Automated Peer Pressure for Facebook's Friend Finder
Facebook has a feature called Friend Finder that allows you to import your email contacts into facebook so that you can add all your contacts to your facebook friends list. However, this requires that you provide Facebook your email address and password. A lot of people don't trust Facebook, so people are understandably leery about providing the keys to their personal correspondence.
However, recently Facebook has started using peer pressure to convince you to use Friend Finder. What they do is show a couple of your friends who have used it, and suggest that you use it too. However, these friends are not chosen at random. It always seems to suggest people who are either
(1) Very influential members of social circles I'm in
(2) Women I've dated that I'm still on good terms with
(3) Close friends
In other words, it's the people who are most likely to influence me.
It's not that hard to take guesses at who these people are. (1) can be easily quantified by creating a formula that combines a person's # of friends, how many comments they get per day on their wall posts, how many events they organize, how many photos they've been tagged in, and how often people message them. (2) and (3) can be determined by looking at how you spend your time on facebook -- the wall posts you comment on and the photos you look at. I'm surprised Facebook hasn't turned it into a public metric, with people being given an influence and closeness level rating they can share. It would make it more crass, but probably more addictive as well for a lot of users.
It's interesting to extrapolate forward what all this will look like in a few years. Targeted advertising doesn't bother me. I'd rather have the ads I see be interesting and relevant than uninteresting and irrelevant. However, socially targeted advertising might be a different game. Imagine an ad system that figures out your particular weaknesses and exploits them ceaselessly -- it can figure out exactly what you're insecure about and use the activities of your social network to embarrass, intimidate, frustrate, or otherwise pressure you into action. For example a gym company could pay a social network to run ads of the form "[Name of girl who is more physically fit than you and who just started dating that guy who you had a huge crush on after he turned you down last week] loves going to [Name of gym]. Join now at a discount!" at the appropriately weak audience. It's going to be an interesting future, and we'll have to learn to anticipate these sorts of tricks so as to be more immune to them. (On a related note, see Paul Graham's Acceleration of Addictiveness)
On a side note, I think the password sharing issue is kind of silly because there's a fairly easy alternative. Web services should allow you to have alternative passwords with limited access rights. For example, gmail could have one password for full access and another password for read-only access to contacts only. I'd give the second password to Facebook. This would also fix my issue with Mint.com. For Mint to work, you have to give them all your passwords to all your different financial accounts. I like the fact that I have money in different places protected by different passwords, and putting them all in one place seems like a bad idea (eg Mint could be hacked). If I could get a read-only password from each financial institution, I'd happily give those to Mint.
However, recently Facebook has started using peer pressure to convince you to use Friend Finder. What they do is show a couple of your friends who have used it, and suggest that you use it too. However, these friends are not chosen at random. It always seems to suggest people who are either
(1) Very influential members of social circles I'm in
(2) Women I've dated that I'm still on good terms with
(3) Close friends
In other words, it's the people who are most likely to influence me.
It's not that hard to take guesses at who these people are. (1) can be easily quantified by creating a formula that combines a person's # of friends, how many comments they get per day on their wall posts, how many events they organize, how many photos they've been tagged in, and how often people message them. (2) and (3) can be determined by looking at how you spend your time on facebook -- the wall posts you comment on and the photos you look at. I'm surprised Facebook hasn't turned it into a public metric, with people being given an influence and closeness level rating they can share. It would make it more crass, but probably more addictive as well for a lot of users.
It's interesting to extrapolate forward what all this will look like in a few years. Targeted advertising doesn't bother me. I'd rather have the ads I see be interesting and relevant than uninteresting and irrelevant. However, socially targeted advertising might be a different game. Imagine an ad system that figures out your particular weaknesses and exploits them ceaselessly -- it can figure out exactly what you're insecure about and use the activities of your social network to embarrass, intimidate, frustrate, or otherwise pressure you into action. For example a gym company could pay a social network to run ads of the form "[Name of girl who is more physically fit than you and who just started dating that guy who you had a huge crush on after he turned you down last week] loves going to [Name of gym]. Join now at a discount!" at the appropriately weak audience. It's going to be an interesting future, and we'll have to learn to anticipate these sorts of tricks so as to be more immune to them. (On a related note, see Paul Graham's Acceleration of Addictiveness)
On a side note, I think the password sharing issue is kind of silly because there's a fairly easy alternative. Web services should allow you to have alternative passwords with limited access rights. For example, gmail could have one password for full access and another password for read-only access to contacts only. I'd give the second password to Facebook. This would also fix my issue with Mint.com. For Mint to work, you have to give them all your passwords to all your different financial accounts. I like the fact that I have money in different places protected by different passwords, and putting them all in one place seems like a bad idea (eg Mint could be hacked). If I could get a read-only password from each financial institution, I'd happily give those to Mint.