4 ms·
On the upside, the prevalence of things like Facebook also introduces a lot of noise and weak social links. Half a century ago you coud make a precision strike
by shazow 15y ago
On the upside, the prevalence of things like Facebook also introduces a lot of noise and weak social links.
Half a century ago you coud make a precision strike and kill half a dozen people to cripple somebody's life. Today you could start clipping off someone's 500+ Facebook friends or Twitter followers, but it gets really impractical really fast and the impact wouldn't be as strong.
Back in the day, you'd find a stash of letters and find your targets. Today Google, Facebook, and Twitter have hundreds of thousands of messages between me and thousands of other people. Where do you start? Especially if you're looking for something very specific like signs of strong relationships, your thesis on this could very well be its own startup or sociology study.
Having more data than you can swallow is cool and all, but pulling something valuable out of it is its own non-trivial task. Throwing raw computing power at it doesn't fix it either.
(Side note: I'm all for private/secure/distributed/federated implementations of... everything.)
- wdewind 15y agoIf you've got the data it's not hard to figure out who the 5 most important people in someone's life are. Shear volume alone would give you a pretty good estimate I bet.
- natrius 15y agoThat's easy enough without Facebook. One example: phone records.
- shazow 15y agoVolume of conversations with people on Facebook != volume on Twitter != volume on email != volume on IM != volume on the phone != volume IRL. [1] Also it varies drastically year to year. I'm betting this wasn't the case 60 years ago. Maybe I'm a special case. Edit: [1] I mean that the social graphs vary drastically between social networks. In fact there's almost no overlap with people I talk to on each network. Kill them all?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- radu_floricica 15y agoI've read of algorithms using Facebook data that manage to predict when couples are about to break up. Filtering strong relationships is something Facebook already does - unless you choose the "Most recent" view, it'll show you what it thinks has interest for you - and it's usually right.
- paulnelligan 15y agoya, but they didn't have any kind of advanced statistical analysis in the old days, they couldn't do keyword searches, and they couldn't graph your relationships - they just read the letters.
- leon_ 15y ago> weak social links I guess Stalin believed in "In doubt kill em all". Weak social links won't save you when there's a psychopath on the throne.