Because I am weird (and because I only have 35 Facebook friends, making it possible to turn my weirdness into some data observations), I have spent the last 10 minutes analyzing how many friends my friends have. On average, they have 162.8857 friends (the person who is .8857th of a friend keeps showing up as a suggestion but I keep ignoring him, preferring whole friends to percentages). The standard deviation is 93.06284 which is remarkable (only in the sense that I am remarking on it) because even at only 35 friends, I am with 2 standard deviations of the mean.
My friend with the fewest friends is Jane at 50. The friend with the most is Madison with 409. Madison is almost 3 standard deviations above the mean of my friends which is probably completely meaningless. There seems to be some inverse correlation with number of friends and age though I have not run the numbers to tell you what the Pearson’s is.
In figuring out the numbers, I only ran into 4 friends with whom I had no friends in common (one old high school buddy, one CrossFit friend, one old AOL/chat/email buddy and one friend from our dog boarder) and in the remaining graph of friends, I only ran into a dead end three times (a dead end being defined as reaching a point where I could not find a friend’s friend numbers without having to return to my home page, once with my family, once with previous work related friends, and once with mutual friends of Kathryn’s. My friends seem to be tightly integrated through a handful of limbs on the tree.
What all this means is that I slept 12 hours last night, haven’t had a drink tonight and thus am not the slightest bit tired at 11 PM. I have finished the book that I said I would (Wisdom of Crowds, highly recommended but you can’t have my copy because I borrowed it from Matt F , another friend, also the friend who shares names with the largest number of my friends at 3), I have roasted and deboned a chicken, I have bought groceries, I have watched Bode Miller win Bronze in the downhill and so I am allowed to waste time on Facebook though I will have to admit, this is the most fun I’ve had on Facebook since starting here. See, I told you I was weird.
February 16, 2010 at 1:04 pm
I hope the book informed your already deep interest and experience in prediction markets. Now we need to have some beer and a) return said book b) discuss prediction markets c) ramble on about other odd [interesting] topics. BTW, welcome back to twitter. Your tweet alerted me to the existence of this blog post, which of course makes me famous. Well, famous among your [short] list of friends.
February 16, 2010 at 3:48 pm
I actually have the book in my backpack, ready to give back to you Thursday night. I specifically chose to finish it so that you did not think I had absconded with it.
I’m up for drinking beer after Hack Club if you are. Otherwise, I’m almost always open to drinking beer.
I’m toying with using Twitter as a marketing tool. That makes me feel dirty but it also keeps me productive.