Social Clusters on Facebook. What do you want – More Clusters or Friends?
Social Graph is a facebook application that gives you a deeper/additional insight about your network of friends. The application relates your friends (and your friend’s friends, who are common to both of you) together, and throws up different social clusters or groups that you belong to.
Social Cluster / SocialGraph of Facebook - Is it Different from Twitter?
For example, the screengrab above shows the various clusters that I am a part of. There is a separate cluster of college friends, another one of my friends from school, colleagues from a previous company, and so on.
My cluster of school friends is disjointed from my cluster of office colleagues. So, yes, I have no one in common here. The clusters of my colleagues are fairly close to each other and there a few who know each other across. Hmm! That’s pretty insightful!
The developer blog states that -
“In the work and life balancing game, the person with the biggest number of clusters, and not the person with the biggest number of friends, wins.”
And it is true. Is it not?
So, how many clusters do you have? And what did you infer from them?
Also, how different is your twitter social graph from Facebook? Would love to understand.
Very interesting insight… but what about people who are in a niche industry? (eg. me)
Most friends are from the industry, and because there’s a lot of moving between organizations, a few friends now in different places can pull different clusters together. And everyone pretty much knows everyone else. College is meshed in, since everyone would up in the same or similar jobs. and since everyone has similar work hours, leisure activity tends to be similar – and shared – so even leisure-activity groups mesh in more than they should. Family is isolated outposts around the outskirts of the cloud.
But doesn’t this structure make for a good success story as well? Close connections, easy references, relevant business leads…
What do you think?
@Ashish: I doubt anyone’s network would be as close-knit that everyone knows everyone else within the group. For such people, the graph would look like one big ball of wool. Also, I doubt if anyone’s network would have people where each are alien to one another. In this case, the graph would be like specks of dust disjointed from each other.
For all others, the graph mostly would be clustered.
True! The connection patterns could vary from individual to individual; and yet, it highlights the commonality between friends.
I am quite unsure though how this could lead to a better business. What do you have in mind?
[...] Check out Facebook Social Graphs. What this nifty little tool does is map your connections in a visual graph, using a specific formula. (Basically, a spring-electrical model. Each connection is a charged particle, repelling everyone away from himself, and is connected with a spring, pulling together. This forces the connections to form clusters, with large interconnected groups bunched up together, and independent loners pushed far outwards. The individual clusters will also repel each other, moving into clear ‘continents’. See here for more details on the model) This creates an interesting theory – that the pattern of cluster formation can be used to predict user personality and possibly career success. (via Pluggd.in) [...]
I have found social graphs to be extremely valuable tools to analyze which “worlds” you move between. I highly recommend this tool: http://apps.facebook.com/_nexus_/
@Rupul: True! That’s another great app on facebook.