Every time I join a social network, I'm annoyed at how much activation energy is required to get things going. In line with intelligent systems being more predictive or at least recommending, I think social networks should suggest people you should be friends with. There are two reasons for this.
One, if you belong to a circle of five friends, and you're only connected to three on the network, there's an extremely high probability that you are friends with the fourth in real life (we're excluding you, the fifth friend). So, task numero uno in any social network is to find people you actually are friends with. What a chore. Tedium should be eliminated!
Two, maybe you just want to up the strength of your network. The people in question, who may or may not be your real friends, but maybe acquaintances, are otherwise known as connectors. These mofos are the ones that link together different social circles. If you've ever looked at a graph of people's social networks, you'll see that for the most part, they're clouds. People tend to hang out with people who have similar interests. But of these people, there's usually an outlier or someone who just also has a vastly different set of friends or interests. What you see happening is that this person is the junction point or the intersection on a Venn diagram where two social clouds would otherwise never meet.
These connectors would be found by ranking everyone in the second-degree (from you) based on their social strength. That is, who of all the second-degree friends know most of my friends?
Actually, it should be noted that as I write this, the idea is deviating or changing from what I originally thought. So, what I wrote about who knows most of my friends is nice, but not what I ended up thinking. What it should be is, who of all the second-degree friends would add the most connections? That's more in line with mathematically strengthening your network.
How I came upon this concept is more of a mix of the first idea and the first metric, who of all the second-dgree friends know most of my friends? It's essentially completing the existing social circles. While working on my Friendster account, I would click on people I didn't know very well (third-degree friends) and then look at how I was connected to them. Usually, the same names in the second-degree (the first-degree is useless since those are my friends) would always come up and these would be the connectors. So, just as a matter of observation, these people (I called them power friends) were either people I should have been friends with on the network or literally people I should just be friends with. They were extremely connected and virtually all of my first-degree friends connected to him could vouch for him.
So yeah, I can feel this entry going a little roundabout... It might be unclear, but the idea is the same, having a social network recommend to you people that are statistically well-connected, either for the purposes of actually knowing you, or just increasing the power of your social network.
Posted by Mark Canlas at January 23, 2006 05:10 AM | TrackBack