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Why is this kind of data ever going to be useful? People have 200+ friends on their friends lists but only a handful of those are meaningful and the rest of tho

Why is this kind of data ever going to be useful? People have 200+ friends on their friends lists but only a handful of those are meaningful and the rest of those links are just about facebook values in the same way that capitalism is about the acquisition of money. So I'm a little afraid about people using this data to generate social "insight".

nfnaaron 17y ago
Everything you say is probably true. But like many trivial things, this could be a stepping stone into deeper insights. Some academic/marketer researches this data, which leads him to a question that can't be answered by the data (and which he may not have thought of otherwise). So he does that data collection and analysis.
tokenadult 17y ago
People have 200+ friends on their friends lists but only a handful of those are meaningful What I have found, by making most of my Facebook behavior submitting links for comment (a la participation on HN), is that many more of my friends have become more meaningful as they interact with one another based on the only commonality they have--that they are all my friends. People who have never met one another even once get into great conversations on my Facebook link threads, and I learn a lot from them by lurking in the discussions. Eventually, I gain a bigger, more cohesive social network that way, including people all over the world who are talking about the day they have a "cocktail party" with me while enjoying serious conversation on thought-provoking issues. The value of the graph is all in how you use the graph. Why is this kind of data ever going to be useful? Accurately gathered data are almost always useful. The mark of a brilliant researcher is figuring out new questions to ask about data that are already gathered.
dasil003 17y ago
Where false insight is most troubling is in the hands of a totalitarian regime. Don't think it can't happen here.
m0th87 17y ago
One example I'm interested in exploring: eigenvector centrality analysis on the social graph. It would be like a PageRank algorithm for people, quantifying how influential individuals are. This necessitates a full social graph. Having only a subset of it would be like Google only looking at the first 10 links on a page for its search algorithm.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  Google used to limit the number of links they looked at. Now they don't explicitly limit it, but they'll stop if the links seem boring.
  - m0th87 17y ago
    For the PageRank chunk of their search algorithm? If so, that is fascinating, because that means I could work with a graph subset and get good results. Could you link me?
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      Unfortunately, this is something I heard from a Googler at SMX East. And I don't know how applicable it is--a human would find a long list of navigation links boring, but to a search bot they have much more content than, e.g., a list of "related pages".
- greenlblue 17y ago
  I don't think this data set in complete in that sense since only public profiles can be crawled in this way. At least that's what I gathered from the article.

nfnaaron 17y ago

Everything you say is probably true. But like many trivial things, this could be a stepping stone into deeper insights. Some academic/marketer researches this data, which leads him to a question that can't be answered by the data (and which he may not have thought of otherwise). So he does that data collection and analysis.

tokenadult 17y ago

People have 200+ friends on their friends lists but only a handful of those are meaningful What I have found, by making most of my Facebook behavior submitting links for comment (a la participation on HN), is that many more of my friends have become more meaningful as they interact with one another based on the only commonality they have--that they are all my friends. People who have never met one another even once get into great conversations on my Facebook link threads, and I learn a lot from them by lurking in the discussions. Eventually, I gain a bigger, more cohesive social network that way, including people all over the world who are talking about the day they have a "cocktail party" with me while enjoying serious conversation on thought-provoking issues. The value of the graph is all in how you use the graph. Why is this kind of data ever going to be useful? Accurately gathered data are almost always useful. The mark of a brilliant researcher is figuring out new questions to ask about data that are already gathered.

dasil003 17y ago

Where false insight is most troubling is in the hands of a totalitarian regime. Don't think it can't happen here.

m0th87 17y ago

One example I'm interested in exploring: eigenvector centrality analysis on the social graph. It would be like a PageRank algorithm for people, quantifying how influential individuals are. This necessitates a full social graph. Having only a subset of it would be like Google only looking at the first 10 links on a page for its search algorithm.

byrneseyeview 17y ago
Google used to limit the number of links they looked at. Now they don't explicitly limit it, but they'll stop if the links seem boring.
- m0th87 17y ago
  For the PageRank chunk of their search algorithm? If so, that is fascinating, because that means I could work with a graph subset and get good results. Could you link me?
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    Unfortunately, this is something I heard from a Googler at SMX East. And I don't know how applicable it is--a human would find a long list of navigation links boring, but to a search bot they have much more content than, e.g., a list of "related pages".
greenlblue 17y ago
I don't think this data set in complete in that sense since only public profiles can be crawled in this way. At least that's what I gathered from the article.