Facebook isn’t useful to me, and I don’t think it’s just a generational thing.
I want to connect to my friends and colleagues, I’m interested in what they’re doing. I think I can share things that they’d be interested in, too. But Facebook’s limited methods for organizing relationships don’t give me any useful granularity, so I just assume anyone can read anything I post. A general “I’m in LA tonight, anyone want to meet for dinner?” would hit a much broader audience than I’d actually be interested in dining with. (Sorry, ‘friends.’)
In trying to understand this better, I came across Paul Adam’s presentation, “The Real Life Social Network” (highly recommended and embedded below). Based on research he’s done at Google, Paul outlines how we group our real-life relationships and how we interact with people based on how strong our ties are.
I considered mapping out my own social network by hand to better understand it. Luckily, LinkedIn just announced a tool to map my professional contacts, and TouchGraph takes a visually equivalent approach with Facebook. As shown below, the two maps look very similar after a bit of arranging and unified custom color coding.
My LinkedIn Networks
My Facebook Graph
I have four major networks (PDI/DreamWorks, the Visual Effects community, the Venture Capital community, and Carnegie Mellon), all related to my working life. There are smaller groups of family, non-work friends and some random individuals.
My PDI and Visual Effects groups are tightly meshed, understandably, but outside of those there is very little overlap. I proceed cautiously when I intermix them – most commonly I am connecting my CMU students with my professional contacts.
On LinkedIn I have 402 connections and on Facebook I have 304. I’ll cop to the fact that I’ve connected with people I don’t really know that well, and I’d even agree that least 200 of my contacts are way out on the fringe. That isn’t visible here, though – neither graph represents how close my personal ties are to each person – information which LinkedIn and Facebook don’t really have. Many of the orbiting lonely people in my Facebook graph would actually be very close to me. That information would alter these graphs radically, making them much more revealing and useful.
I understand my social network a bit better now, but my communications problem remains unsolved – I’d like to be able to message just one group, or message just those people closest to me across groups, and I’d like to be the recipient of the same targeted and filtered information flow. For now, much of that continues on in email.