The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends | Hacker News Reader

The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends

minimaxir.com

105 pointsminimaxir60 comments

I refer to Facebook's "People You May Know" feature as "People I Hate." For some of them, Facebook is quite right--I do know them. And I don't want to be friends.

I laughed at this comment. For me, it's also "people I once knew, but now, it would be weird to friend them"

For me it's "people who I have no idea who they are but they might have looked at my profile once by accident or something".

Facebook suggests I be friends with my high school chemistry teacher. No thanks.

Nice try, Pinkman. You are not fooling anyone.

People You May Know for me is 'Friends of couples you have both of on Facebook'.

e.g. my Romanian coworker and her husband have a lot of friends back in Romania, and apparently an assload of them are on Facebook because Facebook is constantly suggesting them to me.

Likewise, someone's brother or ex or girlfriend or whoever friends me and suddenly Facebook has a huge wealth of people to draw from, and yet it can't figure out that I don't know a 14-year-old girl who lives in Arizona who is only friends with one other person I know.

Facebook's friends-of-friends hack is meant for younger groups of people who have large groups of acquaintances outside of their smaller group of friends - think high schoolers or college kids, where you might actually know that person your friend knows, but you don't have them on FB yet.

In comparison, once people hit 25-30 and their friends are scattered across the country (and they start friending coworkers, etc.) the whole system becomes noise over signal, and it all falls apart.

Not sure that a business based on taking a photo of something and asking people "what is this?" is destined for success. Isn't that something that Google Now/Siri will probably automatically answer in the near future?

"It's a left-handed lug nut for a 1975 Vespa scooter. Click here to buy it now on Ebay!"

"It's a powdered doughnut, and judging from your location, you're at Acme Doughnuts on Main St. They have a 2-for-1 special after 5pm every day!"

"It's your friend Dave, shot through a red filter and wearing a hockey goalie's mask. He has an Android phone in his pocket, so I was able to check my geolocation records to identify him. Good one! You almost got me!"

Although farfetched, the idea of this gives me tingles.

"That's your girlfriend Ally, wearing a ghost costume. You almost got it past me, but the guy across the street watched her put on her costume with his Google Glasses and a pair of binoculars. Buy binoculars at Amazon, click here. Buy window curtains at Walmart, click here."

"To schedule an appointment with a dermatologist about her potentially pre-cancerous mole, click here."

These services require data-entry on the part of their users in order to seed these identification engines. I see this data-entry as a hidden value of the user, and part of why network effects are so valued by VCs/the market.

Doesn't Google have a sort of "index" and "search engine" of billions of photos with captions, link headings, title text, alternate text, and so on?

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=lug+nut

You're telling me it only works one way, from text to images, and doesn't work the other way? But Google already lets you upload an image to search...

http://www.google.com/imghp

In any case, Google can simply say "I think it's a lug nut. Do you agree Y/N?" And in effect, play 20 questions with its entire userbase. In very short order it would be capable of identifying anything.

The lug nut question is an important verification step and indeed data-entry on the part of the user.

The article kindly submitted here shows some interesting examples of assumptions not working right in social network algorithms. Certainly I prefer a narrower rather than a broader sampling in my Facebook homepage feed of posts that have reached the home page of one or another of my more than 700 (!) Facebook friends.

But I do like the "friends of friends" reach for one kind of purpose. By default, posts I post to my own wall are set for "friends only," and I have curated (trimmed) my friends list a few times to make sure it only reaches actual friends. (I am older than most Hacker News participants, and have lived in more than one place, and perhaps that's why 700 friends, not all of whom are active on Facebook, doesn't seem completely excessive.) When I see a new notice, often here on Hacker News, about a security breach in some commonly used online service or software product, I will often share the link about that with "friends of friends," precisely so that the personal information of my direct friends will be at less risk of leaking out through lax security practices on the part of their other friends. I like to keep my extended circle up-to-date on sound online privacy practices, so that my inner circle can surf and discuss with less hassle from spammers and other criminals.

> I am older than most Hacker News participants, and have lived in more than one place, and perhaps that's why 700 friends, not all of whom are active on Facebook, doesn't seem completely excessive.

People younger than me routinely have hundreds or thousands of facebook friends (I have 28, and could easily curate it down). To me it's an introversion / extraversion phenomenon, not an age or mobility one.

Your comment raises the interesting question of what the distribution of number of Facebook friends is among REAL users of Facebook counting other REAL users as friends, and how the distribution changes for various user characteristics. I have not seen good data on that.

You're more likely to have a conversation with a friend of your friend. It's generally much less threatening than talking to a complete stranger. This is how cocktail parties work, people are connected mutually through a friend.

I'd venture to say that most relationships are facilitated through a mutual friend.

When I tell people I go to the bar by myself to see what kind of people I end up talking to, many of my peers are shocked I would do such a thing.

"A friend of a friend" is enough for me to take someone's call if they're asking for a personal or professional favor. Lord knows I've been on the receiving end of enough of those gifts.

The thing I'm noticing lately is most of my LinkedIn invites nowadays are from people that I have never heard of, but have as mutual friends. It's almost as if that space has gotten big enough to let more folks in. Once you have 500+ friends, what's 501+? Though the impact of being so open is sharing less with your friends.

For some reason, denying a FB friend request feels normal, but denying a LinkedIn request makes me feel like a jerk.

I just ignore the ones I don't know. Then I can pretend like I didn't see the request

I met my wife at a friend's birthday party, so I'll vouch for that. But there's a difference between <pool of strangers whom I might like to meet> and <pool of strangers I want to life updates from>. I'd venture that for most people most of the time, we just don't care much about the latter[1], which is I think the OP's point.

[1] One time when we may care very much is when we're actively looking for a relationship. I've found that my interest in social networks is highly correlated with those times...

I'd say that is true if you're truly talking about "friends," but since "friends" on most social sites actually means an acquaintance, it's much less interesting.

For me Foursquare is a good measure if someone is a friend or not. Too bad most of my friends aren't on it.

Wasn't Path's idea to be a network only used with friends? again, too bad none of my friends are on it.

I'd actually venture to say that Facebook's 'friends of friends' algorithm isn't all that bad. It seems to be loosely based on the idea of triadic closure (except there is only a single kind of tie). If 'A' is friends with 'B' (you) and friends with 'C' (them), it is often natural for a friendship to form between 'B' and 'C' due to shared interest in 'A'. Obviously this property is a bit extreme and over-simplified to hold in large networks, but it is a decent heuristic. I think if Facebook included filtering by location and other strong features then their algorithm would be much better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triadic_closure

It seems to me the problem is that his 'friends' aren't really friends at all. He lists 'Robert Scoble' as a friend? He's a news source... he's going to have thousands of 'friends' that aren't really his friends.

The author is aware of this and makes this point multiple times in the article. "Friends" in "Friends of Friends" is capitalized deliberately.

That is the author's point as I read it. Once again Facebook's limited notion of social relationships creates a poor (and sometimes creepy) user experience. The Facebook model works great at college, kinda just after, and then not so much.

> Facebook's limited notion of social relationships creates a poor (and sometimes creepy) user experience

That's the thing I kind of wonder about every time there's a discussion related to Facebook here - I personally can't see neither the "limited notion of social relationships" nor a "poor/creepy user experience". I'm curious where that difference of perception comes from.

> Facebook model works great at college, kinda just after, and then not so much.

I had an exactly opposite experience. While in college, I didn't need to use Facebook much, because I'd see my friends pretty much everyday on/between/after lectures. But now, as I my day bouncing between work, familiy and a local Hackerspace, I find myself having 90% of my social life channeled through Facebook - there's simply no easier way to talk and share information with people you want to stay in touch with, living in different cities, with different work schedules and family responsibilites.

The way I was using it is that I have many different social interactions, from people whom I've grown up with and known all my life, to people who happen to ride the same train I do when they commute and prefer the same car. There are a lot of differences between how I might interact with the former and the latter, and what I might share with them.

At one level they are both 'friends' (as defined to be 'not unknown', 'not threat') but my buddy from Junior High is a 'lifetime friend' and the person on the train is 'a friendly person who rides the same train I do'.

In today's connected world, both of them might want to be 'friends' on facebook. In my actual life they are 'different' kinds of friends. And of course that friendship changes over time, I may develop a deeper relationship with the person who rides the train, I may drift apart from my childhood friend, but none of the subtleties are expressible in the vocabulary of 'friendness' on Facebook.

I've chosen to link with social friends on Facebook and people with whom I've worked professionally on LinkedIn, but I don't generally 'LinkIn' with friends who I'm not going to interact with in a professional context, nor 'friend' on Facebook people for whom I would not feel comfortable inviting over to share a beer by the fire pit and discuss comparative theology.

> At one level they are both 'friends' (as defined to be 'not unknown', 'not threat') but my buddy from Junior High is a 'lifetime friend' and the person on the train is 'a friendly person who rides the same train I do'.

The latter are "acquaintances." I don't think they're "friends" at any level. A social network that understood what acquaintances were would be pretty great.

> At one level they are both 'friends' (as defined to be 'not unknown', 'not threat')

I only treat "Facebook friendship" as this type of connection. The difference between a "lifetime friend" and "a friendly person from the same train" is defined by the set of experiences you had together, not by the value of a 32-bit integer. Note, that neither the "real life", nor Facebook platform provides this kind of explicit "friendship value". I choose to use both platforms in the same way - let the "friendship level" be defined by what we talk about, what we do together and what we feel to each other.

I personally can't see neither the "limited notion of social relationships"

So you only have one binary relationship with everyone(friend\not friend)?

In the context of friends of friends I can see several different categories: current friends(I might be interested in who their current friends are. I might run into their current friends while hanging out with them. I am probably not interested in their old friends who live 500 miles away.), old friends(I will probably never interact with their current friends because they live 500+ miles away. I maybe interested in their old friends because it might help me reconnect with a mutual old friend.), family(I don't want to see their current or old friends since I don't have anything in common with most of my family.)

> So you only have one binary relationship with everyone(friend\not friend)?

Basically yes, but let's place the binarization threshold on whether or not I recognize someone and care enough to have a conversation with that person in the future.

Neither Facebook, nor real life support an explicit "scale" of friendship. You don't define someone as 90% - BFF or 63% - just friend, etc. Relationships are defined by shared experiences and mutual feelings, and those are supported by the Facebook platform in the same way as they are supported by the direct face-to-face communication platform.

In other words, Facebook stores connections explicitly (calling them "friends" might be what confuses people), but is otherwise as much of a sandbox as the real life. You can do whatever you want, talk with whomever about whatever you care - that is what creates friendship.

Facebook allows people to follow others (one-way association) without being a confirmed friend (two-way).

I agree with his basic point that friends-of-friends aren't necessarily friends--although you may or may not be interested in something they have to say in the same vein as attending a party. To your broader point, a lot probably depends on how you use Facebook. For me, it is almost exclusively people I've at least met multiple times and real life at a minimum. And, in most cases, people I get together with when I'm in their town and vice versa. Others use Facebook more broadly which makes filtering more difficult given symmetrical following.

I wish you could designate enemies on Facebook, so that they could suggest the enemy of your enemy as your friend.

Baby steps. First we need a 'dislike' option.

Does anyone remember Friendster and MySpace? (stupid question, I know)

But before Facebook opened itself to non-edu TLD email addresses (read: enrolled college students only), these were the only two major ground-breakers in terms of social media (or what I prefer to refer to as public AOL Buddy Lists).

There was a major difference between Friendster and MySpace though, and it's a big one that was hugely ignored:

  Friendster actually provided real social network graphs,
  that showed you your own Kevin Bacon relationship with every user 
  page you viewed.

  MySpace blindly declared that "EVERYONE" was in your network,
  because YAY! WE ALL USE MYSPACE, SO WE'RE ALL FRIENDS IN ONE BIG
  NETWORK: MYSPACE! SQUIDDLEY DOO! (especially wrt our big 
  buddy: "Tom")

Of course everyone flocked to MySpace because they could customize their CSS to look extra cool, and/or inject JavaScript and Flash objects that sniffed out IP addresses, and watch lurkers.

Meanwhile, technically competant scrapers, could still build out the actual Kevin Bacon degrees of separation for MySpace by scraping the public pages and re-compiling and aggregating the data themselves, but still... friendster gave it to everyone, and understood the significance of degrees of separation between people, but no one seemed to care.

It has to do with international expansion. If you google for family trust vs general trust or similar you'll just get clouds of financial advertisements for financial/legal trusts.

Some societies are familial trust oriented, some general trust/rule of law. USA is pretty high in general trust so something designed to appeal to familial trust cultures is going to look weird. We pick our tax accountant based on location or skill or advertisement, in a familial trust oriented culture you pick an accountant because they are a (possibly very distant) cousin or maybe friend of friend.

Likewise the familial trust oriented cultures probably think the american concept of selecting a business by mere geolocation to be totally bizarre unless its also got a genealogical overlay mode or something.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the author or his 'friends' are misusing Facebook - they can use it however they please. But people with massive numbers of friends are going to break whatever expectation there was of nearby members of the network being meaningful.

For those of us less entwined with social networks, our 'friends' are actually our friends, and family, colleagues, neighbours and people we know through shared interests. The friends of our friends will be likewise, with a perfectly good chance we will have things in common with them, together with a few distant links that could provide interesting or unexpected connections. It can be a useful network.

Of course, Facebook has been complicit in every development that has made it more general and less a reflection of our real social networks - as it has tried to acquire every person as a user. There is a conflict between a social network that tries to be a more convenient form of your real-life social networks, and a 'social network' that is trying to be the whole Internet.

In a Facebook context, friends of my friends often aren't even really friends of my friends, let alone me.

It is very common for sorta-random people to be marked as "friends" because one of them clicked "Yes I know this person" when the creepy suggestion algorithm made a tenuous link based on some shared history and the other person either didn't have the heart to deny the request or clicked confirm just to pad their own friend number or whatever else.

I still haven't even tried jelly, not because of the OP's concerns, exactly, but primarily because if I want to know the answer to a question, I have the internet already with its many sources of forum/stackexchange/whatever expertise on various topics. I'd much rather ask a question in one of those contexts and get an answer later that is well reasoned and knowledgeable than get a bunch of people guessing, joking and/or throwing in random nonsense opinions simply because of social pressure to provide some sort of quick answer.

It doesn't matter that "friends of my friends are not my friends" for Jelly. Jelly isn't a social network, no matter how it is being marketed. It is much closer to Quora than it is to Facebook. Whether there is a market for what it actually is, is an entirely different question. The reason for going 2 degrees is simply so it isn't a ghost town at launch. The questions being asked aren't things that it matters if the person is your friend or not.

Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, it could be simply everyone on Jelly as opposed to just my twitter followers and it would only make it better by extending the people that see the question I want answered. I suppose I could just follow obama or beiber or something on twitter to get effectively the same reach.

It depends on the context.

I don't want to wish friends of friends happy birthday.

But, friends of friends is the absolute ideal way to meet someone to date or to find a job.

but ironically facebook is bad for both of these scenarios.

It depends a lot on (a) whether friendship is symmetric (Facebook) or asymmetric (Twitter or Facebook subscriptions); (b) whether friendship is IRL (more often the case with Facebook) or knowledge-based (Twitter).

The best scenario is an asymmetric network where I follow X and X follows Y. There's a good chance I'm interested in Y. The worst scenario is an asymmetric network where the opposite is true. X follows me and Y follows X. Good chance Y isn't even human.

So when I'm shown a Twitter FoaF, there's a 2x2 matrix of possibilities. Jelly seems to use at least 3 of them, since one label says "From X, follower of Y" while another says "From X, followed by Y" and another says "From X, friend of Y". I'd guess their stats will shown "From X, followed by Y" to be the most useful.

Also networks based on social/URL/family connections are probably less likely to be useful when it comes to FoaFs. Just too much variation and a lot of content being shared like random photos is only intended for immediate connections.

The author has a fair point, but I was left hanging waiting for a "so, what?" at the end. I was hoping there would be something more constructive to this than just a complaint.

What should be done about it? What are people really looking for? How can a network with the goal of connecting more people deal with the inevitable noise? How soon should they worry about that?

Was Facebook perfect 4 years ago, or is there a gap still left to be filled? How can a social network really figure out who is most relevant to you and link you to them?

I think these are great questions. I would love it for authors who know/care about this topic to look at Facebook, Twitter, and Jelly with solution glasses instead of just problem glasses.

I'd say it was better 4 years ago. Maybe because they weren't worried about making money yet. Now with all the "optimizations" to the feed, it's less relevant than ever. Or maybe people just stopped posting interesting things on Facebook. Either way I don't see it anymore.

Sure - in this day and age of the non-religious: f-o-a-f != f

But actually, in the set of people who are 'devout', this fact isn't so true. The religious are connected in this way.

And the thing is .. this foaf thingy .. Its not actually supposed to be a useable metric for you - its a metric for people who want to get to know you without .. getting to know you. If I know all your friends, and all your friends'-friends', then I can assume a few things about you that might be very true.

If I'm a marketer, then great that there are services that get people to self-organize in this way, so that they can be sold things, better.

Hell, a connection on Facebook is hardly a friend in the first place. Are people I went to high school with and reconnected briefly with my friends? Not by my definition.

The only way I use "Friends of Friends" on facebook is for setting a post's audience so the grandmothers can share the grandkid photos I post with their circles of friends. Pity I can't set this from the Android app (Facebook, are you listening??).

Anyways, like the author I'm not much interested in what my Facebook friend's friends are doing.

You remind me of a frustration I have with. Urrent facebook UI.

I only ever share posts either publicly or to a named small group. ("Photos of Bob").

It's gently frustrating that the list for sharing is populated with auto-generated groups that I have never, and will never share things with, and that getting to "photos of bob" takes extra clicks.

No one has mentioned this one yet but maybe they (FB) have found out that doing this, will increase the growth of number of friends? Because from time to time someone (possibly) will be like "oh wait I know him!". And more friends -> more updates and notifications -> checking FB more often -> more time to click the ads.

Yea, "friends of friends" is a really weird concept when it comes to people you know from the internet. It creates connections between disjoint communities. Those communities are disjoint for good reasons. They don't have anything in common.

> disjoint communities

Really? Think about it: when you befriend a new person, was that person usually a complete stranger to you before, or maybe rather a friend of a friend?

The important bit is "people you know from the internet".

For example, I really like survival horror and horror-themed action games. That's what connects me with one particular woman who shares these interests. However, she's also into My Little Pony and other furry stuff. I don't care about those things or people from those circles.

All those communities are very narrow in focus. They only share one particular interest.

In a not so distant future you will see Facebook recommending friends based on shared data points. The weird thing is that due to to their massive backlog on people their likes, website visits et cetera, they might actually do proper recommendations.

It's simply a way to populate your feed with more content. They seem to think/know that you will use the service more if there is more content.

I too dislike how much extended network is being utilized these days.

There is so much more interesting content on so many other sites, that I really don't miss my deleted (a year ago)Facebook account.

The friends of my friends are not my friends. If they were my friends, they would already be my friends...

where's the "enemies of my enemy" social network? that would actually be useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com