Fitzgerald Steele was fascinated by Paul Adam’s (not the VizWorld Author, rather the Google UX Researcher) presentation on “The Real Life Social Network” where he presents the differences between real-life groups and social groups and how they are typically presented in online social networks.  Taking some tips from the presentation and publicly available information on pulling your social graph from FaceBook, he rendered some pretty impressive network graphs of his own FaceBook social network which reinforces Paul’s claims.

  • Facebook turns out to be a pretty decent proxy for my offline social network.  If someone were to ask me, as Google did in their social network user research, to identify my people, place them in groups, and name the groups, this is pretty much the list I would’ve come up with.
  • I’ve got more than 10 people in most of my groups.  However, this graph doesn’t really take into account the strength of the connections.  If I were to apply a filter to this graph that only showed people who posted on my wall, or who’s wall I posted on recently, I bet the number would be much closer to 10 per group.  And some of those groups would disappear.

Be sure to read his full writeup for more interesting insights.
Online vs. Offline Social Networks « Fitzgerald Steele.

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