kill your social network

Your online social networks are too big.

The last time Facebook updated the stats in their press room, the average Facebook user had 130 friends. I'll wager that that number is skewed down by older folks and people who have abandoned their accounts - for the active user the number must be higher. I've got over 400, myself, but I regularly see people that dwarf that number. It's become de rigeur to accept most friend requests - on Facebook I can hardly bring myself to turn anybody down. Even if I started now, what would the point be? My Facebook friends already include people that:

• I went to junior high school with and never saw again
• I had one class with in college
• Were in my unit in the military but assigned to a different company
• Colleagues and former colleagues, including bosses and subordinates

For me, that enormous diversity of friends completely paralyzes me. I'll never post anything on Facebook that's political or contentious, or even something funny but of questionable taste (as it happens, much of the things I find funny are of questionable taste). Sometimes it's for fear of offending someone in my network but often it's simply because, frankly I don't really give a damn about what most of the people in my network think.

When Facebook announced Groups last year, I thought they had finally licked this problem by allowing you to create discrete groups who would be granted varying levels of access to your wall - this was not the case.

I could address this paralysis by just having a massive cull, but I don't really feel compelled to - I already have a small social network populated only by close friends where lively discussions of links take place every day: Google Reader.* Reader works because there's only about 30 people in my network - my closest friends - and I have no intention of letting it grow much bigger. Unlike Facebook, I am stone cold ruthless in turning down Google Reader sharing requests and that's what makes Reader great for me.

It doesn't matter what the network is (a lot of pundit's scoffed at Path's maximum network size of 50, but I found it intruiging) - but to maintain a lot of high-quality discussions and a minimum of drama, it has to be small and very selective. If you do go to a new network you'll have the onerous task of bringing your friends with you, but it will absolutely be worth it.

Facebook and marketers (like me) don't want you to have smaller social networks - look at how Facebook is constantly encouraging you to add people using their Friend Finder tool. Smaller networks make it tougher for us to exploit the network effect to our advantage. But don't worry about me. Kill your big social network and find a more rewarding social networking experience.

 

*I previously wrote about Google Reader's primacy in my social network collection back in 2009.

Comments

[Ged Carroll]

Its as much about context as anything else and Facebook's general purpose model just doesn't work that well.

[Jed Hallam]

For me, Facebook became a lot more useful with groups (and the people that can be bothered to set up groups) because you take a wide net of people that you share a social graph with, then compound them into interest groups - and Twitter was the same with lists.

[Mat Morrison]

I went through a cull of my Facebook friends a couple of years ago after a colleague I'd barely met in an office I rarely visited took exception to a passing comment I had made on a campaign she had asked the entire company to promote through their social channels. I'm sure you can imagine the gist of the comment, so I won't repeat it here.

More recently, I used friend lists heavily. I put a lot of people into limited profile. I have a group of strong ties, and a group called 'weak ties' and I use Facebook's posting controls to select which group (or custom set of people) I publish to.

I quite LIKE the serendipity of Facebook's EdgeRank (although in a professional capacity I do everything I can to circumvent it, of course). I like the odd relationships and glimpses into my extended social circle that it affords me.

I should however probably split my lists further -- and have one called "f*ck 'em if they can't take a joke" and rigorously exclude them from certain posts.