People Pairings
I was tempted to write a post on this Times article, which explains that on average, men and women must have the exact same number of heterosexual partners, despite what survey’s often reveal. Sadly the author of the article doesn’t seem inclined to acknowledge the difference between averages and medians, nor does anyone interviewed in the article offer a compelling explanation of the discrepancy. Fortunately commenters on this Ezra Klein post (myself included) have picked up the slack.
With all that out of the way, I decided to turn my attention to Newsweek’s cover story, Facebook. I dare say that Newsweek seems a little late to the table with regard to the Facebook craze (for example, there was this lengthy New Yorker article over a year ago). Still, as Newsweek points out, Facebook is growing at 3 percent a week, so they’ll no doubt be a lot more Facebook news in our future.
Media attention aside, Facebook came a long way this last year. For one, it opened itself up to non-students (and apparently much of its current growth comes from people over 25). It also added newsfeeds, allowing users to quickly (and constantly) check up on each other. Most recently, it has provided a platform for web developers to write their own apps for use on Facebook. As the web becomes filled with people using Facebook-dependent applications, Facebook’s future becomes that much more secure.
Any social networking website relies on users designating their relationship with other users. In Facebook, friend relationships form the links in a social network. The network is used to spread information as well as navigate the website. When discussing the utility of Facebook, I think people tend to focus on its ability to share information among friends. As the internet grows however, there’s bound to be lots of new and easy ways for people to share content with each (for example, consider last week’s post on internet-based computing)
The real staying power of Facebook lies in the value of having online social networks at all. These networks allow us to take our real life identity and put it online, and once we all have online identities, we can do a lot more than just keep tabs on each other.
Suppose I have a website where I want to allow people to vote (for example Wikipedia could allow people to vote on whether certain articles are accurate). Voting only works if one person cannot pose as thousands of people, and vote thousands of times (in computer science land, this is called a sybil attack). Given that one person can fairly easily get their hands on many computers around the globe, posing as multiple people has traditionally been easy. Social networks offer a solution.
Though it’s certainly possible to start multiple Facebook accounts, it’s quite hard to create tens or hundreds of accounts. If you create all these accounts, they’ll need different friends, different profiles, different photos, etc. To fake all these things, you’d need to start making all of your phony accounts friends with each other, but this discrepancy would be reflected in the structure of the social network. As a result, an active user on Facebook (or perhaps some future, more refined version of Facebook) can be considered nearly as legitimate as you meet face to face in the real world. As a result identities on Facebook (or other social networking websites) are destined to become a building block of many future online applications.
I’m sure the folks at Facebook know all this and are busy adding buckets new features. In terms of future growth, it seems like they should focus on features that make for the most useful social network. That’s why, I’m surprised they haven’t added other types of relationships between users. If your boss, roommate, and grandmother are all on Facebook, it would be useful if you weren’t simply “friends” with all of them.
Also, Facebook should probably allow certain types of relationships to fade over time. If everyone you’ve ever met is your friend on Facebook, knowing that two people are friends becomes a lot less valuable. At the very least you should be able to “reaffirm” a friendship (although I suppose there’s poking and messaging people for that). Similarly some kind of “trusted” friend relationship would be useful for a lot of yet to be developed Facebook applications.
All I’m saying is that if Facebook adds these things, I’ll definitely consider signing up.