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The problem is that nobody wants to present their users with a gigantic list of contacts on first login and ask them to sort and organise them into groups. Inst

The problem is that nobody wants to present their users with a gigantic list of contacts on first login and ask them to sort and organise them into groups. Instead, everybody just lumps all the contacts together so that the user is least inconvenienced at first, only to later experience problems. Google is in a pretty good position to tackle this, since a fair number of people who already have Google contacts probably also have their contacts sorted into groups for email, and that's a good representation of their real-life social network.

mattmanser 16y ago
You sort your contacts in gmail? I honestly would never bother, really don't see the point. I very much doubt Google are, but Facebook might be in a good position to figure this out themselves now anyway. If I'm friends with Em, Bob, Barry and Jill, and Em and Bob are friends and Barry and Jill are friends, the friendship groups are fairly obvious aren't they? Obviously I've never seen their data so don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised that they do have the information. Just looking at 'Mutual Friends' of people I know on Facebook it seems to be fairly well defined.
- tesseract 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory)
- Timothee 16y ago
  Facebook goes further than the mutual friendships and takes into account all sorts of interactions like "Like"'s, comments, etc. and probably re-sharing of contents, common events, common pictures, common places... I've been told they use that to figure out what to show you in your feed, so pretty much to know whom of your FB friends you're actually interested in. But I'd be very surprised if they don't use that in a "group" perspective as well. Which would be very interesting because groups evolve over time but you going back to clean up your lists doesn't happen very often, if ever. From a privacy standpoint, it is a bit scary. But it's very cool from a tech/CS point-of-view.
sssparkkk 16y ago
I don't sort my contacts into groups, and I really doubt whether 'a fair amount of' other people actually do. Distinguishing between for example work and personal contacts seems pretty hard, I'd say even for google.

mattmanser 16y ago

You sort your contacts in gmail? I honestly would never bother, really don't see the point. I very much doubt Google are, but Facebook might be in a good position to figure this out themselves now anyway. If I'm friends with Em, Bob, Barry and Jill, and Em and Bob are friends and Barry and Jill are friends, the friendship groups are fairly obvious aren't they? Obviously I've never seen their data so don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised that they do have the information. Just looking at 'Mutual Friends' of people I know on Facebook it seems to be fairly well defined.

tesseract 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory)
Timothee 16y ago
Facebook goes further than the mutual friendships and takes into account all sorts of interactions like "Like"'s, comments, etc. and probably re-sharing of contents, common events, common pictures, common places... I've been told they use that to figure out what to show you in your feed, so pretty much to know whom of your FB friends you're actually interested in. But I'd be very surprised if they don't use that in a "group" perspective as well. Which would be very interesting because groups evolve over time but you going back to clean up your lists doesn't happen very often, if ever. From a privacy standpoint, it is a bit scary. But it's very cool from a tech/CS point-of-view.

sssparkkk 16y ago

I don't sort my contacts into groups, and I really doubt whether 'a fair amount of' other people actually do. Distinguishing between for example work and personal contacts seems pretty hard, I'd say even for google.