is what is against human nature.

+1 for "*Full disclosure: I own a metric shit ton of Facebook stock, so it pains me to write this."

I have the opposite experience. I have no incentive to use new networks -- all my friends are on Facebook. Facebook is actually very good at (at least in my experience) showing me information from friends that I'm actively being friendly with. People from some event a few years ago fade out, while people I'm going to school with now are in full-swing. When I change my involvements during the summer, Facebook in turn fades them out and favors the other people I'm currently working with.

For me, Facebook does exactly what Kevin Rose desires.

I think his problem is that he, as he put it, friends people "in passing [he] hardly knows".

I can definitely see his point about new social networks - probably the biggest win Google+ has given me was the ability to start my social network fresh, with only interesting people (also, mainly nerds, so I now post geeky stuff to Google+ and stuff my family/non-technical friends would care about to Facebook).

That said, this is also a problem of his own creation - I keep a fairly lean Facebook friends list (which I'll purge of local contacts I'm not close to after I move next week), and fairly often unfriend people who I'm not close to and consistently post things that don't interest me.

I think there's a big difference between how [my generation and] I (19 y.o.) use Facebook, and how older generations do.

For me, it is 80% keeping up with my current friends and 20% older friends. I think these ratios are perhaps flipped after a certain point, perhaps the people for whom their FB graph wasn't created organically from the age of 14/15 but rather, had to go and create it posthumously.

Yes, there are people I'm friends with who I'm not friends with anymore. But, if you use Groups + Lists (which all my non-techy friends use too), this isn't really an issue.

Anyway, I just see a lot of commentary on things FB is doing wrong by people > 25/30 y.o. But, for people below that age bracket (who tend not to be commenting in the media) it has (from my observations) replaced texting/phone/skype/letters/etc.

> No one has yet created a dynamic social graph. Facebook and other social graphs represent a rolling set of relationships that are out of date the instant they are created.

One thing that could be tried, that hasn't yet been done, is for a company to try and own the "dynamic edges" of the social graph. The active borders of the social graph embody a lot of value. If a bit of software could become the killer app for networking and meeting people, it would enable another party to own those "dynamic edges". Meetup.com is well positioned to attempt this. So is Facebook. Apple and Google are as well through their mobile operating systems.

I'm surprised Kevin has forgotten about Google+ and Circles (considering he works there).

Everyme (excuse the shameless plug) would also work very well for him. Both of these products seem like a good solution for his problem.

Facebook has circles but much better anyway. People just don't like to manage their graph.

If you make me grade my relationships with people (friend/defriend/link/put in circle etc.) you are making me work. You must reward me for that. On all these social networks my reward for that exercise is actually some negative feelings, netted against the positives of getting my message out properly. Maybe that's one reason Twitter is so popular among some, you don't really need to drop followers, you just tweet.

Which gave me the idea: what would the response be if facebook culled your friends if you haven't interacted with them (by commenting or liking their posts, or messaging them)? They wouldn't need to announce the change. You just wouldn't see those people anymore. As is, I have friends whom I never see in my feed.

IIRC that's already something Facebook does with regard to the feed (as you mentioned). Say you get a friend request from someone you went to HS with, but outside of accepting the request you never interact with them on FB. They could post every day but you'd likely never see it.

I would imagine that the strength of the intersection of their graph with yours would play a role in this as well. Can anyone who works at FB comment on this? I'd imagine this is one of the back-end engineering problems the developers there would enjoy working on.

I don't use these services, so I'm probably wrong, but don't lists and circles solve this problem? While "friending" may be binary, you can adjust the connection to the other person/profile by moving them from e.g. "close friends" to "acquaintances" and therefore give them less or more access to your profile.

I think the issue Kevin has isn't their access to his profile, but his exposure to their content. When you're in high school you care about what your high school friends have to say, but 5 years later you don't care about what most of them have to say any more, but manually removing them is inconvenient and not caring what they say is not directly tied to being "friends" or not.

I think the solution he's looking for is something that analyses your interactions with a specific friend and the common interests and hides / reduces exposure to their content over time. Although I was under the impression Facebook already did something similar to this.

If you find this observation interesting you will definitely enjoy Maciej's analysis, "The Social Graph Is Neither":

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

I wonder if some part of the answer isn't trimming friends, but instead trying to reconnect you with the people you shared moments with at some point in your life. Perhaps this is just fleeting nostalgia speaking.

Answer: Twitter & asymmetric friending/following model.

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