Facebook users talk to just 4% of their online friends
Facebook's future by Holy Taco
Facebook users have conversations with just 4% of their Facebook friends, it was revealed at The Local Social Summit in London yesterday.
In the keynote presentation Bernie Hogan of the Oxford Internet Institute argued that Facebook and other large social networks are geared for quantity rather than quality, limiting the development of more meaningful relationships online.
Hogan talked about the potential of social media to introduce friends of friends to each other, but that networks like Facebook were not creating the right contexts for this to happen, failing the test of ‘triadic closure’ where people bond through agreement.
One of the side effects is that we move to other sites to manage different types of relationship, what Hogan describes as “the paradox of convenience, everyone is somewhere, no-one is everywhere.”
Other useful insights to emerge during the summit included, in no particular order from my notebook: that the most searched for word on Qype at 1 am in the morning is ‘kebab’, the idea people with lots of online friends don’t have real ones is a complete myth and Clinton actually won the same percentage of youth voters as Obama, without the much vaunted online campaign. More notes from other attendees are at #lss09
Possibly the most startling revelation of the whole day though, was the announcement of a new nano-marketing social network to rival Twitter. It’s called Flutter – here’s the promotional video:
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Once again so-called data on Facebook serves to confuse. Firstly, sharing with 4% of friends is about the same as what we do in the “real world” anyway. We have close friends and acquaintances, just as people have “real friends” on Facebook and “Facebook friends”. The 4% should not be a surprise but a reassurance that Facebook represents the “normal” world so well.
Secondly, the suggestion that this “limits the development of more meaningful relationships” is actually the reverse of all other research findings to date, which confirm that Facebook and other social networks help us extend and deepen our relationships much further.
@Graham, this is hardly so-called data. Its from a series of studies by Cameron Marlow, a social scientist and researcher at Facebook. He is fortunate to have access to the entire corpus of Facebook data, and can give exceedingly reliable results. It has already been published in the Economist and is available on his website (http://overstated.net).
As for extending and deepening our relationships, this is a debatable claim. I am not suggesting it isolates us – quite the opposite: we live in a world if information overload, where it is challenging to maintain valuable connections with everyone whom we have available to us. I would like you to specify which ‘all other studies’ you refer to. Would this be the work of my co-author danah boyd, or perhaps my colleagues at Michigan State or UIUC who have published on this. I’m more than aware of said work. The thesis is that interfaces do not allow for reliable perception of offline social contexts and groups. This is in keeping with previous work such as boyd’s thesis of collapsed contexts.
Finally, there is no use in debating whether a Facebook friend is a real friend or not. All friends have various qualities. Friends on Facebook signify access to content. Some may be more, but many are not. It is simply a way of being semi-public.