A recently published study by three researchers at Harvard examines how and why people make friends on social networks. The study shows that people who share an interest in music and movies are most likely to friend each other. Having a similar interest in books, meanwhile, carries no weight when it comes to making online friends.
The study also documents how Facebook friends impact each others’ preferences. The group used for this study was not easily influenced by what their social circle enjoyed, except when it came to classical or jazz music. Facebook friends who share a taste for those genres did tend to influence each other, researchers found.
“The extent to which friends’ preferences actually rub off on each other is minimal,” Kevin Lewis, one of the researchers, told Wired.
The researchers collected the data from a group of college students for four years. Information for the study was collected from self-reporting by the students, and monitoring from an actor.
This study might cause some marketing professionals to worry about the true impact of their social media efforts. Marketers operate under the assumptions that the public is more likely to trust a peer recommendationthan an advertisement.
Are you influenced by your Facebook friends? Do you influence their tastes? Let us know in the comments.
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Facebook Warning: App Profile Pages Set For Deletion
Facebook App Profile Page managers have begun receiving notifications that their Profile Pages will be eliminated Feb. 1.
Administrators can transfer Likes to their new Facebook Pages, if they take action in advance.
“In December we announced to developers that we’ll remove App Profile Pages on Feb. 1, 2012 so that users will be directed straight to an app or a traditional Facebook Page when searching for it,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote Mashable in an email, referring to a Dec. 9, 2011 poston its Developers Blog.
“In addition to lessening the amount of steps it takes for a user to get to an app, this move will also help eliminate the inconsistencies that exist between App Profile Pages and traditional Facebook Pages, such as different Insights, APIs, and distribution channels.”
The social network warns that the opt-in process of transferring your Likes may take up to seven days. As long as you don’t already have a Facebook Page, you can transfer the vanity URL of your App Profile Page as well. Facebook will not, however, transfer Page content. If you manage a page, make sure to save all photos, posts and Insights you want to keep.
If you do not respond to the prompt before Feb. 1, your App Profile Page will be deleted and traffic will go directly to your app.
Developers of new apps will not automatically get an App Profile Page, but can chose to create a Facebook Page from the Developers App.
Do you administrate a Facebook app? Have you received notifications your Profile Page would be eliminated?
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Have 2 Minutes? Check Out Who Has Access to Your Social Media Accounts
There are more than 130 Facebook app developers with access to my profile. Sixty-eight apps have permission to post to my Twitter feed, eight of them can access my LinkedIn data and another eight are connected to my Gmail account. You don’t have to be an online privacy expert to understand that’s probably too many, but how many apps have permission to your account?
Israel-based entrepreneur Avi Charkham has cut down the time it will take you to find out. After becoming frustrated with how difficult it is to locate app permission pages on social sites, Charkham compiled direct links to such pages for eight different networks into one place on the site MyPermissions.
“I kept connecting to services, and one day I was looking for the list to remove some of them,” Charkham tellsMashable. “I found that Facebook hid them behind four or five links…and thought to myself, ‘There’s no way people can find this.’ Two clicks I could live with, but four or five made it clear they were hiding it.”
He recently relaunched the list at the domain mypermissions.org, and it took off on Twitter and Facebook after a fan submitted it to Hacker News on Monday. Using the site to help clean up your app permissions takes about two minutes, and you can sign up to receive monthly reminders to review your app permissions thereafter.
Charkham is the cofounder of a web app called MyFamilio that lets families post their family moments privately. The simple MyPermissions site is just a side project and — if you’re looking to better protect your online privacy this year — a favor.
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Top 2012 Social Media Resolutions: Share Less, With Fewer People
Did 2011 mark the high point of oversharing? That seems to be the lesson behind a couple of studies that examined the New Year’s resolutions of social media users.
Most of us, it seems, did make social media resolutions of some sort. In a Harris Interactive survey of 2,000 Americanswho use services such as Facebook and Twitter, 63% of respondents said they had made promises to themselves regarding their use of such services in 2012. The survey was commissioned by social network Posterous.
Surprisingly few of those resolutions had anything to do with spending less time on those services. Only a quarter of respondents with a social media resolution checked the box marked “take a break from social media and spend more time interacting with people in real life.” Rather, most users wanted to better control how much they share, and with whom.
The top two promises, chosen by 44% and 42% of resolution-makers respectively, were “share only with close friends and family” and “be more careful about what I share.”
The desire for less sharing was evident on the incoming side, too. The third most popular resolution, shared by 37% of respondents: “Only read status updates from people who are close friends and family.”
Sharing less on social media may not be the most popular New Year’s resolution overall — it’s hard to beat mainstays like “lose weight” or “save more money.” But a separate study, an analysis of more than 152,000 tweets about New Years’ resolutions by Crimson Hexagon, suggests that the social media diet resolution has reached the top tier.
Leaving aside the 20% of tweets that simply said New Year’s resolutions were “lame,” the resolution to “share less on social media” was the third most popular — beating “be kinder to others.”
It’s easy to surmise that we all shared too much last year — that one too many drunken photos got posted, or that an ill-considered joke on your Facebook wall led to a dicey conversation with the boss. But perhaps there’s another lesson to be drawn here: that we’re hungry for a more meaningful, more intimate form of social media.
Most users know the feeling: that Twitter’s connections are too impersonal, that the majority of our Facebook friends are one-time acquaintances we’d rather not spill everything to. On the surface, that’s good news for services like Posterous and Path, which make a virtue of their limited social circles. (It’s also a boon forGoogle+, which touts its ability to divide your friends into various circles of sharing — though critics complain the Circles feature is still too complex for the average user.)
On the other hand, the resolution to share less — or to only share with family and close friends — doesn’t necessarily suggest we’re ready to give up on the twin behemoths of Twitter and Facebook just yet. After all, “switch my social network” was not a resolution that ranked in the Harris survey. Most of our world is on these big two services, and we recognize that. We would just like to be more careful about what we post there, and to whom.
Did you make a social media resolution for 2012? Let us know what it was in the comments.
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