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Facebook to organize friends in “smart lists”

Facebook will soon be transforming the way that friends are categorized online.  According to the article “Facebook to organize friends in ‘smart lists’” in The Seattle Times (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2016193234_apustecfacebookfriendlists.html) , the social networking website plans to automatically create groups based on such variables as geographic location, school, work, etc. to improve users’ ability to decide how to share content amongst Facebook friends.  Users will also be able to designate friends as “close friends” or “acquaintances” to further control the updates that they receive.

This new Facebook feature – scheduled to launch on September 14 – is directly related to our study of friendship networks in class.  For the first time, users will have unprecedented control over how strong and weak ties are labeled, as well as how those labels affect their Facebook experience.  When once their Facebook newsfeed was cluttered with updates from everyone in their network, users will soon find that stronger ties will lead to more frequent updates, while updates from weaker ties will become more rare.  It would be interesting to know whether Facebook intends to use this information in its friend suggestions, if the data is not already used.  As the Triadic Closure Property states that two people with a common friend are more likely to become friends, friendship ties alone would certainly aid Facebook in its ability to recommend new friends to users; however, the new “smart lists” would improve the process even more via the Strong Triadic Closure Property.  The property’s claim that two people with strong ties to a common friend are likely to at least be acquaintances  makes the “smart lists” that much more relevant: common “close friends” are more likely to know each other than are “common acquaintances.”

It will also be interesting to observe how users themselves use the “smart lists” – if they use them at all.  One Facebook director quoted in the article noted that “users don’t really want to spend a lot of time creating and maintaining friend lists,” which begs the question of whether they will feel affected by Facebook’s new feature.  It’s generally known that many users do not take advantage of Facebook’s increasingly customizable privacy settings, and so it is difficult to say whether the “smart lists” will really make much of a difference.  Facebook may create groups based on school, for example, but it’s common practice for students to become friends with numerous school acquaintances, and they may not see the value in taking the time to label such friends as being strongly or weakly connected.  A Facebook feature is only as good as the prominence with which it is used, and “smart lists” may not have a great impact on social networking if users do not take the time to customize them appropriately.  In fact, perhaps they may not even want to – as discussed in class, acquaintances often have access to different knowledge that close friends do not.  Labeling friends as “acquaintances” will reduce their updates dramatically, thus limiting the potential new information that one might gain from the connection.

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