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The Life of P

Tag: facebook

Dunbar’s Reminder

A few days ago I came across a fluff piece in which a freelance writer attempted to disprove Dunbar’s number using his facebook friends. Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships one can maintain, and lies somewhere between 100 and 230.

I have no problem with Dunbar’s number: it always sounded about right to me, though I suspected that approaching the maximum limit might devalue the quality of the much of smaller number of close friendships. A quick trawl through my 500-odd facebook “friends” narrows the current active friendships to a little under 150. Add in a few friends and family not on facebook and I fall pretty squarely in Dunbar’s expected range.

What the exercise highlighted is not some shocking revelation about how I don’t actually maintain all those facebook friendships, nor how I have this vast graveyard of ostensibly dead friendships — that list remains a valuable index of contacts through which it is much easier to get in touch with someone should it later be useful (and the ability to hide updates from individuals means regular “culls” are no longer entirely necessary). The real lesson for me was that there were a handful of people hidden in that list with whom I really did want to get in touch but, without having seen their names, the thought might never have occurred. Perhaps, rather than an act of social vanity, it is an exercise I ought to conduct more frequently in order to prevent some people falling through the cracks. After all, Dunbar might have set an upper limit, but he offers no guarantee that those social relationships will be the right ones. So I wonder: if you have more than 230 facebook friends, who might be hiding in yours?

Meanwhile, if I’m running at roughly capacity, that also means anyone who wants to join my friendship group (for reasons I cannot begin to fathom) will probably need to kill off an existing member. Friends, consider this a heads up. Don’t blame me, blame the evolutionary limitations of my neocortex.

Social Divisions

As an amateur photographer, the highest praise I can receive since I began photographing people (which really began with my first SLR) is when someone uses one of my shots as their Facebook profile picture. It is essentially an acknowledgement that it is currently their favourite image of themselves and the way they wish to be seen by others. So, with the photos from Ruth and Jonny’s wedding now up, I was incredibly flattered to find both the bride and groom using my photos. Thank you.

On the subject of social networks, I remain confused by Google’s strategy with its fledgling Facebook rival. They once again launched via the “exclusive” closed beta route that worked so well for GMail, apparently failing to realise that it fundamentally worked because its email service was still compatible with every other email service. By contrast Google Wave failed miserably under the same system because early adopters had no one with whom to communicate. Similarly a social network, unsurprisingly you might well argue, requires social interaction to thrive.

They have finally flung open the doors to the population at large. So now everyone will be streaming into this brave new utopia, right? Well, they might have if there were important differentiators to set it apart from Facebook, like per-post visibility settings and grouping features. Unfortunately, Facebook has spent the last few months replicating those very features itself.

That is not to say Facebook merely aped Google’s innovations. Its per-post settings are arguably a superior implementation as it lets you hide from certain people as well as add them, a feature I suggested to Google was necessary soon after joining the beta. Meanwhile grouping — be it in “Circles” or “Lists” — is really inspired by “Aspects” in the open source project Diaspora. Sadly the crawling pace of its development is likely to leave it hopelessly outclassed, much as I love its notion of a decentralised system through which you don’t simply hand over all your data to a third party.

The last remaining card for Google+ to play is “Hangouts” which I expect to see it pushing more strongly now. So far I have only had the opportunity to use this feature one-on-one but group video chat does offer interesting possibilities beyond “socially” watching YouTube clips, particularly with improving Android integration.

The bottom line: I am very grateful to Google+ for sorting out two of Facebook’s key failures but, now that it has, I suspect any notion of mass migration may be little more than a pipe dream, exclusive or open.

Social Circles: Google+

First, allow me briefly to gloat over the failure of News Corp’s BSkyB takeover, and highlight unsubtly exactly what they have lost (be sure to check the source code). For all my cynicism — and while I lent my support to the 38 Degrees campaign, I did not believe success was likely — clearly there are times when democracy works.

I’ve spent a couple of days exploring Google’s latest venture into the social networking space with Google+ and that’s enough to share some preliminary impressions. The universal first impression seems to be its stark cleanliness, coupled with a sense of emptiness because the invite-only system means the majority of your friends are yet to arrive. I described it as being like your first visit to Singapore; perhaps a better description, via Tom E from whom I obtained my invitation, was: “You know when you re-install windows and it’s all clean and fresh and empty? That’s what Google+ feels like.” It is easy to underplay the importance of a clean UI, but let us not forget that the fall of MySpace and the mass exodus to Facebook was in no small part due to the increasingly cluttered UI of the former in comparison to the latter’s (then) minimalism.

Google+ is a much more successful, and arguably more mature, implementation than their previous attempts with Wave and Buzz. Unlike these endeavours Google is neither trying to reinvent the wheel nor merely replicate a service found elsewhere. This is a direct, brazen even, competitor to Facebook but one that pares the social experience down to its essence of dialogue and sharing content, but also brings some new ideas to the social party. The clearest is the use of “circles” to organise your contacts. Rather than treating everyone equally, Google+ aims to replicate the way real world friendship groups operate by allowing you to create a range of different “circles” and every piece of content you share can be made available only to specific circles. That simple solution bridges the divide many keep between their “friends only” Facebook profile and “work only” LinkedIn account. It was a key issue I hoped Diaspora would address, and now with Google to compete with those kids have their work cut out.

Realtime communication is far superior, incorporating Gchat instant messaging, which has always been superior to Facebook chat, not least through its automatic creation of searchable chat logs. Videochat, however, has the potential to draw in a far larger audience. Choosing to “hang out” allows you to create a video chatroom with one or several friends. Straight from the browser (after installing a plugin) it is convenient but hardly earth-shattering. The inclusion of YouTube integration, however, is a major departure. Clicking the buttons launches a shared YouTube window which streams to all participants, muting their microphones in favour of a push-to-talk system to avoid unnecessary distraction. I can certainly see this becoming a feature I regularly use — something as seemingly inconsequential as watching a friend’s reaction while showing them a video remotely is not to be underestimated.

Cross-platform integration in general is Google’s strength, being able to share directly from its search engine or share pictures through the advanced Picasa service. Further integration is undoubtedly on the cards, such as Google’s calendar service since a robust event organising infrastructure is notably missing at present. I have yet to experience the Google Docs integration but one certainly suspects there are elements of the abandoned Google Wave code at work beneath the surface of Google+. One assumes notifications will eventually be available while in every Google service and crucially the drop down allows you to see a great deal of info, including viewing posts and leaving comments, without navigating away from the current page.

I am happy to provide Google+ invites to those who want them: simply provide me with an email address. For those already using it, IGN have some useful tips.

"Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has."

(CC) BY-NC 2004-2023 Priyan Meewella

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