May 21, 2010

• Your Interaction to Friend (ITF) Ratio

  It’s unclear what defines a friend, but one thing that is absolutely certain is that this thing we call “friend” on social networks like facebook, myspace, and xanga is radically different from what we have generally considered the word “friend” to mean.

  An interesting presentation of this rather obvious fact comes in what’s being call a “social experiment” that’s been getting a lot of press lately called the Kin project.  I put “social experiment” in quotes because it’s more of an advertising stunt (albeit a brilliant one) for Microsoft and Verizon’s new phone called the Kin than an experiment. But nevertheless it is interesting. Basically the idea is that a girl was chosen to go around the country and try and meet some of the 800+ people listed as her friends on Facebook. Then they are filming the interactions and editing them down into short webisodes to create a kind of reality show. http://www.youtube.com/KIN

  The way they are billing it is that she is going to find out if her friends are really her friends.

  But isn’t that a strange characterization?

  Back in the old days I tried to keep my facebook list reserved to people I really knew and knew at least well. That is, people that I might consider friends or family. But it quickly grew into people that I had just met once or people who I attended an event with or took a class with or people who had just read my writing and requested that they friend me. Then I got involved in Facebook gaming and the list grew out of control. But even if we disregard that last, I wouldn’t consider most of the people I link to on Facebook friends. I never thought of clicking the “friend” link as making a new friend or even marking an existing friendship.

  Xanga is the same. That I “friend” someone is more of a matter of I want to see their posts and recommendations pop up in my universal feed so that I might consider reading them sometimes. It was never really a strong marker of friendship. I always imagined that those who were “friending” me felt pretty much the same. Leastwise you’d expect that if someone sent a friend request because they wanted to really BE friends they’d I dunno, send you message? Try to interact with you in some kind of meaningful way?  But by and large most don’t.

  I used to actually do that when I found someone’s blog that I thought would make an interesting person to become a real friend of.  Now I don’t. I’ve discovered that people are really super cautious and un-trusting of attempts to forge connection. People are quick to assume the worst of new acquaintances and I think people like the distance provided by the loose connection of the reader/writer relationship. That doesn’t bother me. But it certainly seems evidence that most people like me see the “friending” button as nothing more than describing a technical relationship in terms of how the software manages visibility of content. So strong is that implicit understanding that people are shocked or surprised when someone reaches outside of that norm to try to forge a real connection. So our shields come up quickly, just as they would if a stranger came up to you on the street.

  From this we can conclude that in the online world, the word “friend” no more means an actual friendship than the word “folder” represents an actual folder.  (and no doubt one day people will forget that there was once a physical object called a folder)

  Which makes me think, okay, let’s say you wanted to judge how sort of “real” your friend list connections was. Are your friends all strangers that have very little chance of becoming real friends with you? Or are most of the people on your friend list pretty close to friends if not actual friends? Can we create a metric for how close the friend list you keep is to what might be considered a real representation of people you are friends with that you are connected to through the platform you are using?

  Well one thing we do know for certain is that in order for anyone to even be a candidate friend, there has to be some kind of interaction between you and that person. So perhaps a good first step in such an analysis would be to create an Interaction to Friend Ratio.

  To do that, you would go through your friend list on a platform and count the number of people on that list that are people that you at least sometimes interact with in some kind of meaningful way that matters to you either on that platform or on other online or offline platforms, ie via email, IM, twitter, real life, telephone or what have you.  To put a reasonable limit on it, let’s say we will only include people we’ve interacted with in a meaningful way within the last six months. You might object that that, but let’s just use it for simplicity’s sake.

  Then of course you divide that by the number of friend connections you have on the network.  That gives you your interaction to friend ratio. Simple.

  For me, on Xanga my interaction to friend ratio is:  0.0314. WOW! It’s pi!  No. I’m not making that up. I have 254 friends only 8 of whom I’ve had significant interactions with in the last six months.   On Facebook my ITF is 0.0221. So I’ve interacted with a bit over 2% of my total friends on facebook within the last six months.  That suggests that my Xanga network is slightly more potentially “real” than my Facebook network but not by very much.

  It’s an interesting exercise. But I have no idea how to judge whether these are small or high values for the ITF. In order to know that I need to compare them to other people’s ITF and try and see what the average is. For that I need your help.

  So what’s your ITF?

  • 7:11 pm
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