Earlier this week I discovered an interesting Facebook tool – FriendMatrix.me. It logs you into Facebook with permission and then works out which of your friends you interact the most with. It then grabs their photo and generates a collage in which each photo is scaled depending on the level of interaction. Connect with someone a lot on Facebook, their photo will be bigger, not so much, it’ll be small. If you have a large number of friends, those with whom you interact little or not at all will not even feature. The system “tags” the photos in your collage so that your friends get to know they featured.

The collage FriendMatrix created for me was rather interesting. Fellow Big Mouth singers featured prominently as did Robert Slinn who puts together the weekly Slinn Pickings column for my Reactive Reports chemistry website. My wife’s photo was rather small, but then you will probably be pleased to hear that, given that we both work from home, we don’t tend to use Facebook to communicate with each other on a day-to-day basis. Email is much more efficient

The images attracted a fair amount of interest from those featured and people left comment after comment. What I hadnt counted on was that every comment would send an update to everyone tagged in the photo whether they themselves had left a comment or not. This would have been, and was, a bit annoying for a couple of friends who called me out on the social media gaff.

I am sorry.

It wasn’t meant to happen like that. I should’ve realised the comments would trigger rapid-fire emails and updates for everyone tagged in the collage. I should also have realised that it would reveal to non-mutual friends some of the names and faces of contacts previously unknown and also show everyone else just how much a person interacts with another on Facebook. It could be dangerous to anyone with fragile relationships or who was hoping for their acquaintances not to become acquainted with them. Of course, if you don’t want to network, you really shouldn’t be on Facebook, so I won’t apologise for inadvertently connecting people who might otherwise not have met. Such serendipitous connections are often the beginngings of new friendships and collaborations that lead to great things.

Incidentally, Diane Richards on seeing the collage rather wittily coined a new social media phrase, rather than this being a tag cloud, she posited, it’s a “mug cloud”. Jacqueline Limpens spotted her photo on my mug cloud, but pointed out that I don’t show up on hers! Jacob Cox thought it was all very touching, while Nicci Spray revealed she had initiated the Friend Matrix only to discover that the biggest photo was of a friend, but rather inappropriate for public display. She should have words.

On the whole, an interesting experiment. Most of the commenters seemed to enjoy the experience. One or two people were irritated but not so annoyed that they would unfriend me (on Facebook and/or in real life), thankfully. One more thought, far more annoying that a Facebook toy that spreads the love in this way are the malicious links that harbor trojans, phish and other malware. Lots of people are duped by those and those links really are very annoying as the propagate almost endlessly across the network, accessing accounts. It’s probably only a matter of time before a very clever script reaches critical mass and Facebook implodes or else we find that we’ve friended and tagged the whole world and our walls are stuck in a feedback loop of eternal updates.

Related articles

• Facebook Friend Matrix (imagingstorm.co.uk)
• Unfriend Finder, Find Out Who Has Removed You From Their Friendlist On Facebook (ghacks.net)
• If Facebook Unfriends Coal, Will Greenpeace Friend The Open Compute Project? (treehugger.com)
• Jimmy Kimmel Presents Facebook “National UnFriend Day” Nov. 17 (popcrunch.com)