Likelihood of Success

Writing on the wall

Feb 27, 2009 Social networking

From the Inside Facebook blog:

“People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says.

This sounds like an oversimplification to me.  There are more than one level of interaction available to dynamic users of social networking.   Indeed there are many different kinds of social networkers.  The vast majority are relatively passive, as described in the article linked to at the blog, and while they may like to have big networks they mostly hang out with their circle of friends.  But the results of the data discussed in the article are at least presented somewhat misleadingly, it seems:

[I]n a recent interview with The Economist, Cameron Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, shared some interesting stats on Facebook users’ social behavior patterns.

His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

This may in fact be true, but I would certainly want to know the distribution of that trend across users.  I would expect the data to be heavily skewed by the vast number of young to very young people who use Facebook as a toy or a game, which is fine, but which indeed is not at all about networking.

That is not, however, what is getting people interested in Facebook today.  Grownup people, that is.  Are they missing something, because Marlow’s data is an accurate reflection across the board?  Or are we missing something because Marlow’s only giving us a peek of the whole story?  On the other hand, if it’s the latter, what would be his — Facebook’s — motivation for doing so?