The Real Life Social Network

Trolling through SlideShare today looking for interesting social media presentations, I came across this fascinating document by Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher at Google. Paul is the research lead for sociability and works with teams building products and features for the social web.

The presentation, called “The Real Life Social Network,” discusses problems that people see when using social networks like Facebook — most importantly that people don’t actually have just one group of “friends.”

Adams’ research shows that in reality, most people have between four to six groups of friends. He argues that social networking applications need to be built with that reality in mind.

Does the presentation indicate that Google is looking to address these issues in an upcoming social-networking product? Perhaps not.

According to WSJ.com, “Google played down talk of the report as a guide to its plans, [saying] that the presentation simply represents some of the ‘industry trends and observations’ that researchers routinely discuss.”

Many seem to disagree. The presentation (embedded below) has proven to be very popular, with over 66,000 views since it was posted to SlideShare a week ago.

Either way, such a detailed document coming from the heart of Google certainly bears a look-see.

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About the Author

David Swinney helps businesses implement social media strategies and plans in order to identify customers and their influencers, engage them in conversation, and leverage those connections to improve the bottom line. As a technologist with a background in social media, corporate communications, technical and customer support, vendor relationship and project management, he is able to comfortably discuss various social media topics with managers, individual contributors, and just plain folks. Contact David if you're looking for someone to create, build, and enhance your customer relationships using social media tools and technologies.