Facebook-Let Me See My Friends

September 25, 2007 · Comments

According to an article about Mark Zuckerberg in the current issue of Wired Magazine, one of the goals of Facebook is to organize one’s real life friends online, mapping what he’s called the “social graph.” I was thinking about this, and I have to say: Facebook does a HORRIBLE job of mapping this out for ME.

I Can’t See

If I click my “Friends” tab in Facebook, I see an alphabetical list. There are a few other ways to organize this list, but in none of the cases does this map to my real universe. I can’t, for instance, group Jim Long and Jonny Goldstein together, even though I know they both are in the DC area, are both media makers, and are both people I’d want to think about in similar ways. I just can’t see people in this fashion. My own friends are shuffled into a deck in an order I have no power over. (Yes, I’ve heard of “Top Friends.” I use it. Not enough.)

And I want tags to sort in other ways, like “Twitter friends” and “People to call when I’m sad” and “People who might help my business goals.” What do you think, Robert or Jeff? With thousands of friends, don’t you wish the organization would be just a little more David Weinberger for you?

What I Want

I want to slice and dice this data any way I choose. I want tagging. I want visual shuffling, the same way I do with business cards. Know how I organize my business cards? By event. If I met you at TechCrunch40, your card is right there beside other people I met there.

I want ways to message people or notify people geographically. “Chris Brogan is in San Francisco with a few hours to kill.” Sure, you see that status message on your news feed, but if you’re like me, and have more than a few hundred friends, these needles get lost in haystacks.

If YOU Won’t Slice It, Let Me

Is there an app I could write to do this? (By “I” and “write,” I mean someone smart who writes apps, and I would, say, either pay them or encourage them a lot). What’s up with this? Could we break open the “friend” prison, and let me see my friends my way?

Visual Data

And now for something completely different. I want my damned data my way all the time. I want that Microsoft Surfaces interface. I know. Sacrilege. A Mac guy just said he wanted a Microsoft product. But I do. I want to stack my info my way. I want to see things in a way that makes sense to my needs. For instance, I want Gmail notifier to do it my way. I want my files to slide around in piles. I want searches to be heat maps and graphical and more than just text.

Not in Facebook. Everywhere. But hey, if the new rumbling in town – Facebook is Google – is to be taken forward, then I want some better control and visualization. Have you ever thought about just how much we use our qwerty keyboards to do just that? To type words? Why aren’t we coming up with new ways to move things around, and see things not just as lists of text (Look at GMAIL and Google Reader), but perhaps as overlaying data structures? Where is that?

Okay, Zuckerberg. Give me back my friends, and you! Write some apps or something. Okay?

What do you think? Am I alone on this one?

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  • Yes please. I would love to catch up and browse my friends based on all kinds of tags and groupings. Please give us that data, and let someone else innovate.
  • You are not alone ! Design Sense, comes with time in grade, and knowledge of general semantic's! Facebook might take a look at the ny times reader, it has a sense of order ! I find Facebook not that easy to use ! Yes it's my book but UGLY Cause it is their Face On what is supposed to be me my book!
    Thus, a "social order" is a relatively stable system of institutions, pattern of interactions and customs, capable of continually reproducing at least those conditions essential for its own existence. The concept thus refers to all those facets of society which remain relatively constant over time.
  • kamilah
    I completely agree. I'm glad they made it easier to find your friends recently (when you type your friends' name in search a little suggestion box comes up), but there have been so many times when I've been looking for friends and wanted it to be easier. I'm all for tagged friends. And while they're at it, can we have different levels for friends besides limited profile and full profile?
  • I was just writing a post for tomorrow that talked about how I wish there were more classifications for "friends", but your idea is much better.

    Slice it, dice it any which way a person organizes things is what is really needed.
  • lux
    If it had the same privacy controls as the rest of FB, friend tagging would be a nice feature.
  • Yeah, Chris!!! Bring it on – tagging friends, eh? Brilliant. Sheer genius.

    I put this down to learning styles - I'm very visual, gotta SEE my stuff or it's out of sight (site!) out of mind.

    I'd also like to see a way to categorize (tag) Groups. I know I'm underutilizing these puppies and don't really have an effective way to ramp it up, other than dedicating even more time to just trawling through all the minutia.
  • Chris, I've been following you up to now - with a great deal of interest.

    But this one has stumped me. Do we really want to rely on technology to organise our friends for us?

    If we can't think of the very person we want to talk to from within our inner store of memories, feelings, associations - are those people really what we'd call - friends?

    Joanna
  • Chris,
    what you suggest is the tip of the iceberg: this isn't just tagging (though that'd help enrichen the data), nor is it just a way to list your friends...mapping data is the basis of strategy, the basis of planning, the basis of seeing a whole new world. That visualizing is the true basis for growing empires...and it starts with a picture. Joanna, the previous commenter, is correct in that we should be able to just associatively remember our immediate friends...but this is far more than just remembering - this is mapping in the way that Excel provides mapping: visualizing scenarios, landscapes, etc., that our minds eye might not otherwise notice.
    Twitter's "blocks" is an interesting foray into this space...but we do need more attempts at pictorial visualization: this is how to enhance our own vision, but also a way to help the populace visualize and work with the ever-increasingly data-intensive world that we live in.
    Some of the "landscapes" you suggest: Geographical (DC area), tech tool (twitter), like feelings (who to call), business goals (who to call), lists of lists (gmail).
    Some of the landscapes I suggest: education level (remember, "the Bill" dropped out of college), preferred podcasts (mindshare), level of computer savvy (imagined or otherwise), number of facebook superlatives, pokes, wall-writings, etc. (sociability), number of books reviewed on LibraryThing, number of pics on flickr, number of videos on blip.tv, number of times they smile on camera, who does tai chi, who watches STBD.
    How to visualize? Check out this months' Forbes, chock full of Forbes 400 data: I have never seen as many ways of visualizing 2D data in a magazine, except perhaps Science or Nature. So, in addition to 2D and 3D, we need 4D: time and space flowing visualizations, which is the same way we visualize our lives: flowing through the trees, the ocean, amongst the stars.
    For a start...lets all check out http://developers.facebook.com/
  • Add in Six Degrees, TouchGraph, and Connection Cloud as Facebook applications to see your friends in a different light!
  • I have this same problem- I have a three dimensional map of friends and relationships in my head that's hard to translate into the 2-d online world.

    And it's sometimes hard to always remember our annotated internal map of friends- the layers of who also knows who, facts about them, like their companies, business, personal interests- the stuff we want to be able to remember- like who's Grandma is sick, birthdays, anniversaries-and maybe even find other connections.

    It just seems like so much of that information about inter-relationship is dark, or requires me to try to remember that subtle stuff that I feel badly about forgetting- not that I don't care, but there's just so much to keep track of, it's overwhelming.

    I think we're trying to create 2-d maps in a 3 and 4 d world.
  • The problem is not what you want to do. The problem for Facebook is creating an interface that allows that sort of technology passing through without Facebook losing its simple interface. Tagging could be added, yes. But where and how would Facebook add it in a way that simultaneously integrate with everything Facebook already has on it, without making it seem too complex for outside users?

    Also: there ARE ways to find people in networks. I can find anybody living in Central Jersey through the default Networks system that's existed since Harvard. I can also find old classmates, Twitter users, and pretty much any group I want, through a combination of Groups / Networks. It's one of Facebook's basic features, but you don't seem to acknowledge that it exists.
  • @Joanna- I know my personal friends very well, and I know my friends-from-events very well, and I know my Twitter friends very well, and I know people who read my blog and comment very well, and I ... (get the point?)

    What I can't do well is SEE THEM as a cluster. I can't see my real friends who I want to come to with a story. I have to type all their names and search by typing. Easy with my very close friends, a little less easy with my Twitter friends (over 1000), or people who comment on my blog (over 100).

    Remember, in social media and networking, they only give us the word "friend" to work with. In this instance, "friend" means anyone connected to my social network.

    Does that help?
  • @lux raises a good point: I think I'd want my classification system to be visible only to me. I wouldn't want to hurt people's feelings, especially if they fell into the "I have no idea who they are, but they added me" bucket.
  • You're right about the ordering. Also about the ability to filter by "people I actually hang out with".

    Groups aren't good enough to use for this type of feature, and also, we shouldn't HAVE to make a new group just to keep track of what kinds of "friends" people are on FaceBook. Even when you put someone in a wordpress blogroll, you get parameters about if and how you actually know them.
  • Deirdre Walsh (drmusicmd)
    Have you seen the Business Week article claiming Facebook might be worth $10 billion? Unless they make some dramatic search and tagging improvements I find this hard to believe.

    http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/...
  • Hey Chris!

    I've been experimenting with the Circles of Friends app, and it seems to do the trick for me. I'm not such a fan of the ui (It seems a little thrown together) but it does get the job done.

    http://apps.facebook.com/circlesoffriends/
  • I do believe you're on the edge of something very cool here. What if you could mindmap your "friends" with the tags being the connectors? You could look at a visual map of everyone you've tagged with LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, Flickr, Boston, Nashville, Houston, etc. And each person in the map would be represented by name and photo, where available. Better if I can choose to click through to their Facebook page, or LinkedIn page or Twitter page or whatever.

    I definitely need an easier way to categorize all of my contacts. Might make it easier to connect them when they need help.
  • Exactly. I think Facebook would do well to do usability testing as well. You can do lots of stuff but it is not all obvious or easy to do. Friends wheel, is not a solution to what you are talking about but it is kind of cool (IMHO) oh yeah and socialistics
    http://apps.facebook.com/friendwheel/
    http://apps.facebook.com/socialistics/
  • jonnygoldstein
    Jim Long is awesome, and even if we are not Facebook friends, we are real life friends (or at least friendly acquaintances), so I guess Facebook has not managed to totally overtake real life. Yet.
  • I want to break free from Facebook's friend prison! i would absolutely love Facebook even more if they helped me organized my friends with tags and groups.

    I'm gonna pass this along to our FB apps genius builder, Andre Sugai and see what he thinks. He is the maker of the SoDex Facebook app and has been itching for a new idea. I'll keep you updated on his thoughts.
  • You know what this is? I just thought about it. It's the Semantic web. It's web 3.0 stuff. You've read about it here and there, right? It's that thing that says, "knowing that something is an object isn't good enough. We need to know the RELATIONSHIP of things."

    I'm Chris. I'm also Chris who is married to Katrina. I'm also Chris who is paid by pulvermedia. I'm also Chris who knows how to Podcast. And so it goes.

    Hmmm. This is really interesting. I think Darrin Dickey got me thinking about this when he wrote in his comment about MindMaps. Fascinating. Crap. I need to put a new mind map app on my Mac.
  • @Deirdre - they might be worth $10B. The thing is this: Facebook is now an aggregator the same way google is an aggregator. We don't think of Google that way, but the more they corral our attention (I use them for search, email, RSS reader, calendar, maps, docs), the more they own my attention.

    Facebook? Same thing a different way. The more they own the attention of 39 million people and growing, the more power they have to be worth something.

    But you're right about all the things that they're doing wrong. Thing is, they're making them right as quickly as we permit. Faster than Yahoo! That's the trick. Can you do it fast enough to keep the audience? So far, yes.
  • VISUALIZATION. Words often sabotage our evaluations. We can complement our words with visualization. With visualization we see things in terms of relationships. We see things from a structural point of viewing. With visualization we see things from different perspectives. Visualizing helps us to give more values to the variables of situations. With more values to the variables of situations, we can make better maps.

    Milton Dawes
    handout from his October 2006 workshop for NYSGS
  • Ah, I thought I was going to be the geek to bring up web 3.0, but looks like you beat me to it Chris.

    It's web evolution theory at work - second step is to find a way to collect all the information you can and share it piecemeal - third step is to find a comprehensive way to organize and display it. (first step was to do all sorts of stoopid stuff, just 'cause we could!)

    I just hope Facebook is able to provide the necessary tools before reaching their tipping point.

    Michael Valiant
  • Chris, yes, thanks - although it was comment #13 that gave me the "aha" moment as to the different type of friends we might be talking about!

    Joanna
  • I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Not just friends, but everything in FB. For instance, with posted items, how do you instill order?

    I agree: all data should be available for filtering... why not use some form of automagical tag clouding. Like when I post an item, or friend someone, FB could generate a list of active terms and go from there. Of course, that is a major technical feat, but that's why Zuck et al are such awesome geeks, right?
  • Brett A. Meyers
    Chris,

    Just added your blog to my netvibes page Fri. of last week and have thoroughly enjoyed reading your posts, especially the one written above. Will be a regular reader from here on out.

    I would argue/conceed that Facebook does a phenomenal job of delivering a 'fun, interactive (somewhat) intuitive' tool for people to use…However, I agree completely that it does a miserable job of actually 'mapping' my real-world relationships. There is no contextual separation between all of my hundreds of friends, no way to gauge which 'news feed' is the one that is actually relevant to me, no (organized) way to share information between specific groups of friends, etc…
  • Hi Brett- glad to have you on board, and thank you.

    You're right. I should have stated that Facebook has done wonderfully with a great swath of usability. I'm really appreciative of their overall usability.

    Thanks for reminding me.
  • I think we will start seeing the type of interaction design you made note of in the very near future. As applications and services move from the static to the dynamic, a whole range of users are starting to pop up on the internet who have more intuition-based needs than the "Netizen" of the 1990's (remember the time they were called "Netizens"?).

    With the rise of social networks, I believe interaction design as a whole is going to be shifting web services into a more "real-world"-like experience, like you described.

    Facebook has a lot going for it in terms of usability, but the issue you mentioned goes far beyond Facebook and reaches out to the way interaction between people on the internet is currently handled. I think we've got some interesting years ahead of us in this field.

    Thanks for the post, I think you raised some very valid issues.
  • Ed M
    From the "Interesting you mention this" department and O'Reilly Radar...

    "Facebook developers and partners now have their own conference, Graphing Social Patterns" where you can "learn more about social networking platforms, applications, marketing, and strategy". There is also going to be developmental coding/contests with Facebook apps.

    So here is an interesting conference where someone can help affect changes outlined here within the social media tools and collaborate with other social media types.
  • Chris Hassett
    facebook is like most sites, only concerned with making its founders and venture investors wealthy. they could give a rat's tooty about your friend ideas
  • Have you tried the Group Friends application? http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id...
  • The Social Media Market might just be the next great market for Advertisers ! If it loses site of it's friends, it may wind up like the auto industry Dead As Custer in the US ! Business exists for profit and it is always the few who get wealthy from the mass audience ! Microsoft has always marketed to to a large and diverse audience, Gates will never lose site of his or our friends ! If it happens Facebook with Microsoft's business savvy , won't leave us behind we are bucks.
  • Rachael loggie
    ok so i can will do my facebook with you i could go on my websites is www,myspacetv.ca for go the white stripes this music is ansome.
  • it was great !
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