But Facebook groups (or other features) could do with the same versatility being available. Applications could make groups a powerful framework for tasks like:

• charting fundraising by or for the group
• publishing regular event times
• better-than-forum planning and discussion tools
• polls, voting or surveys
• rostering
• game tournaments
• friend wheels to show how group members are connected
• Countdowns, countups and counters (e.g. how many of my yeargroup have got married)
• hundreds of thousands of other things only other Facebook users could come up with.

There’s a good chance Zuckerberg and his team have thought of this already, but the privacy arrangements would have to be quite complicated: at the moment individual users consent to individual applications having access to their personal information. Just because a user is a member of a group with an app, that doesn’t mean they consent to the app knowing about them. Will users have to consent to a group’s apps when they join it, or each time the group admin adds another app? That’s potentially a lot of bureaucracy.

Basically, this could get messy. But the future tells of bright and endless possibilities.

Nonetheless, I have for a long time wanted to know the relationships between my friends on Facebook. I.e., who of my friends know each other? More so, who is a common friend of a lot of my friends, but is not listed as my own?

The application that I saw on my friend Ariella’s page piqued my interest in analysis of the social network. That is the Friend Wheel. It plots on a circle the interconnections between one’s friends. Well, up to 400 of one’s friends, so it ?randomly excluded a few handfuls of mine when drawing the graph (sorry if that includes you!).

Annoyingly, it does not produce a very usable or analysable format, especially when your network of friends is large, but it does perform some clustering. So I decided to take the produced chart, and (unneatly) label some of the clusters I could identify… Have a look! Nothing too surprising, really, and more often the outliers—the ones that don’t get clustered in among others—are the interesting cases, and I haven’t made the effort to mark them.

(And if making this chart available is a privacy concern for some, please let me know.)

I think it’s largely influenced by novelty, and a little too by practicality. Many of these people I doubt have much interest in what I’m up to, the photos I’m in, or in writing me a message. Rather, because Facebook is a new thing to them, everytime they see someone they know and are amicably acquainted with, they get trigger-happy as they quickly grow their friend list on this online social network. I did it too: when I first joined, I added anyone from Sydney Uni that I vaguely knew, but that was because there were very few people from USyd at all on Facebook, so to add 5 of them was not a big deal; we shared not only our bond of acquaintance but the bond of being part of the minority Australian community on a North America-dominated web site.

And then there’s the convenience, because even if you’ve only met a person once, if you have a photo of them, you can’t tag them in it without them being your “friend”. And after a first acquaintance, there’s always a possibility of the relationship growing, but on the other hand you may never see them again; still you add them and are too lazy to reverse it. But I don’t think this is the real reason I’ve been receiving add-requests: I’ve not spoken to these people in many moons.

A person’s definition of “Facebook friend” is almost certainly looser than their definition of friend, but how much looser? Just because I am a Facebook-friend with A and not with B doesn’t mean I like A more than B, it just means that A probably has a more lenient definition of “friend”, and I was polite enough to accept their approach.

This is yet another of those online social problems that arises when you don’t have to look someone in the eye. Like being able to write more offensively online than you would ever say to someone’s face. Or maybe it’s just that the word “friend” is too weighted and if they could make up their own word for the relationship whereby I’m in someone’s list and they’re in mine, then that would cool me off and alleviate my worries. (I guess that’s why AIM chose “buddy” and ICQ used “contact”.)

Other social networking sites like (Newscorp’s) MySpace have the same problem, of course, but worse. At least with Facebook it’s easy to find and befriend people you know. (Whereas I consider MySpace probably the internet’s worst-designed most-popular web site.)

I also don’t think the social issues are Facebook’s biggest problem. No: that, in my opinion, would be the lack of internationalisation… But I might talk about that another time.

So, do I accept?