FriendFeed ‘Likes’ Compatibility Index
May 28, 2008 31 Comments
A favorite feature of FriendFeed is the Like. You get to indicate your interest in an item with a simple click of the Like button.
The act of applying a Like does two things:
- Provides feedback to the content creator
- Reveals what your interests are
It’s that second point that is interesting. Amazon.com matches you to other shoppers based on what you buy in order to provide recommendations. Toluu matches you with others based on common RSS feeds. Diigo matches you based on common bookmarks and tags.
How about matching people based on common FriendFeed Likes? Call it the FriendFeed Likes Compatibility Index.
Curious about this, I went to my Likes tab on FriendFeed. I went back to my 50 most recent Likes, and tallied the number of Likes by others. By doing this, I figured I’d see with whom I had the most in common.
The top 29 people are shown below – I put the cutoff at having 4 Likes in common. Some of these folks I know, others I really haven’t interacted with yet.
Here are my top matches in FriendFeed:
- Atul Arora (13 likes in common)
- Louis Gray (13)
- Mitchell Tsai (11)
- Shey (11)
- Robert Scoble (10)
- Thomas Hawk (9)
- Julian Baldwin ( 8 )
- Jason Kaneshiro ( 8 )
- Mark Trapp (7)
- Charlie Anzman (6)
- Mark Dykeman (6)
- Bearded Dave (5)
- Bwana McCall (5)
- Mack D. Male (5)
- Mike Fruchter (5)
- Phil Glockner (5)
- Alejandro S. (4)
- Andrew Badera (4)
- Anthony Farrior (4)
- Dobromir Hadzhiev (4)
- edythe (4)
- Kenichi Matsumoto (4)
- Marco (4)
- Nikpay (4)
- Rob Diana (4)
- Ruth Ferguson (4)
- Shawn L Morrissey (4)
- Susan Beebe (4)
- Timothy Neilen (4)
One small observation – I’m not in sync with a lot of women, am I? What’s up there? FriendFeed Is from Mars, Twitter Is from Venus?
Now what I need to do is to subscribe to those on this list that I haven’t yet. Also of note – there were 241 different people with whom I shared a Like in this analysis. Really great how FriendFeed lets you come into contact with a wide range of people.
Would be cool if a script could automate the FriendFeed Likes Compatibility Index…
*****
See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22FriendFeed+%27Likes%27+Compatibility+Index%22&public=1
About Hutch Carpenter
I'm Not Actually a Geek 
I could automate this….
…If friendfeed fixed this bug http://blog.yuvisense.net/2008/05/26/friendfeed-bug-makes-it-useless-as-an-archive/
Interesting point for analysis! If nothing else, social network graphs are a statistician’s playground.
My major problem with the “Likes” is that judging from our blog’s stats like does not actually mean that you are really-really interested in the content. For example, for a post with over 30 likes only 20 people actually clicked through to see the post itself. To me it means that people only click “Like” to ensure their presence on FF, not to actually join the conversation or show their real interests. Pretty hard to graph something on such type of information, no?
FriendFeed is holding all sorts of information to characterize the user better. This is a good start to generating conversation over what types of features the community might like to see in the future. Good post Hutch!
Interesting post. I find that I sometimes use the Like button not to indicate that I really like something, but just so that I can find it again later on my Likes or Discussion pages.
I could use you as an index to see how well I’m blogging. 😉
Svetlana, that’s one view, but you’re not seeing the whole picture.
If I saw a Profy story on my RSS feed, and liked it, or even shared it, and later I saw it on FriendFeed, I could click “like” and yet, I didn’t have to visit it again to read the story and show the referral click-through.
Also, it’s possible many folks “like” headlines. It’s not about FriendFeed presence, but more so about liking ideas they agree with.
Pingback: FriendFeed “Likes” Compatibility Index Pre-Pre-Pre Alpha - The StatBot - Fun stats. Visualizations. Leaderboards.
http://thestatbot.com/2008/05/29/friendfeed-%e2%80%9clikes%e2%80%9d-compatibility-index-pre-pre-pre-alpha/ Louis and Scoble’s there…
If you want yours, just leave a comment, I’ll generate it and put it up…
Your’s are here: http://thestatbot.com/2008/05/29/friendfeed-%e2%80%9clikes%e2%80%9d-compatibility-index-pre-pre-pre-alpha/#comment-205
Pingback: Friendfeed Like Compatibility Calculator
@Andrew Badera – yeah, FriendFeed is virgin territory for stats analysis.
@Svetlana – that certainly is the glass-is-half-empty view of it. But I wouldn’t damn Likes based on that point of view. There’s still a lot of information there.
Most people are still clicking the links. And suppose people are clicking Like not for the content itself, but the ensuing discussion in the comments? That’s still good to know.
@Julian – thanks. I suspect there’s a rich vein of analytic-type of features that could be rolled out for FriendFeed.
@Mack – the Like as bookmark is a use case of mine as well. But the fact that I wanted to come back to it later still counts a form of interest, which is what the Like is.
Also, I created my own private room where I re-share things I want to remember. Rooms as a bookmarking vehicle.
@markdykeman – I love Broadcasting Brain (http://broadcasting-brain.com/)
@Louis – good point on Likes for headlines. Sometimes a headline is THAT good.
@Yuvi – love the work you did on automating this. Check out his blog for more info: http://tinyurl.com/6ba7oa
@hutch – that’s the spirit!
Great idea, and great to see that it’s already provoked a response! These kind of app developments and additional functionality are what really make services like Friendfeed invaluable.
I must admit that I don’t use the “Like” button as much as I perhaps should. I’m too wary of Friendfeed becoming too scattergun in terms of things being rated, as many other services are. But once I extend my usage then the pre-pre-pre Alpha that Yuvi is working on is well worthwhile!
I use my Like very sparingly. There seems to be this want for FriendFeed to be THE platform for everything: conversation, bookmarking, message board, feed-reader… whatever happened to doing one thing well? If I want to bookmark something, I’m still using ma.gnolia; as Yuvi has shown, stuff isn’t in there forever, so I’m going to lose it if I rely on FF to save it for me. For me, the Like is one of two things: “Hey, cool thing you did here/linked here” to the originator and/or “Hey, this thing is cool and I want to bump it back to the first page so more people see it.” That’s why I think MY likes have more value. 😉
Hutch – Just wanted to let you know I really ‘like’ this 🙂
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