I just started reading Dataclysm, the book by the guy from Okcupid. You can run your Facebook profile through the analysis. The closer the dots are, the more connected. It'll also pop out an assimiliation score: how important is that person to your network? Importance is determined roughly by how many people you would lose as second-line contacts if that person were to fall away from your network. This is mine:
That tight cluster in the top left is all my high school friends. Everyone has everyone as a friend. The bigger, but less dense cluster on the right are my current university friends. Bottom left are the few family members I have on Facebook.
I'd be interested in other people's networks. What does yours look like?
My wife is my #1, so I've got that going for me.
My wife's "assimilation score" is an order of magnitude higher than everyone else's (7 figures). My sister's is an order higher than everyone but my wife (6 figures). The next guy on the list is a dude who attended a bachelor party I threw for a friend five years ago whom I haven't spoken to since. On the graph? The person I'm closest to is indeed someone I spend a fair amount of time with, but who has never posted or commented or liked anything to my Facebook nor me to his. Make of that what you will.
Good! For 75% of the people, their spouse is the #1. They did research and found out that people who don't have their SO as the number one have a 50% higher chance of breaking up. High assimiliation score means that that person is very important in your network, as a link to people you don't know directly:My wife's "assimilation score" is an order of magnitude higher than everyone else's (7 figures).
It’s the people you don’t know very well in your life who help ideas, especially new ones, spread.
This is a neat tool. The two highest scoring people are two of my roommates, who I've been living with for four years now. After that it's a mish-mash of a lot of differenet people. Family and otherwise unrelated people such as Hubski folks and other people without many connections are the least assimilated.
I went to a summer camp with a bunch of people from my current school and one person from my old school, so that one person is highly connected to me b/c she overlaps with both the camp/newschool group and the oldschool group. There seem to be quite a few church/family connections too, which makes sense. Also apparently my sister is my #1? Very few of my super close friends are on Facebook.
Each group is very isolated, in particular there is only one person out of my college peeps who knows a single one of my high school peeps. It's kind of startling to think about, but I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Everybody in my high school goes to the states for uni, not Canada.
My closest assimilation was with someone I've never met in real life, he's an indie game developer that lives a few states away. I hardly talk to him at all. This tool is strange. Nowhere is there any list of people I actually associate with on a regular basis. The two people I communicate with most on facebook were well near the bottom and they shared a ridiculous amount of friends and interests with me. I should read this paper and figure out wtf is up with my facebook.
Nono that's the point of assimilation: the people with the highest scores would have the largest negative impact on your network, were they to fall away. If one of the friends that you share a lot of friends with were to unfriend you, you'd hardly notice because you share so many friends in common. So by that metric they're not that valuable to you.The two people I communicate with most on facebook were well near the bottom and they shared a ridiculous amount of friends and interests with me.
Okay, well let me add this new datapoint, my first highest on the list was my brother. Who I went to highschool with and have the same friends. I don't see how he ranks differently from other friends... I don't know. The whole thing is just kind of weird.
My r/relationships addiction on display in the upper right tab what what. The big cluserfuck on the lower right are all my bar/college friends. The close-ish network on the upper left are the gamer/larp friends I have decided are mostly not wastes of space or are at least worth not unfriending so far. As a nice touch, my two siblings are my two closest assimilators, then my 3 closest friends, not a surprise. The people on my edges tend to be co-workers/former co-workers and Hubski friends. Meriadoc is my least assimilated friend. (Sorry dude!) The honey is far down on the list, but hey, we've been dating a month, and he mostly hates/stays off of Facebook, and I tend to monitor closely what kind of things I post, and of whom, and certainly more so in the past as well. 
I've touched on it briefly here but I used to LARP in my college days. Mostly White Wolf stuff though my friends also formed their own variant - Echoes of Empires, which, even if you do larp, you probably haven't heard of. Mostly Vampire: The Masquerade, but also Werewolf and Changeling. OWBN at times. Tabletop was of course a thing that happened as well. I have some dear friends who are still way into it, but for the most part the group as a whole was poisonous, manipulative, incestuous, gossipy, society misfits who were content on getting by by doing as little as possible and sponging off of whatever system they could. One of the "ringleaders" of the group, hell, he's in his thirties and still lives off an allowance from his rich dad or something. Has never had a job. The allowance isn't enough but he can full time LARP and that's all that matters right! Right! I was cool, yo. Said with all the dripping sarcasm you can imagine.
Zomg. I retired undefeated from Car Wars and Battletech at the ripe old age of 13. Curious to find my "peeps" in college, I attended one meeting of the "RPG club" where I found 8 dudes and a chick who were big into Vampire:Masquerade. Which was a game that got you beat up by D&D nerds. In 1992. I'm a pretty big nerd. I can walk the walk, talk the talk. I'm a member of LASFS, a group of gentle nerds that makes me feel like The Fonz I'm so cool compared to them. I think they'd kick the shit out of anyone LARPing V:M. It amazes me that game still exists. 
All over the place. That gender ratio sounds about spot-on too, bonus if the female was on the land-whale side. One of my besties really, really, really fucking enjoys LARPing. I don't really get it, at this point, at all. It seems like far too much work on her end to be any fun, and moreover, I have a lot of difficulty understanding the appeal of what is, essentially, total escapism. She even does a LARP where none of them have any super-powers, I guess it's like an SCA variant. At minimum, if I am going to pretend I'm a different person for several hours, I want some cool powers to throw around. I don't want to be gathering herbs in a garden for some other person's feast. I also wonder how one must feel about their life in general if one's favorite form of entertainment is, essentially, pretending that that life is not real by engaging in role-play in fantasy, alternate realities. However, love the gal, and she's pretty down to earth otherwise, and LARPing isn't hurting her, so who am I to pick on her recreational activities? They were certainly the outcasts of the outcasts and in general I wish them what is coming to them, including what is sure to be a lot of tooth and mouth pain. Hygiene was none of their strengths. I'm well rid of them.
This is actually really good news to me! And a good time to mention it because I wanted to start a thread about something like this. I, and to a similar degree my honey arguewithatree, have been moving away from people more as time goes on. I've especially been doing this on social networks. I truly despise facebook and, while I have it and generally check it daily, I rarely use the service, while she is generally more involved with people online. We were talking the other day about how many friends we'll have when we're older, and that she's worried about not having as many as we are less and less willing to hang out with people just to hang out with people. I don't really have a problem having a very small group of friends that I talk to sparingly. My closest friends are more or less the same. My best friend in the entire world, jackdanielswife (who, while having an account here, has never used it grumble grumble) and I very rarely talk, but it doesn't mean we aren't just as close. For a long time, I still frequently talked to people online, but I've been pulling away from even that. I just don't see the point of talking anymore unless the person is physically with me, mostly. I don't have any qualms with the thought of living far, far away from people, but I still care tons about my friends! I see everything y'all post here, and those of you that I'm friends with on facebook I see all your stuff just as much! Like your meal vines, and cat snaps, and poems on kenning, and your (and insom's) halloween costumes. I just... connect less and less.
I think, honestly, it's a part of growing up - much as I hate to use that term. If it weren't for things like Snapchat and such...Well, let's just say that once in high school I forgot to talk to a friend for so long he thought I was ignoring him. With my friends I can be very "out of sight, out of mind." Doesn't mean I'm not close with them, but it takes more conscious effort on my part to think of and involve my friends than I guess is typical. The plus side of hanging out with friends less (and as you may remember I do tend to "go out" pretty often) is that you have more time to develop your own interests and hobbies. I think that's valuable. As people age they develop things that cause them to be free less, and as all your friends develop more of those commitments (like significant other, family, houses, etc), it means that even if you're free, they might not be. So you get more spare time to yourself, and I think people start to develop the habit of seeing spare time and using it for themselves as opposed to immediately reaching out all the time. I don't know, it's crackpot wisdom from a 25-year-old. Might be talking out my ass. But I agree with you: just because I don't talk to someone doesn't mean I am not close with them. I'm also a completely terrible pen-paller and email-er. Lack of physical proximity diminishes the urgency to keep conversation going. Unless, like I said, it's going on right there in my hand and I can get back to it quickly.
interestingly, here's my map. the top left corner is my sorority + college friends, top right corner is friends from high school, bottom right is jews i met in Israel, bottom left is jews i met at jew camp. outliers are coworkers for the most part. the most assimilated people are my jewish friends i've known my whole life and my people who either went to jew camp with me or lived in my hometown and who then went to college with me (actually a significant cluster seeing as we all moved 2000 miles away for school), then my mom cuz shes's a social butterfly. @meriadoc@ is more well integrated in this one than ref's tho that said, it's kind of inaccurate re: centrality. i was expecting more hits for people i interact with more, but that's a skewed dynamic as well