News Not Noise: Socially Aware Information Filtering
Average session duration (minutes) by frequency
Figure 2: Average session times, grouped by login frequency
Average reported session duration increased as the login
frequency decreased, as might be expected, apart from for those
users who logged in less often than “every few days”.
The survey asked respondents to rate the importance of several
key functions of Facebook on scale from 1 to 5 stars, where 1 is
labelled “not important” and 5 “very important”, but the
meaning of intermediary ratings is not prescribed. The most
important reason cited for using Facebook was to keep up to
date with their current friends' lives, with an average rating of
3.9 and the vast majority (89%) giving this reason three stars or
higher. It may seem surprising that they would want to
communicate via online social networks with people they
frequently meet face-to-face and communicate with through
other media, but it appears that people use social networking
services more as a way to view information about their friends'
lives that their friends may not communicate to them directly.
Indeed, in the case of photographs, where Facebook allows
users to easily see photographs in which their friends appear,
somebody they do not know may well have created the media.
It is very unlikely that this type of sharing would happen if it
were not facilitated by the social networking platform. In close
second and third places respectively were contacting friends
(3.7 stars average) and rediscovering old friends (3.6 stars),
with around three-quarters (77%) of respondents giving three
stars or higher for each. There was no statistically significant
difference between these three reasons.
These results suggest that people are using online social
networks to replace their address book. This overcomes
difficulties with out-of-date contact details that other systems
typically suffer from. Contact via social networking platforms
also has different overtones to that of other communication
media, especially writing on a user's Facebook “wall” -
essentially, writing a message that is intended for that user but
can be read by anyone who knows that user. This might be
roughly equated to a comment made face-to-face to that person
in a public place, where other peers will moderate comments.
This is often how friendships in the real world are formed
before any one-to-one meetings are considered appropriate.
However, respondents were widely agreed that Facebook was
not a place for making new friends, with two-thirds (67%)
giving just one star and almost all (93%) giving three stars or
less. Men were significantly more likely to give a higher score
than women, with an average rating of 1.79, compared to 1.59
for women. It appears that meeting new friends is still an
activity that mostly happens offline. However, sites such as
HospitalityClub.org, Meetup.com and Match.com suggest that
many do use the Internet to find new people to meet, when
there is some shared interest or motivation. It seems that
Facebook is not frequently used in this way, although there are
some indications that third-party applications (such as “Are
You Interested?”, a simple dating application with around
500,000 daily active users) are starting to fill this void.
Number of friends
There was a wide variance in the number of friends that
respondents reported having on Facebook, from just 2 to 883.
91% of respondents had over 50 friends; the number of
responses trails off quickly after 350, with only 10% of
respondents reporting having over 350 friends. The average
was 212 and the median was 168 with a standard deviation of
159 (to 3 s.f). Several respondents commented on how
“friends” is perhaps an inaccurate description of the contacts
listed on their Facebook profile, for example:
“A lot of the people are on my list because they like to add
absolutely everybody they have ever known even if they have no
intent of talking to [me], but [they] want to look at what [I] do I
guess.”
and, more succinctly:
“God. So many 'friends' are actually zombie sub-
acquaintances!”
One respondent mentioned that they thought there was some
peer pressure to add as many friends as possible:
“Facebook sometimes comes across as a pissing contest to see
who has more friends. Lots of people have something like 300
friends, despite studies showing that 100 people is the maximum
number of real social interactions you can havee∖.. As a rule, I
generally only add people who I see regularly, with some
exceptions.”
(^Probably a reference to “Dunbar’s number”, 150, a suggested
average size of human social group that is manageable [2].)
The average number of friends added by users in the last 2
weeks was 3.7 (s.d. 5.01), suggesting that the average user's
number of friends is growing by 45% per annum, as previous
interviews have suggested that they rarely remove friends.
There seems to be a significant reluctance to delete friends as it
seems slightly confrontational. One user suggested that he
didn't like to voluntarily block himself from accessing personal
information about somebody:
“I know I should delete some of my "friends” but you never
know when you might need to creep around their page to see
what they have been up to!”
The maximum (34) came, unsurprisingly, from the user with
the greatest number of friends (883). 20% of respondents stated
that they had not added any friends in this period.
The survey asked respondents to classify 50 of their Facebook
friends into five categories (close friend you see regularly; old
friend who not seen regularly; new friend, seen regularly; don’t
know well; family). However, many respondents apparently
misunderstood the instruction and classified more than 50
friends. In these cases, it was assumed that they had classified
all of their friends. Responses with no friends categorized were
assumed to have not completed the question. The category into
which users placed most of their friends on average was old
friends who they do not see regularly, with an average of 18%
of their friends. In second place were current friends, with
10%. The other categories had less people in, with an average
of 13% in total. Women had significantly more close friends
than men, twice as many on average (12% vs. 6%).
Respondents only classified an average of 41% of their friends
into the suggested categories, suggesting that the categories
were not very comprehensive, despite feedback to the contrary
when the survey was initially being tested. One respondent,
who categorized 62% of his friends, confirmed in a comment
that the remainder of his friends don't fit into the given
categories. Some respondents suggested additional categories
in their comments:
“The missing category... is a friend who you contact regularly
but don't see regularly. That would be about 25 of the 50
people.”
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