Facebook Fan Pages (Groups)

I decided I needed to be more comprehensive about my fandom on Facebook. I had randomly become the fan of several topics my friends had become fans of but this left topical gaps among my Facebook pages. I had no idea what I was getting into! I don't know why I thought the task would be quick, I guess it had something to do with the small number of groups I was in up until this evening. For those that don't know about Facebook pages (groups), on every Facebook user's profile there is a tab marked "Info." At the bottom of the Info tab is a list of "Pages" (groups) that the user joined by supporting their causes or becoming a fan of their topics. Politicians get support for instance, rock bands get fans.

The impetus for feeling my Facebook pages needed attention was the fact that I appeared to be supporting Barack Obama twice. Because of limited real estate on the Info tab this meant that some other topic was falling onto a second page. I thought I could get all these objects of my admiration onto one page. Silly me! This became pulling the proverbial thread from a sweater and unraveling it entirely.

I could probably have compiled a satisfying list of pages by "depth charge" searching. By this I mean look at a few pages of topics and via inspiration (one television program begets another, etc.) I could round out a pretty good collection. If I like Star Trek (I do!) then I would search on analogous topics such as Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, and Galaxy Quest. Instead of doing it this way, the Harris in me came out and I decided to tackle this the slow and methodical way...I would browse through all of Facebook's group pages and find all the things I am a fan of in this fashion. What a dreadful mistake!

It would appear that Facebook fan pages are sorted primarily by popularity. I say "it would appear" because with each page turn, at the top of the page there is a topic that has more fans than the last topic on the previous page.

Many have observed before me that Facebook's pagination provides no hint as to how long the queue is. I decided I would find out the hard way. When I started, the pagination read "1 2 3 4 5 Next." For those curious, if you are on page one and you click Next, it takes you to page two, not the next set of pages--there is no easy way to advance to page 100 on Facebook.

At the top of page one was Barack Obama with over six million supporters (I am one) followed by Vin Diesel with over three million fans (I am not one). By page fifteen I was on topics just above and below the half million fan mark. For those interested, Mariah Carey has 500,496 fans on Facebook. Just behind her, at 499,691 fans, is "Naked Cuddles In Bed." Although I am a fan of naked cuddles in bed, I choose only to share that with you my loyal blog reader, making this fact a blog post exclusive. My Facebook friends will be so jealous!

Atop page 100 we find "Mini Eggs Cadbury" (not a fan). The mini eggs have 97,186 fans tonight.

While I browse I begin to wish there was more governance over these pages. Not just for parentally challenging topics but also because of the amount of redundancy. As far as getting parental I'll go straight to the crux of the problem as I see it. I believe that Facebook was started by and for college students and I applaud both the ingenuity and the end result. The number of fan groups around specific brands, of alcoholic beverages for instance, becomes saddening to me. I hypothesize the majority of fans of Marlboro Light cigarettes and Smirnoff vodka are people not legally old enough to purchase or consume them. A search on the topic "wasted" yields a few fan groups for a band (or bands) called "Wasted" but it also shows a group of 106,133 fans of "Getting Wasted" and another focused on "Getting Wasted After Exams" --an "Event Planning Group" with a fan base of 31,974. Among Facebook fan pages that's not a particularly high number but it's greater than the number of males in Framingham, MA (the largest town in the USA) according to the 2,000 US Census. Similar searches on "partying," "drinking," and the like yield depressing results.

With regard to redundancy it seems as though if I was the owner of the Boston Red Sox I wouldn't mind if a Facebook moderator combined the three fan groups I have seen so far into one category--permitting the world to see the true number of Sox fans on Facebook in one group. There are three pages of search results full of Nutella fan groups. Dr. House and Chuck Norris each have several groups, instead of the single, centralized page they each deserve.

I also observe that lingual barriers seem to create redundancy. There are several groups around each of the following topics: sleeping, napping, siestas, hating waking up on Mondays, hating waking up for school, hating waking up for work, and hating waking up for exams, but each one is labeled in a unique language, some of which I am only guessing as to the topics by their "avatar." Here is one entitled "La grasse mat' avec son (sa) chéri(e)." Babelfish translates that from the French to mean "Fatty the mat' with its (its) cherished (E)." This illustrates why I find the language barrier a little offputting.

I click further on and a disheartening revelation dawns on me: as the pages advance and the popularity goes down the difference between each topic's number of fans is also going down. This means that while on page 120, I am probably not even half way through the results. When I started, I was determined to go through all the pages. At this point, a few hours in, I have decided to cap my hunt at four digits (9,999): the first group with under 10,000 fans will end my hunt for topics this evening (and perhaps for good). I realize as I write this I may need to rethink even that goal.

Another effect of doing this for so long is I start to lose my judgment. Early on I would go past several sequential pages without joining any fan groups, but I just caught myself asking over and over again "Am I a fan of 'Axe Body Spray?'" (the answer is NO!). While Facebook has categorized each of the groups, even when I delve into a category (Celebrities / Public Figures) I am still presented with the same pagination issue.

[ long break ]

Good morning! I had to go to sleep at the bottom of page 150; the group was Tie-dye shirts with 52,415 fans (now including me). My hunt goes on.

I decided my new goal was to get to a topic under 50,000 fans. This project was not intended to take days; I don't frankly have days to devote to it. At 49,625 fans, the group "Brothers and Sisters" is about an eighth of the way down page 159. From here I will depth charge the rest of my fan groups and I will conduct that activity after I post this blog entry.

This blog entry was being concluded with dismay when I discovered I could cheat to get to the last page of results. All I had to do was spoof the browser's query string. Duh! So using this new method to circumvent Facebook's limited pagination I discovered that they capped pagination at 1,000 pages. Go figure...I am glad I gave up on page 159! The group that currently holds the dubious distinction of being the last topic before going into the too-unpopular-to-appear-in-the-pagination void is Hobart (a "Religious Center") with 3,466 fans. I feel good knowing now that it was best that I gave up browsing one page at a time; and I was able to get around the confounding pagination--GO ME!

It has been an interesting study--let me review what I have learned.

1. Facebook's pagination is due for a rehaul. There are so many good models for good UI/UX it is unclear why they don't provide better control. Throughout the Facebook experience, there are so many instances of brilliant DHTML pop-ins and on-demand control; why not provide something like that for getting to a high-numbered page?
   
   
2. Non-English speaking people like to sleep and cuddle naked a lot. OK, who am I kidding? Most people like to sleep and cuddle naked but the vast majority of the groups around these topics have titles in languages other than English. A friend of mine confessed that she set her primary language on Facebook to French and this has done wonders for dusting off her knowledge of that language. Shouldn't these titles be in the language I declare and get translated based on my preferences?
   
   
3. Facebook groups desperately need librarianship. I was asked "why?" this morning by a friend with a post-baccalaureate degree in library sciences. If for no other reason I might have found Brothers and Sisters on page 80 instead of 159. Further if I were to have kept paging forward to groups with really small memberships, I would see increasing redundancy and that's where I believe the groups suffer most. Ultimately a librarian's pruning and grafting is needed because for so many topics such as fanaticism for "snoring whilst sleeping during an exam" parsing through all these groups becomes exceptionally painstaking.
   
   There are way too many groups for any individual to actually parse through and become a fan of even a small fraction of the things they like. I wanted to find peanut butter on the list (I finished a jar while doing this study). I will have to go depth charge for that. Now that I am done clicking through 159 pages of groups I have an unwieldy list on my Info tab that I have to consolidate--who among my friends wants to wade through 293 topics across thirty pages of my predilections? Also, having now cheated Facebook's pagination algorithm, I wonder if I really only have thirty pages or if this is another imposed cap. Ultimately this falls under the category of poor UI/UX.
   
   My suggestion for this is two-fold:
   
   
   • Combine redundant groups. It is OK for there to be differentiation between "Star Trek" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" but there don't need to be ten groups called "Star Trek" spread across six pages of results when I query against that search term. I want one definitive group!
     
     
   • The other way to reduce the number of groups is to set a firm policy for group creation and police for inappropriate topics (getting wasted after exams) or antitopics (I Hate Boston Red Sox). Fanaticism is about things we like, not things we like to hate. Hate groups beget hate groups, adding to the confusion.

Facebook is a positive, family-friendly environment. Without effort, it will fall into the pig sty that MySpace fell into. I can't visit MySpace with children present for fear of some form of profanity or nudity; it's safe to say I don't particularly like to visit it alone. I enjoy sharing the lives of my friends and classmates with my kids. I would hate to lose that on Facebook. Information is entropic by nature. With entropy comes chaos and amid that chaos users will post inappropriate content into the mix. It is a slippery slope, one particularly hard to scrabble back up after you've gone any measure of distance down.

To conclude, I enjoy and applaud Facebook's groups functionality but I feel it needs TLC.

That's my two bits, what do you think?