The people you care and talk to the most are the ones in your contact list. They are the ones you see on a daily or weekly basis and exchange text messages more than once a day with.
These aren't the 100+ people that follow you on twitter or the 500+ friends you have on Facebook but they are simply 5 to 10 close friends.
A number of big players are trying to figure out and tap into this list of friends because its an important piece of the user engagement puzzle.
Path is definitely close to figuring out one aspect of the contact graph. Most of my close friends and I all use Path on daily basis. I personally post up to 5 'moments' a day and most of my friends average around 2-3 'moments' a day. My engagement on Path is really high even though I only have 15 friends on it.
Path has built up solid data on who I post the most moments with and they have a pretty good idea of the people I spend the most time with.
Below is a screenshot of Path accurately suggesting which people I'm with before I posted a 'moment':
Facebook is now trying to tap into the contact graph too but they call this group your 'close friends' in their lists. For these people you get notified each time one of them posts on Facebook. I personally think the Facebook close friends list is doing it wrong.
There is a ton of other activity that goes on other social networks. A number of my friends tweet multiple times a day, post a few pictures on Instagram, like some videos on YouTube and so on.
There's a so much information being posted and shared each day on the internet that sometimes you might miss the things that are most relevant and important to you. I don't want to see every action my close friends make on Facebook.
But I think the coolest thing Facebook is doing by far is with Messenger and Chat. They know the people I talk the most with, so they know how to rank my friends better on chat. They do this really well.
I think this is where they should focus on rather basing my close friends just on lists. Because you know, friend rankings change over time and the only real way to measure the change is by observing how often a user communicates and sees each of his/her friends.
Chances are the more I talk to a person the closer of friends we are. Its simple.
Unfortunately Facebook and Path both have one problem - they don't get to see the full picture. People move up and down in my friend rankings based on things that go on outside of these two networks. Not all of my friends have Path and I don't use Facebook Messenger or Chat as the medium to talk to all of my friends.
Now let's say I met someone for the first time and added the person on Facebook. Because the person I just added is a new friend of mine, Facebook doesn't know how good of friends we are unless I add that person to a specific list. Chances are that person won't show up on my newsfeed quite often and it will take a number of interactions on Facebook to change that.
But if I connect with a new person via a Phone Number and add them straight to my Contact list, then chances are I want to stay connected with that person in real life. The phone number is the most precious and private piece of information everyone has. You can practically look up and find anyone you want on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. but you can't get anyone's phone number that easily. Better yet, you can't just get into someone's Contact list with ease.
So what does this all mean?
It means the Address Book (Contact List) is the future of social networks.
In a blog post Christian Kreutz describes the address book as the future of social networks:
Until next time,
Dami