Social Experiments http://socialexperiments.posterous.com Most recent posts at Social Experiments posterous.com Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:37:43 -0700 Facebook in Circles http://socialexperiments.posterous.com/facebook-in-circles http://socialexperiments.posterous.com/facebook-in-circles

F8 is yet another tech conference I go mad for, alongside WWDCGDCE3Google I/O & TGS. And this year, the newly-christianed Timeline and redesigned Ticker were rolled out to the public almost immediately. Within hours, people had come up with wicked Timeline designs, reviews and reflections. It was a good F8.

Like every Facebook rollout that takes place, people moan and complain about how the new design is the most tragic thing to have ever happened, join a group to 'bring back the old Facebook design' and a week later everyone accepts and moves on. Generally, public opinion has settled for the design, and are accepting the roadmap for the Timeline becoming the enew profile standard.

While I think that the new design is much more functional and aesthetically pleasing than the previous iterations and obviously has been inspired by more than simply a short stroll in the park, there is one fundamental change to the way the information is presented to us that I feel reduces my belief of what Facebook really meant to be.

As someone who is away from my vast network of my friends regularly and dependent on online social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with friends, I relish the thought of catching up on the lives of others through vicarious observation. One of my old school friends was pushing a campaign in London to win an entrepreneurship competition to see Richard Branson. Another school friend is living in Korea for six months with her boyfriend. A girl from small-town Busselton in Western Australia is living in NY.

These people I don't have much direct contact with, nor did I live near them at all, but after seeing them appear in my news feed on a semi-regular basis, I became engaged with their various narratives… the stories of their lives. It was cool. My network is so geographically diverse that I watch these people doing different and amazing things.

Now the obvious reasoning behind the Ticker is to condense the streaming content to the side bar, and then hero in on the top stories, which I think Facebook thinks are the stories I want to read, or that which are the most relevant to me. Unfortunately, there is no real way to tell Facebook what I think my top stories are.

I decided to see how much content actually came in, so I went to my News Feed. Of the first 25 stories that came in, 21 came directly from my friends here in Singapore. The four that weren't Singaporean were from my Australian friends, but really they were acquaintances. 

So it seems that the majority of my top stories are determined based on geography. Although I am sure that the frequency of interaction with users has a part to play in determining whose lives I see and whose I don't, there are still people who I can't explain appearing on my news feed. Maybe they were the only ones who were recently posting… I don't know. But it doesn't seem logical.

It makes sense that they prioritise those who are geographically closer to me in the News Feed than those who are on the other side of the world as they are much more likely to have an impact on my day to day happenings. I'll likely see my neighbour during the day than my friend of ten years in South Korea.

Facebook would argue that all the details are still there - they have been shifted to the side. But now it's wall of text that never ends - continuous, scrolling text. Words and words and words. It reminds me the purpose of film credits - they have to acknowledge all the people involved somehow, so they make it as small and condensed as possible. It achieves the goal, albeit it's not exactly pretty.

My primary concern is that we lose so much from our outside networks. We lose the ability to scroll down and down to see the familiar faces of our friends whether those pictures are from parties, holidays, or the library. And a picture is worth more than a thousand of words from the ticker. They are infinitely more social - this is one reason why things like social photo apps such as Instagram are taking off, and even the idea of photo-sharing was one of the reasons Facebook got a foothold on the social platform market early on. I don't want to read about someone adding a photo. I just want to see it.

And so my News Feed is now primarily reduced to those people around me. The people I would likely see during the day. For some people, this isn't an issue, as Facebook compliments their day to day lives and happenings. But for some people like me, we want to see what everyone else is doing, not just those who are in our city. It's one of the reasons we go onto Facebook. I know I'll have a conversation with my neighbour, and I enjoy preserving that sense of natural discovery through face-to-face communication than finding out from online networks.  And although I am aware I can browse different networks with Facebook's new Smart Lists, not being able to change the News Feed from its default geographically-preferential blog sets a clear stance as to how Facebook perceives the nature of social interaction to be.

In essence, Facebook is reducing the likelihood of our outside networks intruding on our close, inner friendship circles. As a result, we become more circular. We mix with our friends who lives closer to us, and mix less with those away from us. And this effect multiples upon itself - my strong relationships become stronger and my weak relationships become weaker. Without the user making a conscious effort to dilute their social network habits from the defaults that Facebook presents, we are at risk of dropping those friends who we contact intermittently but not regularly. 

I don't think it's a terrible thing, but I miss the more open networks. I hope they will change, or at least allow us to dilute our news feed with more than those who live on our street.

 

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