Your Facebook Profile Isn't Really "You"
A recent study at the University of Texas shows that you might not know your online friends quite as well as you think you do. The study, which utilized a Facebook getting-to-know-you type application, "You Just Get Me," showed that the typical information posted on social networking sites, like favorite books, movies, and music, favorite quotes, majors, hometown, and other similar personal information, does not always give others an accurate impression of you.
Psychology professor Samuel Gosling and collaborator David Evans created the "You Just Get Me" Facebook application and web site, where users could answer forty questions about their personality and then compare their answers to how others view them. The users would rate each other based on these answers, letting their first impressions be their guide. People could be rated as anything from lazy to ingenious to quiet or rude or any of several other unique personality traits.
Surprisingly, answers to most of the basic type of questions, like those found on social networking sites, did not help users figure out what each other were "really" like. Instead, the researchers found that when a user posted things on their profile like their most embarrassing moment, proudest moment, or spirituality, their personalities were much better understood.
A Typical Facebook profile
Even by just posting a link to a funny online video, other people were better able to "get" the other person's personality more accurately that by basic questions alone.
Gosling was drawn to this research because he believed that how one is perceived online is more important than ever these days since social networks are often where other people get their first impression of you. He also mentioned that your social networking profile could also impact your employment opportunities as savvy employers have learned to search out the online profiles of potential new hires.
The full details on the findings of this research project will be presented Monday at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Seattle.
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Nice study, but isn't facebook's main aproach to "connect you with the people around you" rather to get to know new people through the platform? Well, yes there are applications...
But the fact of user's rating each others via profiles might fit better for other (-more open-) social communities.
Yeah, but Facebook (and a lot of other soc nets) have based their business model on the notion that they can pinpoint their user's advertising preferences through their public profile settings ... if this study is true (which the click through rates at MySpace and Facebook strongly suggest) then the very foundation upon which the soc nets are built - precise ad targeting based on user defined profiles + actions - is about as valuable as a one dollar bill in Europe.
If you're searching for this app on Facebook, eliminate the spaces like this - YouJustGetMe. As the author of the paper, the only tweak I would make to this article is that impressions formed from online profiles are actually better than short face-fo-face interactions (if you make sure to study only total strangers). Point well taken about how Facebook connects existing acquaintances.
And isn't this really the problem with a previous post on ReadWriteWeb that talked about Facebook going business to business.
The web is the perfect place to lie.
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These results do not surprise me. Whereas before, when a resume was one of the only tangible profiles of a person, a person now has many online profiles (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). I think it is important for a person to keep in mind how these different profiles reflect themselves. Whether you like it or not, we are now in the age of personal brand marketing.
My thoughts can be found at http://abovethenoise.blogspot.com/2008/04/age-of-personal-brand-marketing.html.
Would love to see the details of this study and a great point made about Facebook built around the idea "connect with the people around you".
In regards to the comment about Facebook being able to target relevant ads to a user based on their public profiles, it is a well known fact that its not very effective(we did a quick study of the Facebook Flyers program). I believe (and Facebook as well as demonstrated by the recent "beacon" debacle) that the answer isn't so much in a user's public profile but in his/her actions and interactions within Facebook. This however, does bring about a variety of privacy concerns that Facebook has learned the hard way. How they go about these issues will be very interesting see down the road.
We, at Youlicit, are also developing an engine to connect people based solely on their interests and are examining ways on how this can be applied on Facebook.
Read the full PDF of the study "What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality Impressions?" at http://www.psychster.com/library/EvansGoslingCarroll_ICWSM08.pdf