Accidentally in Code

Tag: Social Networking

  • Social is Normal

    Jump on the social media bandwagon
    Credit: flickr / Matt Hamm

    Last week, I read Coders at Work (Amazon, Google books). I really enjoyed it, it was fascinating and I learned a lot about the history of programming and the programmers themselves.

    There’s a great quote from Douglas Crockford:

    Progress isn’t always forward. Sometimes we’re leaping forward and sometimes we’re leaping backwards. When we leaped to the PC, we lost a whole lot of stuff. In the timesharing era, we had social systems online. A timesharing system was a marketplace. It was a community, and everyone who was part of that system could exchange email, they could exchange files, they could chat, they could play games. They were doing all that stuff and it got lost when we went to PCs. It took another 20 years or so to get that back.

    Humans are social creatures. Social is normal. So the person pitching a website so: “<generic idea>, blah blah blah… but it will have this social network and that’ll be so awesome” – how different are they really from those people who used to pitch: “we’re going to have a business, we don’t know what it will do yet but it’ll be on the internet” back in the day.

    Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about user’s mental models. For instance, for the “average user”, what does their mental model of the internet look like? How about their mental model of their social network?

    For sophisticated users, the mental model explains to me why Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Foursquare can be completely complementary. LinkedIn is for professional contacts. Twitter is for people they want to share ideas with. FourSquare is for people they actually hang out with. Facebook is for everyone else (perhaps that is why power users have lately been finding Facebook so expendable?).

    What about average users though? Do Facebook lists sufficiently enable the distinctions they have in their mental model? What do you think? It seems like they wouldn’t.

    In the real world, people have different social networks. Some people work hard to keep their different networks separate, and may act differently depending on who they are with. Some people are consistent, and deliberately try to build links across networks. Most of us probably fall somewhere in between.

    It used to be that you managed these networks from one phone – two at a push. That is less and less the case. Now we manage our networks through diverse means – multiple phones, multiple email addresses, multiple social networks, chat programs. I might make a plan with a friend on Facebook, confirm the day before by SMS, and know that they’ve arrived via Foursquare. Mentioning that we’re hanging out on Twitter or Facebook might mean that other people join us. It’s confusing.

    Ages ago, I read a novel about a woman with commitment phobia who managed her cheating by having a different phone for each lover. Horrifying, right? Most of us would not want to live like that. And yet – right now it seems like I kind of do. I catch up with my work colleagues via Sametime, some friends via Facebook and some via Twitter. I email a couple of people. I chat with some friends via a AOL/MSN using Adium, and others on Skype. The other day I invited some people over, and I had no clue how many people were coming because I’d arranged it via so many different medium.

    I think the future of “social” depends on our mental models of ourselves and our network. I was started to explore this in this post, and I’m increasingly fascinated by it. So I’m going to keep thinking – and let me know what you think, too.

    Social art
    Credit: flickr / kevindooley

    Embedded below – really great slide deck with commentary which has given me a lot to think about in respect to this. I hope you enjoy it too!

    The Real Life Social Network v2

    View more documents from Paul Adams.

  • Life Without Facebook: Week 2

    Talk Nerdy To Me #2
    Credit: flickr / constantine✖belias™

    My boyfriend has told everyone that I quit Facebook because I don’t want to talk to anyone.

    Now all my friends think I’m depressed. This is kind of amusing.

    I’m also finding a number of events that are Facebook only, and Facebook won’t let me see them and just tells me to log in. This may be because I’ve just deactivated my account rather than deleting it entirely.

    It’s interesting to me that problems not having Facebook come from the assumption that it’s ubiquitous. I don’t miss the other aspects. Currently, these issues are not compelling enough to convince me to re-activate my account.

    In fact, I’m liking this change so much that I’m contemplating life without Foursquare, as well.

    (and no, I’m not depressed)

  • Life Without Facebook: Week 1

    hey babe, want to come over to myspace and twitter my yahoo 'til I google all over your facebook?
    Credit: flickr / constantine✖belias™

    Last week, I deactivated my Facebook account. Why? There were a number of reasons, and I’d just found myself using it less and less. Since they rolled out the redesign the news feed seemed out of date (it might take days for something to show up), but the live feed was full of repetitive drivel so it wasn’t helpful for keeping up with what my friends were doing.

    Perhaps the beginning of the end for me was the constant Farmville updates – which I (stupidly) didn’t disable until I’d got to the point when it felt like I actively disliked half the people I was “friends” with. And I know, you can block Farmville (I eventually did) but there are so many other applications that it didn’t seem to make a difference.

    I like ambient awareness, I do, but I was concerned that I’d got to the point that whilst I could get a bunch of people to come to a party, I didn’t have many people with whom I’ll exchange phone calls just because. Is that where we’re going? Where we’ll have a close-but-not-that-close relationship with so many more people, but fewer close relationships? Perhaps it’s just my experience as someone who moved to another continent about 18 months ago knowing no-one. I don’t know.

    However an @ message on Twitter has started to feel more intimate than the vast majority of the communication I was receiving on Facebook. The sheer volume of “I’m having a terrible day” / “why does no-one love me?” / “I’m so incredibly busy and important” updates was drowning out the great stuff that does get shared. I prefer Twitter, the lack of requirement to reciprocate, the character limits. Yes some people are still full of angst and over-sharing, but you can just quietly unfollow them. As well as quitting Facebook, I also did some cleaning of my stream on Twitter – some people I find are better in lists, because I want my main stream to be manageable.  And that’s OK, everyone does it differently. They can unfollow me too, and that’s up to them.

    So far, I have moments where I would normally check Facebook and I pause, but it’s been pretty easy to give it up. Perhaps in a while I’ll reactivate it and just be one of those people who is on Facebook, but never uses it. Or I’ll just leave it, because you can’t commit Facebook suicide anymore.

  • Visualizing Engagement on Twitter

    Cliques size 4+

    Next Thursday, I’m giving a talk on my research to people from the communications department. Outline below.

    When we talk about how we quantify success in social media (and Twitter), we need to consider how we’re defining engagement. Does someone following us mean that they are engaged with our content? Maybe – but maybe not. We only have to look at spammers with > 1000 followers to see that our current metric for success (number of followers) is severely lacking. I think @ mentions are a far better measure of engagement – it shows people are responding to, and/or retweeting your content.

    How can we express this? We can view each @ mention as an edge on a graph, which we can visualize. Whilst our network of followers/following can be massive, typically for a social network (this has been demonstrated on both Facebook and Twitter) the number of people we interact with is just a small fraction of our network. What information can we gain by pulling out this network, and the cliques within it? Potentially it can tell us a lot about engagement, and make some smart suggestions for growing our network, too.

    On Twitter? Have you requested a graph yet? Get yours here.

  • My Journal is Online

    WTJ 94 - Write a list of more ways to wreck this journal
    Credit: flickr / isazappy

    Now that my iPhone is unlocked (yay!) and has a data plan, I can play Foursquare. Which is exciting for me, but I know some people hate it and my boyfriend has been getting all angsty about giving up my privacy for nothing.

    The thing is though, I love tracking things. I track the applications I use, and the music I listen to. I track random things on Mycrocosm. I track my todo list through Remember the Milk and my goals page and I use various applications for tracking how I’m doing on Twitter (am I tweeting too much? Tweeting stuff that’s interesting?). I track my blog stats through Google Analytics which means I can say that when I added related posts to my blog, my bounce rate went down. I’m a bit of a data junkie, I guess. But that is probably fitting considering that to describe what I like to work on I’ve taken to saying, “I take data and try and present and organize it in a way such that I can answer questions that you didn’t think to ask.”

    Not everyone is interested in doing this, of course. But I’ve been thinking about why I like to document my life and track it online like this and I have an answer. And no, it’s not that I’m self-obsessed and want everyone to know exactly what I’m doing, all the goddamn time. It’s my way of keeping a journal – the journal I tried to keep at numerous points growing up, but never had the dedication to stick with. It’s easier! I track my music and application use just by running stuff in the background. My task lists are a little more arduous to maintain, but they can be updated anywhere and the payoff in terms of organization is well worth the time. Twitter allows me to keep track of funny or useful articles I find online and document the highlights of my days in snippets, now I archive my tweets into weekly blogposts for easier searching. My blog is a history of things I’ve thought about and worked on, it documents my ideas and is search-able, and sometimes I find things in the related posts section that I’ve forgotten I wrote.

    Now with Foursquare, I can keep track of where I’ve been. And I get that it’s annoying when your every check-in gets posted to your Twitter or Facebook stream, so I don’t do that. Currently it’s set to post only badges and mayorships, but I’ll turn that off if they’re frequent occurrences. Here’s what I’m getting out of it:

    Ambient Awareness

    I’m a big fan of this idea, I like the ease of keeping track of people and staying in touch this way, rather than the long “this is everything I’ve done in the last month” emails. And I suck at writing emails anyway (working on replying, I’m getting better at it), so nobody gets those from me. This makes it all the more useful to have places where people who are interested in what I’m up to but can’t be bothered to write the email and wait for the response can keep up with me, and hopefully I can keep up with them in return. If you’re not that person and my content is boring, I’m sorry – but it’s not meant for you. I tend to use Facebook for this, because it’s closed and I tend to limit it to people I know, but I think Foursquare can potentially be nice for that too.

    Serendipitous Meetings

    OK, this hasn’t happened yet but I hope it will. If I’m in Starbucks and you’re nearby and fancy a coffee then maybe you’ll come by and hang out. That’s kinda cool! And the other day when I was meeting friends at a restaurant, I knew one of them was there because his Foursquare check-in popped up on my phone. That’s potentially useful, too.

    Competition

    I really want to be Mayor of where I kickbox. Perhaps some people might find that a little sad, but if it gets me training more isn’t that a good thing? Competition encourages me to get out there, and visit new places. It’s pretty cold in Ottawa right now – the more motivation to get out and about, the better.

    How about you? Do you think Foursquare and services like that are stupid, or do you use them? And if so, why – what do you get out of it?

  • Great Talk from danah boyd at Le Web

    Interesting thoughts on visibility, the good and the bad. See her crib sheet here, too.

  • Web 2.0 Presentation

    This week my supervisor, two of my office mates (Amir and Payam) and I have been working hard putting together a presentation we’ve recorded for a conference in Algeria on Sunday.

    I laid out the slides in Keynote, using my color scheme (luckily the others were OK with the pink). We’ve been impressed with how easy it has been to record in Keynote, although I think due to the number of takes there are some glitches where the audio doesn’t quite match with the slides.

    It’s taken longer than expected – I think we all got quite perfectionist, and when checking it the playback always started from the beginning – meaning with each additional person it took longer to check everything was working OK! Also – I hate listening to myself present. I say “So…” at the start of every slide!

    The slides are available on slideshare (I’ve embedded it below). You may notice that my section is very similar to the presentation I prepared the other week, although I’ve had to add some text to the slides. You can also download the QuickTime movie here (it’s Benyoucef.mov and note – the first section is in French) my section starts at around 32:30.

    As ever – let me know what you think!

    Web 2.0

    View more documents from Cate Huston.
  • TouchGraph

    TouchGraph

    This is kinda awesome – check out the demos here.

    Screenshot for “Social Networking” from Amazon:

     

    "social networking" on Amazon - using TouchGraph
    "social networking" on Amazon – created by TouchGraph

    My Facebook network (zoomed out):

     

    My Facebook Network (zoomed out) created by TouchGraph
    My Facebook Network (zoomed out) – created by TouchGraph

    Zoomed in:

     

    Facebook Network (zoomed in) - created by TouchGraph
    Facebook Network (zoomed in) – created by TouchGraph

    And finally, this adds a whole new dimension to Vanity Searching!

     

    Vanity Search - created by TouchGraph
    Vanity Search – created by TouchGraph

     

     

     

     

     

  • Does Facebook Render Twitter Redundant?

    I’m going to start this by saying that if you’re thinking about using Twitter to communicate with your friends, that’s a job that can be done fine by Facebook. Especially if you have a smart phone.

    Of course your friends who are using Twitter are probably using it differently from Facebook (danah boyd has some commentary on that here). I definitely use these services differently, I tend to post more frequently on Twitter, share way more stuff, and Facebook I use to communicate with people who aren’t on Twitter, or for statuses that are too personal for public consumption.

    Anyway, the other day one of my friends said that he was quitting Twitter because it was pointless and Facebook did everything Twitter could do (and more). And so I directed him to my Why Twitter isn’t a Pointless Waste of Time post and said – how do you replicate information gathering on Facebook. And he said – groups.

    I disagree, because I think Twitter gives you so much control over your stream, and you can’t have that in a Facebook group. And my friend said, no you can be the administrator and then you can have that much control.

    And I guess he is right. I could be the despotic dictator who says who can be in my group and subject them to rules depending on who they are. So friends can post anything, but people who I’m following for inspiration can’t say anything depressing (or religious) or they’re gone. Techies can’t wax lyrical about Windows 7 otherwise I’ll get bored and kick them out. And there’ll be an eclectic mix of people – techies, atheists, newspapers, academics, friends and the people who relay what’s hot right now. But they’ll have to coexist peacefully and I don’t expect to see much cross-subject discussion – this isn’t an exercise to encourage them interacting (unless they already are), nor can they complain if I get bored and get rid of someone else. And they have to be posting regularly, I want to see perhaps 200 posts a day.

    But somehow I don’t think people would participate under these conditions, and even if they did that it would work as well as Twitter does. Do you?