The Human Social Dynamics group at Yahoo! Research has just launched Friend Sense, a Facebook application that measures how much people know about their friends’ attitudes and beliefs. It is surprisingly fun to play–even a little addictive–especially when your friends start playing as well.

We were inspired to create Friend Sense by a remarkable finding in political sociology. Despite increasingly polarized political parties and ideological rhetoric, most Americans are neither consistently “liberal” nor “conservative.” In contrast to our image of a country divided into red states and blue states, America is unexpectedly purple. To give just one example, knowing someone’s view on affirmative action gives you little insight into their attitude on the death penalty. Friend Sense is both a test bed for our theories of political polarization, and a compelling Facebook app that gives people a rare view into what their friends, family members, and co-workers think.

Source: Yahoo Next*

See Also: Have Some Fun and Sip Some Interactive PhotoSoup with Yahoo and Flickr (Beta)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 and is filed under Information Industry, Social Media, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.