[FRIAM] Facebook? iPhone?

[Hugh Trenchard]

My experience is that Facebook is highly popular among non-adolescents, at least in terms of their chronological age. 

Although there tends to be a certain frivolousness to the interactions that occur, I think Facebook would reveal some interesting hub formations within a larger network, and could actually be a source of an interesting study in complexity.

There seems to be a tendency for some people to try to gather as many "friends" as possible, even to the extent that many, if not most, of the "friends" are merely distant acquaintances. I'm not sure if this constitutes a form of social competition to see who has the most friends, or what. Regardless, one could do some interesting "degrees of separation" analysis. 

There are, I've no doubt, some emergent properties in the Facebook phenomena, and I personally have found it interesting to be involved in it -- not to mention there is just a hint of fun involved!

Hugh Trenchard
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Breecker 
  To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
  Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2007 9:20 PM
  Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Facebook? iPhone?


  My general impression is that its popularity is driven by adolescents, Owen; which means you and I will never understand why its wonderful (or it may be wonderful precisely because we can't understand it), and you're better off asking your kinds. But that's based on anecdotal information, and may be innacurate. Do they have demographics on the site?
  db


  On Aug 16, 2007, at 10:02 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:


    OK, I've been bumping into facebook a bunch lately .. can anyone tell  
    me why its wonderful?


    Anyone using it?  My interest is that the iPhone world is happy with  
    it's new iPhone version.  Apparently lots of web 2.0 sites are  
    rushing to provide an iPhone version.  Makes sense 'cause the iPhone  
    does not support 3rd party apps, and encourages developers to create  
    web-centric applications instead:
       http://developer.apple.com/iphone/


         -- Owen






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