Did social games kill Facebook’s social graph?

Doubtful.<p>Facebook has mechanisms for defining both familial and romantic relationships, as well as usage data in the form of profile visits and wall comments and likes.<p>It might be a little more work, but I'm sure they can take a large friend list and still figure out who's family, who's a close mutual friend, who's disproportionately interested in who, and who's a fake friend just there for the purposes of social gaming.<p>Even better, since this true social graph depends largely on usage data, it's available to Facebook but not to scrapers.

News Feed is the reason I open facebook so many times a day. Games, apps and pages (some of them) kill the value of content in the news feed with stuff that I have no interst in. for some reason there is no option to hide all posts from all games, apps, etc. I hide horoscope apps in my news feed but there are so many of them thats it is impossible to mute all of them. so basically I do think games and apps killed Facebook's social graph, though if I was Facebook, I would not care at this point either as the valuation is going through the roof and userbase grows so fast.

This article had me until:<p><i>Asking the game makers to remove features that help the games go viral doesn’t seem to benefit anyone financially.</i><p>Sure it does. It benefits Facebook.<p>If the best way to get growth (ie, viral) goes away, most companies will fall back on the second best way to get growth: ads.<p>Guess who controls the most effective ad network on Facebook? Facebook.<p>Every time a viral channel is removed, a developer ends up buying the installs instead. It ain't pretty, or cheap, but you have to find them somewhere.

It is actually very easy to create a Friend List just for 'Game Friends.'<p>When you are adding a fake game friend, you can immediately add them to this list. Facebook makes this step easy.*<p>And to my surprise, it is also somewhat straightforward to exclude this list from your various privacy setting items. I assumed I would have to explicitly include - piece by piece - sets of friends with whom I do want to share data, but Facebook provides functionality to exclude a friend list. Bingo.<p>Now if I could only have a way to exclude a friend list from contributing to my News Feed.<p>* Furthermore, by assigning a fake friend to an appropriate list in the same step that you send a friend request, you can avoid the security gap within which a fake friend would have access to your private data before you were able to manually add them to such a list.

The way I'd see it, Social Games just accelerate the "fake friend" problem. The problem itself seems structural.<p>I have only so many real world, flesh and blood friends.<p>Once I've added all of my real who are willing to be on Facebook, what do I do?<p>The fun of Facebook isn't getting the same thing from the same people but getting more new stuff. So I'm tempted to add distant relations, random acquaintances and so-forth. As the trend continues in general, the addition of distant acquaintances become more standard, more socially accepted.<p>It is a real conundrum for any social networking site wishes to directly reflect real world identities.