Friend Wheel

There’s this application on facebook that’s called the ‘Friend Wheel’. It’s an interesting little app, in that it shows how all your friends are connected. Who knows who among your friends. The important thing being the ‘among your friends’ part, as it doesn’t show anything more than that.

This screwed me up, originally. You see, quite a lot of my friends don’t know each other. There are quite distinct groups, where every friend might have met within that clique, but the only connection between the individual groups was – obviously – me.

This meant that I had lots of white space in my friend wheel. The connectivity simply wasn’t that great. I saw this as a bad thing. I looked at other people’s friends circles and everybody seemed to know each other. I thought ‘am I doing something wrong?’

But I’m not. You could say they are.

Let me explain that. The fact that their circles are incredibly interconnected means that all their friends know each other; which basically means that they are all the same group. The group may be very large – but the person with the very interconnected friends wheel is basically not very good at meeting new people by themselves. They are reclusive and depend on others to meet new people.

The less connected your friends circle, the more you are the one to go out and meet new people (and the less these new people you meet meet your former friends, of course, but I’ll get back to that). The outgoing extrovert with the large social network that can get them things done, because they always know somebody who can help them is the facebook persona who knows a lot of people, while these people barely know each other; the friend circle with lots of entries, but few spokes.

Of course there is another good reason that the people I know don’t really know each other (there’s always as second explanation) and that’s distance. I move around so much that the people I know will have trouble knowing each other. So that deflates my extroverted outgoing bubble a bit.

Still, it just shows that our instinctive desire (many lines between all the people) is not necessarily the right one. Ultimately the network with fewer spokes will be more useful (as there will be far more people from different walks of life in it – giving you both more fulfilment and more resources).

Yes, I’ve just spent an entire entry on a facebook application.