Facebook and data..

This is a post on Facebook data.. my Facebook friend list data..

Given I tell FB a lot, it was quite interesting to see how FB doesn't make it easy for me to even track what is going on with my Friend list and update me on what is changing. 

A few hours ago, I was trying to see how many of my friends post politial stuff on my feed. I could count 8 people off the top of my head and by skimming my feed over last week. Given it is holiday season, it is easy to spot the political posts.. My count was accurate. My entire feed is pretty much overwhelmed by these 8 people. Maybe the others dont post much? Maybe the most vocal ones are the ones that keep forwarding stuff to everyone on their timeline? Maybe the things they are forwarding are paid ads masquerading as meme's or just regular forwards? Maybe the people are not who they claim to be on FB and the account is hijacked? a lot of thoughts led me to try and find out again how after reducing my friend list to 150 two years ago, it is back at 318 now.. what has changed in the friend mix etc. etc.

Any analysis starts with the data set. Trying to export just the list of friends and the number of friends they have (or mutual friends) is not trivial. I did spend a lot of time copy pasting stuff from HTML to csv to JMP and had to do some clean up just to get the data in three Columns.. (Friends name, their friends total, mutual friends). Now why FB lists only Mutual friends in some cases I do not know. At first glance it looks like some folks do NOT want to even disclose how many friends they have!! I don't know what the point is of being on a social network if you are that worried. Let's move on..

Then I found that some of my friends have deactivated their accounts. Their pictures are blank and there was nothing listed. When I click on that friends page it says "this account is deactivated. you have the option to unfriend this person". WTH? This was for multiple people. So the person just left FB without a note of any kind to say they are deactivating it? 

72 of my friends show only a mutual friend count. So it makes it difficult to do a fair distribution.. that was a painful realization that there was no way to get the friend count. You have to go to that friends page and see if it will show up. Even my wife's page will only show we have 152 mutual friends. It wont tell me how many friends she has in total. Not that this count matters but if you are looking at data and you try to see patterns it makes sense to have apples to apples. 

Then I put in a classification by how they are my friends. 

F- Family (anyone related by blood or marriage)

HS- high school (PS. Senior)

C- college (classmates, juniors, seniors) from IT-BHU

GS - Grad school (All the Drexel and RPI connections)

FF- Family friends (this one is tricky because some of these people we met in social settings, my kids classmates, but Majority are spouses of friends from HS, C, GS or my wifes classmates and their spouses)

BL- friends from my Blogger days who I have managed to stay in touch with till now!

Y- Yoga (there are teachers and there are students, but I just lumped it into one)

W- Friends I made at Cypress Semi at work

Here are the distributions given this classification:

This one is the distribution of the friends my friends have (unfortunately for the 72 people out of 318 where it listed only mutual friends, that data is not included in this). 

If you read the anthropology books Guns Germs and Steel or Sapiens, the authors make a case that tribes split up into rival tribes or multiple tribes after their populations cross 140-150. The social structure at that point is unmanageable and the connections become meaningless. At any one point everyone closely interacts with 15 people on a day to day basis. In the last 2 years I have observed this at work, at home, at gatherings and on my social media feeds. People simply become inactive.

Given that there are some celebrities in my FB friend list (read star Yoga teachers, music teachers, public figures) I took them out of the distribution to see what it looks like for the bottom two bars in the previous graph.. ie, people with under 1000 friends.. The people who are between 600 and 1000 are mostly inactive but keep accepting friend requests and looking at some of their pages, I am seriously wondering if there are account issues. Again, companies that pride themselves on AI should be able to see patterns and alert people that one of their friends is multiplying on their friend count in an abnormal fashion that does not make sense.

117/212 still have <300 friends.. and 78/212 are within 200.. Gave this 150 number a lot of thought for the "average person".. read "not someone who is trying to get a following like a Business person or Brand ambassador)  and maybe given todays ability to connect more easily, that number can be 300.. It should be able to plot the number of active interactions between me and my friends to verify this. I am sure FB does this or has the capability to do this, but it would be nice for me to do it with data at least as it relates to my account and friends.

In the graph above the top four points on the Family (F) are wife, MIL, SIL and co-sister (see graph below) why it will only give the number of mutual friends for these four people is beyond me.  You can see that a lot of my High school and college friends are connected to each other by looking at the mutual friend count and it is the case with the Yoga community. I really don't have an apples to apples on this one as technically all the mutual friend counts are not available.

The graph below is the mutual friend list distribution where FB wont list their total friends but only mutual. Each bar is the number of friends who have a mutual friend list between those windows.. eg. 1 friend (wife) with 150-160 mutual friends, 1 with 50-60 (MIL), 2 friends with 40-50 mutual connections (SIL, co-sister), etc. etc.

The bottom 32 people with 0-10 mutual friends are mostly not sharing their friend list?

So what did I learn from all these exercises of graphing and charting and cleaning up data sets?

1- It is not easy to get exportable data out of Facebook.

2- There is no notification if your friends deactivate accounts or become inactive for prolonged periods of time

3- There is no warning if your friends account is showing abnormal increases in friend counts

4- A lot of my friends on the list have way more than 150 friends just like me. 

5- Never got to the actual reason why I started doing this.. which was to see what % of my friends post political stuff. That count is still 8/318 but there is no easy way to classify the posts on an excel file and put a code next to it and pareto it!  Out of almost 200 most recent posts in my feed, 50 were political and they came from 8 people.. They all seem to have posts on their pets, yoga, family which always seems to be anywhere between 50-70% of their posts. If there was a select way to mute that, I would be a happier person. 

The real question is "Am I seeing all their posts?" or "is FB only showing me select posts from these people that are political?" or "are these people deliberately posting this only to me and a select group?"

No way to tell. 

Majority of the posts are travel realated or family photos and pets. For that, I will gladly keep reviewing accounts periodically, clean up stuff and go explain to people why there is no point on being "friends" on FB when I don't get to see what they look like after 5 years but keep getting memes and political forwards for years. 

I am just having data withdrawal symptoms.. there is a lull at work and Christmas/New Year is coming.. next I will go look at my Yoga class graphs and charts.. Thankfully, that dataset was generated by me and is very accurate!

Once in a pink moon

This blog and my facebook account for that matter has had a "Separation of Work and personal life" policy that was maintained a lot better than the separation of Church and State policy by our government.

There were reasons for that! Very valid reasons.

Although many of my co-workers follow my travelog or see pictures in it,  they sent me comments to my gmail id rather than post comments on the site. Well, everyone has their own policy.

As for facebook, an incident two years ago prompted me to defriend 140 people in a single day and reduce my "friends" list from 200+ to 60. Why?

My then boss left my company and moved to St. Louis. As it so happened my sister relocated from New Jersey to St. Louis as well the same week and I had made plans to visit my sister for her son's first birthday function which tradition requires a maternal uncle be present. My brother was in India and I was the only maternal uncle within flying distance.... and I made the mistake of posting a comment on my ex-boss's facebook account saying "See you next week in St. Louis!". It was a harmless comment, as all I wanted to do was to say hi to him in the new surroundings.

It so happened that this was picked up by the rest of the workforce that was already deeply upset by his move to St. Louis.. what with him being the founder of our workplace and all.. as a message that I was going to join his new workplace. The rumor mill starts flying and folks give me the "et tu brutus" look for a couple of days. By the time someone was kind enough to tell me what was going on, yours truly had "had enough".

Cancelled the St. Louis plan, addressed the folks and kept going. Hindsight being better than 20/20, should have gone on that trip. That was a long time ago and it is water under the bridge.

Why bring all that up now?

Well once in a pink moon, it is okay to break that separation and post something about work. After driving to the same parking lot for the fifteenth year one gets used to the routine. Have gone to work by mistake in a trance so many times on a saturday when I was supposed to go somewhere in that general direction, find myself in an empty parking lot and have come back home. Have spent more time in the fab at work in terms of total time spent in any location in my entire life.

Seriously, kid you not. Have lived in many different homes as part of childhood, dorms in college, apartments as a bachelor, five different residential addresses over the last 10 years .. but one place that anchored me was the fab.

That place is expected to be closed in the very near future! Tempted to go on a rant about our current public policies, the fate of American manufacturing and R&D, etc. etc. but will refrain. That is another post for another day. We all know there is not much silicon left in silicon valley. There is going to be even less after this fab closes! Sad thing is over the last 18 months, started liking Austin and all those trips there, the wonderful folks there and another "fab" in Austin and that too gets the locks soon.

It is heartbreaking to see this happen and we still have to go through the motions of a person who has to perform his last rites while still being alive but that is part of the job at this point.

This blog has been an open letter of sorts to the world on happenings in our life and if anything warrants a post, this does!

A lot of things need to be done at work, at home, on the road. The mind is in pieces even after sleeping at 1, waking up at 5 and doing Yoga bright and early on a Saturday morning.  Have a lot of good leads and potential opportunities and am confident of getting jobs. Just need to know inside that "I am not settling" for anything but going for something that brings back those goosebumps on a day to day basis!

Now that most of those folks that were "defriended" (if that is what Facebook calls them) are not going to be co-workers in a short time, time to add them all back on facebook!

Last time, wrote them a note at work saying "My apologies for taking you off my friend list!". That from a guy who writes an open blog!

Now, it is just a post announcing to folks that they are going to get requests from me.. and they can send me one too..

Buzz ain't bad for a bumblebee like me..

Ok, there is a lot of negativity these days around anything Google.

Since I am not employed by google, am a self proclaimed techno nerd (not the software type though), and have had an open love-hate relationship when it comes to the products they dish out, here is an open heartfelt feedback of why this is actually a good thing..

1. Now that they fixed this contact business, it is no different from facebook. You can share all info to all public or choose to share your info with select people. You do have to invest some time and effort to set up the group lists for friends, family, etc. etc.. then what you share gets viewed by different people. Have checked it out and it works nicely. (it also tells you which items you shared with the world and which ones with family).

see the example shot below..

2. if all your buddies put their accounts and share it in the buzz stream, you get to see their feeds, tweets etc. just like you see blogposts on reader. the look and feel of a reader is maintained.

3. You don't have spam on this yet with stuff like "so and so took the How much do you know Shah Rukh Khan quiz and scored 13%. would you like to take the quiz?", in a quiz where even Shah Rukh would score only 5%.

4. the picture viewing is great!

5. It is almost a blogger and reader combined into one.

Now, if google makes you selectively embed links and images into the text box.. in other words, integrate the blog editor into buzz status updater, and have the ability to selectively show only my posts in the buzz stream, then will I even use blogger? highly unlikely.

So when people say Buzz is trying to replace facebook, twitter etc.. it also seems to be trying to replace blogger and blogreader as well!

They should have done this two years ago!

Just look at who are on your facebook list. Friends from school, college, work, friends you make thanks to who your kids go to school with, friends you make because of your hobbies and that is pretty much it.

It is usually the same bunch of people you email the most. I fundamentally had an issue with Facebook calling everyone a "friend", be it an acquaintance or a thick pal and almost stopped using it because of how it had security issues. Facebook fixed those issues and have a way to send your status updates to select folks only and have a way for you to say "NO" when it comes to information on your profile going out.

Buzz is doing the same thing.. It does surprise me that they didn't learn from the mistakes of Facebook before launching Buzz! The good thing with Google is that the react fast when you point out things to them.

Looks like someone heard my plea for a one stop shop with one login!

The second impression on this one is "I could get used to this!"

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Security...

Security is a double edged sword!

Take for example the full body scanners that are going to be at most major airports in the near future. You pretty much get an x-ray picture of everyone's nakedness (be it man, woman or child) and the airport security people get to watch you and your dear ones naked on the x-ray machine.

1. This is a violation of privacy in the name of security

2. Reminds you of those Holocaust movies where the Jews get paraded naked past a checkpost and they have that bleak resigned look on their faces and their biggest concern is not the nudity but the fear of losing their life. (except the irony here is you are being stripped bare on a machine by the supposed good guys!)

3. Apparently this doesn't work as intended.

4. These machines are made by companies which have a connection to the officials who is responsible for putting these machines in the airports. . . (this is like politicians who are on the boards of weapons manufacturers pushing for the Iraq war). Looks like somethings never change)

Someone posts an inappropriate comment and we think of turning on comment moderation. Then we realize the hazzle it becomes and turn it off. (Wish google would publish stats of how many people turned off comment moderation after turning it on for the first time).

People start violating my openness in facebook and I stop using facebook! There are only so many things where you can go into a shell.. you choose your options based on the bandwidth you have to handle all these security vs. freedom compromises!

Have pretty much stopped using facebook, twitter etc. and this blog is the only online thing I do. So imagine my surprise when I was presented with this security thing to read...

and I failed!

On a sidebar note, why should all these different sites have different logins, userids, passwords etc.

The way the world is going, the best thing would be to ask for the dad and mom to request a userid for the kid the day it is born, along with the birth certificate, social security number etc.

That way the kids birth certificate will arrive in 2 days.

The Social Security number in a week

Passport in 6 weeks

UUID (Universal User ID- I am patenting this concept if it hasn't been patented already) will arrive same day with premade google, yahoo, hotmail, twitter, facebook, myspace, etc. etc. accounts...

The kid will be able to use this ID on his/her 10th birthday?!

In any case, back to the topic of security, I think if we take the first family, and the top 10 Homeland security officials and post their full body scan pictures on the internet, this thing will go away real soon!

What do you think?

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Retirement

from facebook that is...

In case you missed it, there is a temporary retirement from facebook for a few months.

Hardly any time to do anything anymore you see..

the blog gets a once a week post and the rest of the time, just seems to disappear!

so, till the economy recovers, life gets back to how it was nine months ago, there will be no logging into facebook.

If you are a reader of this blog, friend, relative who is wondering why your friend invitation is not being responded to... you know why?

Retirement from facebook, now does that count as a midlife crisis?

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