A question to all: what are social networks (Facebook/Myspace/Orkut) good for?
Mason: shush. As awesome as it is, your research isn't what I'm asking about. Okay, so you've got some good answers besides that. (For those who don't know, Mason has done some neat applications of his community-finding work to Facebook data.)
Finding old friends or lost contact information is certainly a plus. It's also nice to be able to browse around the network and see where acquaintances ended up. What else?
I took the plunge -- first with the Club of Mars, and then with Facebook. My initial assumption was that the pervasiveness of a network (Facebook, Myspace) was pivotal to it's utility, which has quickly been proven false. Club of Mars has ~500 members, making it more personal, and a bit more comfortable to use to chat up strangers -- I'm already sitting on an indy comic recommendation that sounds cool, Johnny Repeat. Of course, all of my previously-stated benefits go out the window.
Why suddenly join? My months-long project is finally working, as of a few days ago. I need to monitor lots of big, slow tests in order to know what parts of the code need my attention. That means I needed to find a way to kill lots of intervening minutes online. Enter social networks!
EDIT: What is the Club of Mars? It's a small social network created on Ning by Warren Ellis for Bad Signal readers, and since I'm a compulsive fanboy...
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Sometimes those old acquaintances who look you up will make a pass at you. (Apparently I'm more approachable now than I used to be...)
Travis: Is that good or bad? (I guess both...)
Lemming doesn't want me to comment about my research, so I won't except to say that it was my student Eric Kelsic who came up with the idea of studying Facebook (I hadn't even heard of it until he told me his idea) and two other students (Olga Mandelshtam from Caltech and Mandi Traud from UNC Chapel Hill) have continued where he left off. (That is, the extent to which I'll talk about my research is to stress that my students are the ones who did the heavy lifting, not me.)
Also, I like the phrasing of the post. It makes me think of "War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" (Maybe I got the lyrics slightly wrong... I didn't look them up.)
In terms of the size of the network community, while I agree it's not essential for certain boons, it does give huge improvements (to the point of being, err... essentially essential --- this phrasing is technically grammatically correct but simultaneously ridiculous) in other respects.
I have been contacted by someone I hadn't heard from in a while in Facebook, so I definitely like the prospect of getting in touch with people. (Via Facebook, I was also contacted by a Caltech person who I didn't previously know. It was good at first and then... not so good. Though how things played out doesn't really have anything to do with Facebook itself.)
And as Lemming points out in the post, the utility of using Facebook (and similar things) for research (awesome or otherwise... but I'm biased here) is a different beast entirely from the utility of using the service in the first place.
Another point: In principle these things can be used to organize events; I just set up a Facebook group for our monthly lab games night. Although (since not everybody is on Facebook) it won't replace e-mail announcements, it gives us a way to discuss location, timing, etc without spamming a bunch of people who aren't all that interested. Since I just set it up, though, it remains to be seen how well this will work.
Mason: Certainly there is the potential for good or bad. The two times it's happened to me it's resulted in pleasant, flirtatious exchanges but nothing more (mostly for reasons of distance).
But do the discussions actually benefit from the Facebook format or are you just doing something that you can just as easily do by e-mail? It seems to me that this doesn't really utilize the Facebook technology in a fundmental way. (So it can be done there, but it could also be done elsewhere.)
I have some fun playing with the 'I am' feature that people can see on updates (I just change it when something else gives me a reason to log in), but this is hardly a fundamental benefit from the medium.
I think my favorite one has been: "Mason is." Here's to being philosophical...
I think there are several ways Facebook works better than e-mail for this purpose, although these are arguably minor. First of all, for this kind of recurring event there are going to be some people that are regulars and heavily involved, some people who attend casually, and some who come once or twice but don't really care for it. All three of these groups should get the invitation, but last group won't want a whole flood of e-mails discussing details afterwards, and the second group will only sometimes be interested.
On the other hand, if these discussions take place in a Facebook group, the first group can go there regularly, the second occasionally or when they're planning to attend the next event, and the third can just ignore it. And individual discussions will be threaded by subject making it easier for people to decide what to attend to.
Another point is that sometimes you're going to leave in five minutes and just need to pull up the address or some other detail. Unless you're very organized, you have to go looking for this in your e-mail stream. It's nice to just have the salient information at the front of the Facebook group when you need it.
Now, all this could be done on any random message board (or, say, Evite), but people aren't necessarily going to sign up for that. Using Facebook makes it part of a larger social center that (some) people are checking regularly anyway, which substantially lowers the barrier to getting it going.
All that said, it remains to be seen whether this will work as intended or if the group will languish in obscurity while the real discussions take place at the lunch table.
Travis: Let me know how it goes. I know that when I have e-mail threads, I am one of the organized ones who just keeps the most relevant e-mails (or, I send myself a summary e-mail with the info I need). So if everybody agrees to sign up (which is by no means a given for a particular set of people), then I can see the possibilty of getting improved results (even though I suspect it won't typically happen). And these e-mail threads kind of count as "pleasure e-mails" in another loose sense of the word. :) [Incidentally, the reason I prefer them is that I like getting all my messages in the same place because I know I'll be checking it continuously anyway.]
Travis: Actually, I find email *very* handy for looking up that kind of information, as long as GMail isn't sucking at the time... I've adapted to the point where I phrase all sorts of tidbits I try and remember as google-like searches w/ appropriate associated keywords.
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