Applications that cure the straggler syndrome

I’m finding more and more Facebook applications that strive to fix the friend problem. You might not have noticed this problem; I only recently identified it myself. The difficulty with Facebook friends, as with real-life friends, is that if you have a central group of friends who all know each other, then the few friends out on the fringes don’t get a lot of attention. For example, I have a bunch of Facebook friends who all hang out together in real life because we all live in the same area. And then I have a friend who lives in Damascus. So while my mini feed shows lots of Wall talk, pokes, fluff pets and updates of every kind about my central group, I rarely hear what my Damascus friend is doing unless I go check out his profile.

Lately I’ve found some applications that try to draw more connections between your Facebook friends, which could make a cohesive group out of your stragglers, or at least keep you posted on more of what your stragglers are up to.

I’ve already written about Friend Connector, an application that lets you introduce Facebook friends to one another based on mutual interests. Friend Wheel helps you determine the connections that already exist between friends, which is fun and helps remind you to use Friend Connect to add some lines to the wheel.

I am also kind of loving the imo.im friend finder, which is similar to Friend Connect except it suggests connections for you. This takes a lot of the shyness out of the process for me, because I can just shrug my shoulders and say “Look, guys, you were introduced by a computer suggestion. How can that be wrong?” It also suggests people you might want to befriend, although I’m not clear whether it’s pulling these from my friends’ friends or whether these are random strangers.

It seems to me that the best way to solve my problem — having friends outside my main circle — is to use these connection apps to either pull my friends further into my circle or insinuate myself into theirs. Or, I guess, I could just visit their profiles more often. If only Facebook had a cure for laziness.

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