Google conducted a study of social interactions between people.

Paul Adams, a user engagement researcher at Google, posted a slideshow from a recent presentation highlighting his research on how people use social networking technologies.
The presentation shows the shortcomings of the existing technology and focuses on the things that are wrong in the current implementation (for example, on Facebook).
But first things first.

Paul worked with real people and asked them to draw him their social connections in from real life, combining them into a network. He was also interested in how people use familiar tools, such as e-mail Facebook, Twitter, telephone, etc. Here are some of the conclusions from his research.

In real life, a person has several groups of friends that do not overlap with each other. In the existing implementations of social networks on the Internet, all friends fall into one “heap”, and networks created online do not coincide with real networks. Some features also came to light, for example, that only 15% of “friends” on social networks in real life can be called friends. That the average Facebook user has 130 friends, of which he regularly communicates with only 4-6, while 80% of calls are made to the same 4 people.

In his work, Adams talks about how the social web is radically changing, and focuses on a few basic things:
Social networks in real life. The way people are connected to each other offline, and how it relates to their online behavior.
Relations. Everyone has very different relationships with people in real life and this must be considered when designing online networks.
Influence The way people influence each other, and how it looks in the structure of our social networks.
Identification. Why identification is the cornerstone of a social network.
Protection of the person. Why it is critical to give people control over their own data.
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Paul considers many aspects of existing social networks, such as friends, fans and followers, status updates, groups, etc. Describes the need to design different types of relationships online, regular, close and temporary connections between people. Constantly giving examples of how these things are currently implemented, he provides recommendations on how this should look like when designing future social networks in order to bring online networks closer to real interactions between people.

Summarizing, Adams states that the existing social networks on the Internet only have a “rough approximation” to real human social networks, and that when developing future social networks it is necessary to “look around” to reality more often. The social web is not a whim and it is not going to go anywhere. But this is not an addition to the web, as we know it now. It is fundamentally changing, rebuilding and these evolutionary changes are becoming more and more noticeable.

Presentation in its entirety (more than 200 pages with pictures, 14 megabytes in PDF)
A source