Favourite Friends

Recently, Facebook introduced a new sidebar for chat. Now, despite how you feel about Facebook’s constant changes, I’m interested in something else. Zuckerberg’s design choices are a conversation for a different day.

Try this. Shrink your Facebook window vertically and you might notice something. There are less people in your contact list! Of course, that isn’t much of a surprise, but look closer. Your favourite friends remain, while the ones you don’t like so much are kicked out due to lack of vertical real estate.

I’m sure Facebook isn’t always right at calculating this, and you might see one or two strange people remain even when there are only 10 contacts on the list. But it’s kind of creepy knowing they are even attempting to do this type of calculation in their algorithms.

Is this useful? Perhaps, it certainly does make it easier to connect with people you are more likely to connect with. Will the average person notice it? I’m not sure, it’s done so quietly and subtly that we’ll just click the friend we want to talk to and not worry about it, since all our favourite people will always be there.

This shows just how complex Facebook is, how fast it’s evolving, how much data they have on us, and how oblivious we are starting to become to the scores of information we are uploading to the web every day.

Maybe we’ve always sort of assumed Zuckerberg would be up to this kind of data mining behind the scenes. I don’t know the implications this has on privacy law, or the benefits it has on society - probably little on both sides so far. But hopefully this makes you think twice. You shouldn’t take everything at face value, pun not intended.