Made out of people

What is the second degree for?

In my own work, second-tie connections aren't all that useful, by and large. The statement that "my mother is two links away from my officemate" is meaningless (if you go through me) or just weird (if you don't). Either way, it might be interesting trivia ("look! among my friends, you can get to Chuck by way of Michelle!"), but I don't think it tells me much. (Indeed, on an upcoming paper, I'm writing an argument why all of my visualizations and views have changed to one-link distances.)

On the YASNS ("Yet Another Social Network Service", a danah coinage), they seem to be the point. You don't join it for your friends, you join it for -- well, because everyone else is joining it. That's a question for a different discussion

I started shopping this question around, then, at the Social Computing event. Sure, it's fun to see who are your friends of friends. But just generating a list of all of X's friends is not really a fundamentally interesting concept to me. What good can they do?

• Interestingly, the first response was to find my own friends. I can surf my various friends' friend lists and check out which ones I missed.

• Within an organization, it's a guide toward expertise location. "Who do I know on that team who can help me out?" "Which of my allies can get me something?" (This is part of the concept behind linkedin and spoke and ryze). That is, it's a way of seeing what my least-difficult path into part of an organization might be.

• And, of course, within a dating context, I can troll my friends to look for the cute folks they haven't introduced me to yet.

• I can use it as a way of finding context and clusters: this friend is associated with people from Berkeley; this friend is associated with four of my other friends.

Anything I'm missing?

April 12, 2004 09:19 AM | TrackBack | in Social Networks