fil-ter

Here’s the deal: My girlfriend makes a fuss about how I’ve got more girl friends than I have guy friends. It is juvenile and stupid and it’s… basically it’s about Facebook. Having lightly checked she’s right, Whoop-dee-do. I have about 3:2 ratio girl to guy friends on facebook. (HOLY CRAP! BAD PERSON!). She worries about this. She thinks I need more guy friends. And I’ve asked her if she thinks I need more guy friends or if she just wants me to have less friends that are girls so that she doesn’t feel threatened all the time.

“I just think you could use more guy friends.”

Which is stupid. I have 400 million guy friends. The fact that I have 600 million girl friends is what’s getting her. Has nothing to do with how many guys, obviously, it has everything to do with how many girls.

She begs to differ though, so here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to add me as a friend on facebook. www.facebook.com/calebroy

That’s me. Add me, and at least once a week for… what a month? Please make a comment on my wall about how awesome it is to be a guy and be friends. That’s it.

Example: “Whatssup Caleb! Just being my guy self here! Great to be your friend man!”

This chick monitors my facebook like hell on wheels because she’s paranoid as they get. I just want to even the ratio out, even if it’s meaningless, so that she can get off my back about it. I don’t even hardly talk to half those people anyway.

So hey, add me, like I said I really don’t care who you are, I’ll approve you. And I’ll tell you that you’re awesome too. And maybe… together we can win this war.

Facebook announces changes in UI, and they consistently get tons of comments like this:

i hate the new facebook

i just want the old facebook back.

Designing UI is challenging enough, must suck to have so many bitch and moan. You’d expect this from an older audience, but it’s surprising to see from the “net generation” (bleh). They’ll get over it soon enough, of course.

We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks? This is a particularly difficult question to answer, so as a first attempt we looked into the types of relationships people do maintain, and the relative size of these groups. The image above presents a high-level overview of our findings: while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core. This not only affects each user, but also has systemic effects that may explain why things spread so quickly on Facebook.