Joseph Hsu

Awesome, just grabbed my Facebook username: http://facebook.com/josephhsu

FYI: just discovered that you can add/remove periods anywhere in the username so http://facebook.com/….joseph.hsu would work.

note: you may not have gotten the new design, I believe they are rolling it out google-style (some users at a time)

Changes

real-Time streaming

My favorite change to the homepage is real-time streaming of updates. This AJAX goodness now auto-updates the stream without us stalkers having to repeatedly press ‘refresh’. What real-time does is allows us to waste less time trying to fetch from our streams which breaks our workflow. I’ve presented about this at the last BarCamp Buffalo.

highlights

Re-vamped right column to show popular items from your network’s stream. Filters out the good stuff, saves the trouble of looking through your stream and I believe it also is determined by clicks (seen some photos there with no comments).

filter by group

Left side lets you see groups (of friends) that you may have created and allows you to view items only posted by those people. Time to organize out some of my network. Family group is a definite must.

filter by type

Another filter is the ability to filter by type. This allows you to filter the stream by things such as video, photos, links, notes and even by application. When you click on some of these, they change the publisher (check next section).

publisher box by context

The publisher, the box that allows you to post to wall, update your status, share a link and other things, has now been re-vamped to fit any context. In the homepage, try clicking on the video filter, now the publisher lets you record a video (through webcam) or post a video! How awesome is that? It’s now flexible to adjust to your context.

prediction: Since they have application filters, I wonder if they’ll open up API methods to allow applications to add features to publisher based on their own context.

rounded corners

A small change, purely eye candy, is that small profile pictures now have rounded corners, less dangers for the eyes.

Additional Reading

• See the official Facebook homepage tour
• look into the redesign by Eric Eldon at VentureBeat

Here is the list of top social games based on rewards. I added the active monthly user numbers, rating and type of reward.

*note: some ratings weren’t available (probably due to not enough ratings) and the numbers are from March 9th, 2009.

It’s interesting to see that the top game according to Inside Social Games rewards money, but does not have even close to the number of users as the others (maybe due to length of release?). Are users looking for money or things that enhance the game (eg. virtual goods/currency)?

Read the original article “Super Rewards The Top 11 Player Rewards in Facebook Games” posted on March 9th, 2009.

Facebook Data Team did some research on relationship management through Facebook, which was used in the article “Primates on Facebook” in the Economist.

The question being: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks?

Social networks provide a means of relationship management through passive engagement, a one-way communication of observing activity in their network. Facebook provides the News Feed as a way to monitor your network’s activity.

Here we can see that there is a one-way communication with half our total network.

Read “Maintained Relationships on Facebook”

Recently in my Communication in Organization, my professor Michael Stefanone mentioned he is cutting down his friendships on Facebook. His reasons being that with most of them, he isn’t anywhere closes to being friends with; he’s aiming for about 50 total friends. This brings about the question…

Is a friend on Online the same as IRL?

Friendship Offline

Friendship, as defined by Fehr in “Reflect & Relate” by Steven McCornack:

a voluntary interpersonal relationship in which the people involved like each other and enjoy each other’s company. — Fehr, 1996, 2000

The main points being that friends are voluntary and there is a mutual liking. I believe the most minimal requirements to be friends are: the two must have awareness of each other and mutual liking.

Friendship Online (according to social networks)

First, let’s look at what social networks like to call our connections with others:

When you join a social network and start adding people to your network, they presume that you are friends by using an “add friend” button. Though, they may be wording it this way to incite social behavior or simply that they originally didn’t predict the friending frenzy that Myspace brought.

Inside of social networks, we are ment to be social. Isn’t that the whole point? You add the people you know IRL, but is that it? True, we add those that are in our social circle and they are geographically clustered which means we most likely we have met them in person, but we also search for those with similar interests to expand our networks.

The problem with using “friends” to label connections is that it assumes us to have some sort of mutual relationship, sometimes our connection is the first communication.

Friendships online and offline are not the same. Social networks label connections/relationships online as friends (eg. “add as friend”), but do they intend to use the word’s denotative meaning?

So… Should We Limit the Term “Friends” Online to that of Offline Friends?

Obviously not. Just because they use the word “friends” in the app, does not mean your network has to consist of friends only. The connection itself represents an opportunity to build or maintain a relationship.

So add whoever you want, go crazy! Just make sure you add with the intention of following up. Build relationships. Just remember, it’s not about numbers (unless you’re talking about money), it’s the relationships that come.

When Building Your Network

Remember: While it isn’t a game of numbers, building connections are important to start and maintain relationships.

Other Resources

• Changing the way I use Twitter… by Kevin Lim
• Do you have the Social Media Disease by Keith Burtis
• What’s the difference between offline and online friends
• The blurry line between online and real life friendships

UPDATE: There’s a good article about friendships and Facebook over on the Huffington Post titled “Are Facebook Friends ‘Real’ Friends?”