Jun 8, 2011
A clever new Facebook app seems to be suddenly taking off on Facebook.
The Facebook Friend Matrix is a third party app (i.e. one that is not developed by Facebook themselves) that provides a great conversation piece.
Once you connect to the app and allow it access to your Facebook account, it works out which of your friends you interact with the most and displays them in a collage of photos. This isn’t like the usual style whereby all your friends profile photos appear in one place, the Friend Matrix works out which of your friends you interact with more often and displays those in a much larger image than others.
I spoke with the co-founder of Friend Matrix who provided me with his personal insight on their intentions for Friend Matrix as well as their success so far.
“Our goal in building the application was to create an interesting way to visualize your friend relationships. We launched the application a few weeks ago and it has been growing rapidly since then. We’re currently generating over 200,000 images per day.”
- Andrew, Co-Founder Friend Matrix
Just to emphasise, the Facebook Friend Matrix app is currently creating 200,000 images per day and it was only released a couple of weeks ago. Quite impressive.
The app seems to work quite well. My wife appears in my collage as the largest picture (her profile photo is a picture of us both from a year or two ago) and is surrounded by photos of the friends and family that I interact with the most on Facebook. It’s quite a nice way of recognising those close to you.
The key people in the collage are automatically tagged but if you want to tag everyone else, you’ll have to get busy with your mouse.
Thankfully my mum got a good mention in here so I won’t land myself in trouble. Others might not be so lucky. Imagine yourself in a long term relationship, for example, and you see your partner’s Friend Matrix. Now imagine that your photo is large enough to be respectable and yet it pales in comparison to the size of your partner’s ex-boyfriend/girlfriend’s photo. I can imagine that would be a great topic of conversation over the evening meal!
You can get your own Friend Matrix by heading to the Friend Matrix website and connecting your Facebook account.
Facebook App Privacy
It appears to be well put together and the app’s website features its own privacy declaration and, and this is always a good sign, its methods of income generation are clear as it displays adverts from Google and LifeStreet Media while you’re waiting for the collage to render.
It’s not a good idea to trust an app that seems to give so much away for free without any obvious sign of income generation as there aren’t many companies out there that will give you something for nothing!
So have fun with your Friend Matrix and don’t worry, you can preview the final image before sharing it to your Facebook wall!
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