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Social Profile - I’m interesting and boring

social_profile.jpg

Disraeli’s quip, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” could do with “and Facebook” tagged onto it, although it wouldn’t roll off the tongue so well, I have to admit.

I just received a spam mail notification from Facebook’s Social Profile app, where friends can rate you. Here are my results:

… your strengths:

best travel companion
kindest
best scientist

… your weaknesses:

best companion on a desert island

Apart from the fact that I’m far from being a scientist – maybe the egghead and specs give that impression – how can I be the “best travel companion” and then worst “companion on a desert island”? Aren’t they the same thing?

In the words of Pauline Hanson, please explain…

[tags]facebook, socialnetworks, statistics[/tags]

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

  1. Nigel Kersten | March 9th, 2008 | 5:50 pm

    I loved this one I got recently via Facebook.

    This email was sent by Social Profile. You can disable emails here.
    —
    In total, you were reviewed for dating 2 times and no people expressed interest in you.
    You are more desirable than 21% of 23,338,835 people.

    hmm. So the 21% of people who are less desirable than me… were they reviewed more times with no interest or fewer times with no interest? There’s an interesting value judgement in there somewhere….

    Along the lines of the social graph transforming into the social graft, there’s a rather awesome fiction piece in the New Yorker at the moment.

  2. Andy Polaine | March 10th, 2008 | 12:03 pm

    Weird isn’t it? I don’t really understand the stats behind the Social Profile stuff.

    Just started reading that piece in the New Yorker. This was nice: “Whatever we watched was, by definition, good, because we’d watched it”.

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