Still waiting for a Google Plus invite? Do you have Circles envy? A new Facebook app called Super Friends launched by social well-being startup MeYou Health has a little cure for curious Facebook users who want to see how their social graph is split among their friends.
Super Friends claims to be the “first true relationship visualization of all your Facebook friends.” The app creates a map that shows the connections between all of your friends and what friends connect you to the most people. It will not help with privacy or sharing things with certain people that you probably should not, but it is an interesting tool to see who your friends are and how they are connected. The goal of Super Friends is to keep you healthy. But how on earth is it supposed to do that?
Here is what MeYou Health has to say about the purpose of the app:
“To create a visual representation of people who may influence your health. According to the pioneering research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, your relationships with friends don’t just affect you socially – they also affect your health. In their book Connected, Christakis and Fowler show that behaviors – good ones like quitting smoking, or bad ones like obesity – can be spread, virus-like, via social networks. They found, for example, that if your friend starts smoking cigarettes, you’re 36% more likely to start smoking too. “
Facebook does have a feature where you can separate your friends into different lists and share certain information only with certain people, just like Google Plus Circles. Lists have been around since 2007 yet have never really caught on. As we wrote at the time, Facebook lists were a little half-baked and four years later not much has changed. It is still a tedious process that seems like it could made much easier.
It would be interesting if Super Friends could take a lot of the pain out of creating Facebook friend lists by exporting its connections map, with the labels of groups intact, back into Facebook as lists. That would take the brunt work out of separating the majority of a user’s friends. With a little culling and maintenance, it would be an easy way for Facebook to mimic Circles. Let the feature war continue.
If Super Friends was able to export its group connections back to Facebook lists, would that be a feature you might like to use?
