Comments on: ”Fake Following” to avoid information overload in social networks

By: Zvi Band

Zvi Band — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:59:50 +0000

I think you have to go one level deeper than the issue of reciprocating invites. The underlying issue is that people have their own different views of what constitutes “friendship” on social networks – somewhat similar to real world friendship, that you have spoken of before. Because of this, you’ll often end up with “friends” who have little interest to you, therefore diluting the value of the activity of the overall network.

By: Jared Goralnick

Jared Goralnick — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:37:48 +0000

Those are some good tips, Aaron! I don't know how fast a YahooPipe will be, but I can always find out. I'm also playing around with SocialThing, though I'm not sure that it does much in the way of filtering.

By: Productivity in Context » Blog Archive » Restricted Following for Higher Productivity

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:36:18 +0000

[...] grouping, hi-lighting, or restricting the updates that he gets to only see the most relevant. See ”Fake Following” to avoid information overload in social networks Personally I’m not just interested in restricting connections’ updates, but also in [...]

By: Aaron Dragushan

Aaron Dragushan — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:53:57 +0000

Hey Jared, I use Facebook’s filters, and it’s working great. Note that you can get an RSS feed for that as well. For Twitter I haven’t found a good solution yet. A yahoo pipe would probably work but who wants to go to the trouble?

By: Jared Goralnick

Jared Goralnick — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:37:44 +0000

Thanks, Titus. To help explain this feature, I’ve incorporated some notes and a screenshot above. Really appreciate your pointing this out!

By: Titus

Titus — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:03:39 +0000

Yeah, Nick’s article didn’t say anything about the filtering by friend list, though, which is what I found most interesting.

By: Jared Goralnick

Jared Goralnick — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:39:36 +0000

Thanks, Titus! That does seem rather interesting. Here's some more information on it from AllFacebook. I'll play around and report back. (I haven't yet read about its filtering features.)

By: Titus

Titus — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:49:52 +0000

Have you taken a look at Facebook’s new “Livefeed?” You can set up friend lists and filter the feed by the entries that are applicable to just those friends. There’s more functionality that would make it more useful, but overall it seems pretty capable.