If Facebook and the mutual friendships among its users could be visually represented in the form of a bicycle wheel, then welcome to my wheel of friends.
Lining the wheel’s perimeter are the names of 600 of my Facebook friends. The interior of the wheel–the spokes–comprise 4,413 links between all of my friends.
Before seeing this wheel, I was limited to viewing mutual friendships within the constraint of names and head shots. Now, I can see bands of color and plots of thickness to illustrate the bonds we share.
By means of example, look at Jeff Vecchio. He’s fairly new to Facebook and has 60 friends. Three of his Facebook friends are also friends with me. Because our mutual connections exist on a smaller scale than my 22 shared connections with Eric Schoenfeld, it’s fair to surmise that Eric is represented by a wider band than Jeff’s narrow one.
One of Eric’s connections is Leslie Poston, who shares 29 Facebook friends with me. I’m assuming that Leslie and Eric are among the green or orange bands, with Jeff on a thinner blue or red one.
While parts of the wheel, such as around two o’clock, are devoid of links, that is probably because I’m linked to them but they’re not linked to anyone else. Maybe people who joined Facebook, set up a profile, but never did anything with it?
The Friend Wheel application, developed by Thomas Fletcher, provides a neat visualization and interesting fodder for discussion. For instance, while I have 607 Facebook friends, the app is limited to 600. As people gain mutual friendships, what does that say for the bonds (and bands) between them?
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I think there is a great deal of potential in the power of a personal network, but even given lower standards of “loose tie” connections, I don’t believe networks of this size are really useful. Perhaps we just need a newer definition of “friend” but I don’t believe it is possible for a person to have any connection to more than a couple hundred other people.
I was baffled when Chris Brogan publicized his LinkedIn address and encouraged people to connect with him. And of course he has 10,000 Facebook friends. But at that level of connection, a different order of comparison is appropriate. These connections are so minimal, so easy to make…do they mean anything? I’m not saying you guys are bragging about how many friends you have, but I question whether it can be effectively translated into opportunity.
Twitter is a little different…it is so immediate and concise that I do think occasionally you can get into a chat with Guy Kawasaki or some famous celebrity…and who knows where it might lead. There is the opportunity for more and “the more” happens more actively.
The same is true of your blog…nearly 30,000 people came to your blog last month and any one of them can, if they have good ideas, get into a conversation with you that might lead to working together, sharing ideas, who knows what?
But Facebook is a mess. There is just so much junk on there with all these people sending me virtual plants and asking me to support virtual causes or whatever. At least they stopped biting me and turning me into a zombie. Now they just hug me. The cool thing about Facebook is that it does promote passive connections; you can reconnect with old acquaintances and then maybe you learn they are doing something interesting. That could elevate them into the group of 200 or so real connections we have.
So I’m just a bit skeptical when I see people with thousands of facebook friends. At that level of superficiality, I’d be more impressed with millions.
Dave Atkins´s last blog post..Social Media for Clients, Constituents, and Customers
I tried one of these for twitter once, but I never got it to work, and eventually forgot where I found it. This one worked, although it told me to become less popular. I have 600 nodes, and 6,034 links.
~ Kristi
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