Top Friends Gets Demoted: Socialistics is Now My Favorite
Published by Rodney Rumford August 31st, 2007 in Facebook, Facebook Applications.
Rating: 
I am a very analytical person and I value the ability to look at information from different perspectives. Socialistics is a new analytical application that lets users look at their facebook network data in very interesting ways. I can slice and dice data from many different criteria sets of my facebook friends network.
Socialistics is a very interesting social insight tool. It understands your relationship and gives you an overview of your friends and your network. Here is why I like it better than Top Friends: It is more useful, Period. I only use Top Friends as a navigation tool.
It has a really cool friend name tag cloud or a picture cloud that i can put on my profile page. Clicking a name or picture takes me to my friends profile page. Nice! The bigger the name/picture the more important they are to me most likely.
This application is best explained by pictures. Look at all the interesting ways that I can look at my network. I never knew my friends were so educated, single, etc.. I was talking with Socialistics CEO Ankur Shah this morning and he told me to expect even more features in the near future. The funny thing is that I had a sneak peak at this app over a month ago and I had to not say a word while everyone keept saying facebook apps are all about biting, and throwing food and are worthless.
I really like that this application helps me to visualize data and connections about my friends network. Oh yea… Imagine how well you could serve me data (ads, news, content, etc.). Social Graph in action baby. Are the readers of this blog waking up to the potential long term value of facebook and applications? Facebook knows more about me than Google does. Can you say marketers dream here?
Bottom Line: This is one heck of a sophisticated app and a lot of fun to look at and play with. Take it for a drive you will be be blown away! Make sure you let the modules load (this might take a while if you have a lot of friends, but it is worth the wait)
Common Friends
Profile Friend Picture Cloud
Profile Friend Name Cloud
Friends Country
Friends Education
Friends Cities
Friends Gender
Marital Status
Wall Posts
Work
Technorati Tags: facebook, top friends, socialistics, facebook analytics
Wow. Sounds like a great application. I hope they work out the slow load kink. Slow loads can cause user flight. I never used the Top Friends program because I thought of it as a dis to my other “less popular” friends. I only have a handful, so each of them is equally special. Of course, people with too many to keep tabs may want to check this out.
Screenshots look cool, but I’m getting a bunch of php errors when I try it. I’ll check back again later.
Yes, this does exactly what I wanted Top Friends for, without the presumption of preferences. I just wanted something that has my friends in view where I can easily click through to the profile of those whose materials interest me the most.
In my case, the Cloud view fits completely on my profile page, but the thumbnails don’t, so I am using the Cloud.
I only saw slowness the first time I loaded. I suspect that if I tell it to refresh, it will take a reasonable amount of time. It wasn’t that bad the first time.
More than I need, but a winner because it provides exactly what is helpful to me.
This is a cool app. I may now be my favorite. I look forward to the Sub Groups and Socialysis features. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Makes you wonder what else they could open up to data mining.
Personally, I think Buddy List is the best friends app (see link above). I’m surprised you still haven’t reviewed it. It has a very clean look, it’s simple, and it does its job extremely well. It allows me to put my friends into one or more groups that I name. When I click on a friend’s name, his picture appears as well as links to his profile, wall, poke, email, etc. I can give nicknames to my friends.
I tried Socialistics but I kept getting php errors so I uninstalled it immediately. Top Friends only gives you access to 32 friends and instead of linking you to friends’ walls, poke, etc., it forces you to install super poke and super wall and all those bloated crapps. On top of all that, it’s very spammy and annoying.