Power of Friends: when friends guess about their friends' guess

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Friendsourcing games aim to collect useful information about individuals by targeting their socially connected groups or friends. The current method of eliciting information is to pose direct questions to friends and expect a truthful response in return. However, such an approach not only becomes monotonous after some time but also suffers from problems like social awkwardness and reticence and thus, affecting the accuracy of the generated responses. In this paper, we present Power of Friends, a novel approach to friendsourcing games, which involves identifying the unanimous opinion of all the friends about a question related to an individual. We tested our proposed approach with seven different groups and were able to generate 47 facts about members of the selected groups. Participants particularly enjoyed the guesswork and interactive elements of the game. Based on the feedback obtained from the study, we propose four strategies for designing similar friendsourcing games.