The General Election, in Facebook-land

Thanks to the General Election I was supremely unproductive yesterday. I am actually not 100% sure what I feel about the results themselves. But there is change in the air that makes it hard not to be excited. And I am optimistic enough to believe that the change will be for the better.

Anyway, there has been a lot said about the role of social media in this election. I was certainly thinking that as I watched the updates roll in on Twitter while Channel News Asia did their millionth 'analysis' of the constituencies and candidates and then started talking about Osama and golf results (!?!). But sometimes the role of social media can be a little...overblown?

I did a brief survey of a bunch of Facebook fan pages this morning, and here is what I found.

(data correct at time of collection, ~10am EDT; almost certainly no longer correct)

So apparently the returning officer who has burned "pursuant to Section 49, Subsection 7E, Paragraph A of the Parliamentary Elections Act" into our brains forever is better liked than the PM. The ranting can start now.

I will add that if you use Facebook likes as an actual measure of things liked, I am like that grumpy old man who hates the world and waves his cane at small children. For the record, I actually like small children, except on planes.

People you may know

The 'people you may know' feature on Facebook is fascinating and creepy. I guess you could say the same for many things that Facebook does, like telling you where and when you met someone based on a series of assumptions. Anyway, the point is that the little friend-suggestion sidebar is always staring at me, and I have looked at the expanded page a couple of times before, but I decided to take a more detailed look at what it was up to.

I scrolled down the page and took notes on (1) which row of friend suggestions each person showed up in, where the top row = 1; (2) the number of mutual friends reported; and (3) whether I actually knew the person. Here, I categorised "people I know" as someone I would recognise and talk to if I ran into them on the street, and who would most likely do the same. "People I know of" are generally people I know of through other people and may have met once. I might recognise them on the street but talking to them would probably be awkward or creepy. I scrolled and recorded until I got bored of scrolling and writing, which is of course an extremely systematic way to collect data. But that came up to a decent sample of 242. It turns out I don't know most people on that page.

When it suggests people it thinks you might want to 'friend', Facebook tells you how many Facebook-friends you have in common. So I took a look at how good an indicator this actually is for predicting if you actually know someone. Here are the distributions for the number of Facebook-friends I had in common with people that were suggested, sorted by whether I knew them. The arrows indicate median values. The median number of mutual Facebook-friends did increase across the categories, though they are similar for people I know and people I know of.

But the real question is, how well does Facebook's metric of 'number of mutual Facebook-friends' predict whether I might actually want to be Facebook-friends with friend suggestion X? That's the basic purpose behind this annoying little sidebar on Facebook, right? So I collapsed the first two categories (people I don't know and people I know of...but not enough to be a 'friend' and not a creeper) into one where "Consider Facebook-friending = 0" and the third category of people I know was "Consider Facebook-friending = 1*"

Here is a logistic regression I ran in Stata with the number of mutual friends as a single predictor. It actually turns out a statistically significant relationship (P<0.001) that is not a particularly good fit to the data. But on average, I get a 13% increase in the odds that I will actually be interested in friending someone with every one more mutual Facebook-friend.

I guess that is basically saying what everyone kind of knows already: that if you have more friends in common with someone, you are more likely to know them, even in Facebook-world. So if Facebook was aiming to suggest people that you are likely to click on/friend on its "people you may know" page, it would start the list with people who had more mutual Facebook-friends and go down from there, right? I guess not. This is what I got plotting the number of mutual friends for each person against how far down the page they were (row number). It is rather strange. There is a nice negative relationship starting at the 26th row (a point which any person who wasn't looking for useless data would be unlikely to get to) and a big mess in all the top rows. I have no idea what is going on here...





* I did not actually friend any of them. There are already too many people on my facebook.

Friend accumulation

I've been working like crazy over the weekend to get everything done before the Benthic Ecology Meeting that starts tomorrow, and I think it's been pretty successful because now I'm sitting here with 4 hours to go before my train leaves and I have nothing pressing to do.

So: in addition to my dive log, guess what is an awesome source of data? Facebook. All the friends I have and all the friends I forgot I had. I decided to graph my Facebook friends against when I first met them. Interestingly but unsurprisingly, there are obvious jumps corresponding to starting at new schools in Primary 4, Secondary 1 and JC. I pretty much lost touch with anyone I went to school with before P4. (The curve starts above zero to account for family members who are older than me.)

Obviously this is a limited dataset because plenty of people aren't on Facebook. I also clean out my friendslist once in a while, so the people graphed are the people I care at least somewhat about. Current total: 273.

On the subject of social networks, my research advisor told me to make the best of this conference and do some networking!!! I think my idea of networking is hanging around networked-people that I know...then when other networked-people come to talk to them, they have to talk to me too to be polite.

Benthics in 24 hours!! :)