stoweboyd and the /messengers

Facebook has also been on the receiving end of some heavy criticism this year for an array of privacy issues and a perceived desire to look and act more like Twitter. Some of these concerns are valid, and some are just the growing pains of a five-year-old company in a market that continues to change and adapt at breakneck speeds.

All of that aside for a moment, I believe that Facebook has one important, underutilized feature that no other site can replicate or compete with: the “mutual friends” list.

When you go to an individual’s Facebook page, the list sits in a little box on the left of the page, visually displaying who you know in common. For me, this often-overlooked feature has become an integral part of my Facebook experience. Sure, I still go to the site to update my status and peruse my news feeds, but I use Mutual Friends more than anything else.

This feature enables me to supplement the real world with additional digital information. When I go to a meeting or party, I take a minute to look up who’s attending and quickly explore friends we might share. It’s the perfect digital icebreaker. Increasingly, when I go to a conference and meet someone new, I’ll sneak into the hallway and look them up, too. Or, if they seem unencumbered by potential privacy concerns, we pull out our phones, and using Facebook’s mobile application, look each other up.

Last year, for example, I met Wired columnist Steven Levy at a conference in Boston. After a few minutes chatting about mundane tech stories, we quickly pulled out our laptops, zipped along to Facebook.com and sat for an hour discussing who we knew in common.

via bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Nick Bilton must be a gossip. Or maybe he's onto something. Our accelerated world leaves us with hundreds of 'continuous partial friendships' where we don't know a little about people, but hardly ever have a whole-person understanding about anyone.

FB's mutual friends feature can emulate the village knowledge we lack about friends in common, from which we can infer a lot. And have a basis for juicy gossip, too.