In the days of social networking, there is no prize for guessing that we are actually missing out on our real social life. The one we share with real people everyday throughout life or whatever is left of it after Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes it is really necessary to be reminded of the offline life and the app we are going to feature here does just that. Not literally but finding areas of improvement. Social Life Audit (SLA) is an online service that based on some key observations interpret how you engage socially in real life.
The fact that we are almost nobody without a Facebook profile is yet again proved here. Why?? This very tool that offers to audit your offline life and does so by evaluating your Facebook activities. You need to have a Facebook account to use SLA. Your social rating depends on how circumstantially you share your real life on Facebook. The more the merrier. No wonder I failed miserably.
SLA is powered by the Face.com’s facial recognition API to analyze the photos related to you (uploaded, tagged or liked/commented). Once you are recognized, the game begins to roll in the more obvious direction. Your moods, the number of people you are with, the number of people from opposite sex you are seen with and even the mood of those people are considered as parameters. Based on the observations made, the algorithm estimates your score and comments on your social behavior.
The service serves a better purpose when it comes to evaluate location based services (or check-ins). Facebook check-ins are compared with the popular Black-book listings to find out whether you have been hanging out at the right place or hanging out at all. Well my result was even worse, my city was not even listed (and I was instructed to move to a city with improved social life, such a bummer, although it’s normal for any average town).
Apart from auditing your own social life, you can get a glimpse on your friends social engagement too. Search for a (Facebook) friend by typing in his name and you will get a comparative view of friends social rating matched to yours.
The observations made are not close enough (not because I failed) for those who uses Facebook as a promotion/marketing tool, or people who are strictly aware of the Facebook’s privacy concerns and refrain from sharing their real life in full detail. However for most of the Facebook generation, the results can be considered to be near perfect (for some I know personally, it does). The app seems to rely too much on Facebook. Images speak a thousand words, true, but if images were to be considered to evaluate somebody, there are other places/services where people love to share their life in pictures, such as Instagram or Flickr. It would be better if more location based social networks like Foursquare or interest based services like Path or Pinterest gets considered in the scoring system, as in current scenario people (and a notable smartphone population) tend to share their life here too. Overall, the app does a great job based on a unique idea but fails to seal the opportunity. So worry not if you fail here, better put your efforts on getting a life out of Facebook, that’s what the SLA is here to remind you.
