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See How Well Google Knows Your Circle of Friends
- jws 16y agoYour social circle as determined by Google is currently a blank slate. – excellent.
- MarkBook 16y agoA well aimed arrow if ever there was one
- yanw 16y agohttp://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228 http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
- jberryman 16y agoMy "secondary connections" seem to be a bunch of cosmetic companies.
- Groxx 16y agoMine are all museums and photography sites. But then, they're all through a single contact, who's a professional photographer. Guess my friends are tight-lipped with Google.
- portman 16y agoMine are a bunch of restaurants, again all through one primary connection. Considering that I am the ONLY person on Facebook with my firstname/lastname, and that my 522 Facebook friends are publicly accessible, how and why is Google not indexing Facebook? Is it just a matter of pride?
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoDo FB allow that sort of indexing in their ToS?
- swankpot 16y agoGoogle doesn't have a lot of content about my friends. In fact, none, other than some names, many of which I don't even recognize. But, interestingly, I got a 404 when I logged out. http://www.google.com/s2/u/0null?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F http://www.google.com/s2/u/0null?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.g... Edit: actually, I can't log out. Fascinating, I know.
- groaner 16y agoYep - logout is broken for me there. Just go to some other Google site (docs, gmail, maps) and logout from there.
- willheim 16y agoYeah... I just stumbled on that recently (like 5 minutes before) in a google search was doing. Wild. Too bad google seems to really only know one of my connections and all that they are linked to. Also too bad that that connection is really a weak one to me.
- stilist 16y agoMy problem with the Social Circle stuff is that it apparently never ever removes anyone that it’s pulled in through external services. People I haven’t followed on Twitter or Flickr in a year still show up in the ‘Direct connections from links that appear on your Google profile’ section.
- holman 16y agoNot much, apparently. It knows my Twitter network, of course, and that's helpful for search results (someone I follow on Twitter blogging about some arcane JRuby tidbit I'm searching for is great). If this is what Google's leaning on for their new social graph stuff, though, they're in trouble: it knew very little about my real-life friends. In other words, the friends that Facebook knows about. You can't glean that from Gmail contacts necessarily, since I don't really use email for that type of correspondence. If they really do want to flesh out a social graph of their own to combat Facebook, they have to roll their own social network. Maybe it's coming, maybe it's not; I just think they're only getting part of the picture right now.
- tiredandempty 16y agoMy Facebook network is not my real social network. It mostly contains people i know, not the ones i interact with. My real social network is in my Android powered phone. I am waiting for a better merge with the contacts on my phone and the rest of social circles.
- ohashi 16y ago6 people... not impressive at all.
- Detrus 16y agoIt doesn't know much and what it knows is based on one other person who is connected to many other things. Poor Google.
- js4all 16y ago386 secondary connections. Impressive. Is there an API to access these infos?
- buro9 16y ago128 Direct connections that include all of my close friends. 121 Direct connections from links... which duplicate some of my close friends and then contain a load of bogus entries I don't recognise. These are all based on Flickr apparently. 3905 Secondary connections that do contain acquaintances, some good friends and lots of people I don't recognise. It didn't do a bad job, but given that I use Google Chat and Calendar to organise stuff, that I use Google Contacts because of Android and that I have a lot of history in Google (email loaded from 1996) I'm not surprised that they have such a complete picture. Edit: Just read up on it... it's figured out so much as I'd added sites to my Google Profile and it's followed those to determine the rest.
- alexbosworth 16y agoI wish I could turn this off or edit it, it's a bit creepy and never really shows me anything relevant.
- adewale 16y agoIt's all based on public data gathered using this: http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/ http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/ You can always just edit your contacts on the original sites where the information came from and either wait for a recrawl or force a recrawl using: https://sgapi-recrawl.appspot.com/ https://sgapi-recrawl.appspot.com/
- alexbosworth 16y agoSome of it is from people I've exchanged emails with over GMail, which shouldn't be public data, unless Google has leaked it out somehow.
- adewale 16y agoDid you see this: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228 http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... especially the bit about the difference between Public and Private connections?
- alexbosworth 16y agoI'm sorry my point is that I don't want to see private connection results myself in addition to no one else seeing them.
- RossM 16y agoReturns the same old bogus "I emailed them once" people listed in my Google chat, apart from one person. Since I haven't given Google or YouTube my Facebook info it can't be so accurate.
- agentakki 16y agoTesting...
- bootload 16y agoGoogle is missing the thing that Facebook does well here, "identifying real people". [0] When I looked at the "Friends" google identified it was really just connections I'd made with Twitter, flickr and various other services. Very few I'd met or consider a friend. Parsing data to find friends isn't as good as being sucked into the human "social graph". Identifying real people is a core concept at Facebook. and something they have got right (identity) and google will find difficult to replicate. [0] I wouldn't have realised this point as quickly had I not read "The Facebook Effect" ~ http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connecting/dp/1439102112 http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connect... which despite its flaws gives some useful insights. Excerpt: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/facebook-david-kirkpatrick/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/facebook-david-kirkpatrick/
- txxxxd 16y agoThe title of this post probably mislead you, but identifying friends is just a subset of what Google is trying to do here. If I'm searching for a good online backup service I care more about the opinions of people I follow on twitter than those of my non-technical friends and family, etc.
- bootload 16y agoGood point I hadn't considered the real purpose of the service. But one thing I can't understand is why google - the kings of simple - want to include such messy data? When I see "do more" I smell failure.
- bkudria 16y agoGoogle doesn't mind messy data at all. Their goal is to get more data, even if it's not perfect. If they can get massive amounts of data, their statistical accuracy will improve.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoSo, my questions are will this be used to alter search results - eg this person is well connected in this field and regularly visits these domains, hence we'll add a bit of authority to those domains? Seems they should probably try it. Also are they using meta data like XFN and microformats to garner some of the data or is it just internal Google social links?
- adewale 16y agoThe part that uses the Social Graph API: http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/ http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/ is based on crawling XFN rel="blah" links from all over the web. The canonicalisation layer that's used is opensource: http://code.google.com/p/google-sgnodemapper/ http://code.google.com/p/google-sgnodemapper/