Are Your Facebook Friends Really Your friends
http://www.alternet.org/media/134004
In this article the author explores the dynamics of social networking in the form of facebook friends. “Are facebook friends really your friends?” The author thinks no, and according to her Wikipedia reference, a friendship requires mutual respect, affection, shared interest, and some form of rendering of service in times of need. By this definition, the author argues, the way many people use facebook is not to connect with their real close inner circle of “friends”, but with their loose, larger “community”. The author then concede that different people do define “friends” differently and gave some tips on how to be a social person.
I think that’s actually a really interesting point, how different people use facebook very differently. Some people use facebook to connect only with their close inner circle of friends; others add on facebook everyone they’ve ever talked with. Some people use facebook for strictly casual affairs; others use it in professional connections. Some people add their moms on facebook; others don’t.
Facebook has tried to help distinguish between different types of connections by asking you to identify the relationship with the person you’ve just added. In addition, you can create groups that distinguishes between different friends to separate connections. This creates many possibilities. But I think most people dont use the facebook networking tool to its full capacity.
Understand the dynamics behind different facebook connections and different types of users can be really interesting to us the common people, and very valuable to the facebook programmers. For those people who only use facebook to connect with their really close friends, then by strong triadic property, someone who shares only one or two friends with them probably already knows them, but may not be a good enough friend to added to facebook friends. For someone who adds everyone they know, having several mutual friends may not suggest anything at all. Some types of edges requires logic to figure out, such as family. Someone who is listed as a son of your mother is probably your brother, so even if you have very few mutual friends in common, that person should be on the top of your suggested friend page. But we will leave it to the facebook people to figure the rest out.