Accidentally in Code

Tag: Social Networking

  • Email

    Since I started using Remember the Milk my task list is now separate from my email – so email that I mark as “ToDo” items don’t show up in it unless I put them there. I’ve opted not to, and instead made a recurring task every other day to “clear email”.

    As a result of this, I’ve discovered two things: 1. not having it on my list means I do other things instead, which is good – clearing my email in one go should be more efficient. 2. I dread doing this task.

    Perhaps the thing is, that the people I want to talk to I am talking to – on Twitter, or Facebook, or Wave. So the emails I get are mostly tedious things that I need to attend to for someone else’s benefit. Except that one, and er, that one. And yours if you’re waiting a response from me.

    I wonder if with real-time or near real-time communication I’m just getting to the point when something so asynchronous seems weird. I mean, if someone doesn’t respond to a Twitter message within 2 days, that’s it right? You don’t expect a response.

    What’s bothering me? Too many services? To much mail, period?

    I remember when getting a letter in the post from a friend was exciting. But now only getting a package is exciting, because letters consist of bills and things trying to get you to buy insurance or whatever. I wonder if I’m starting to see e-mail in a similar way. E-mails mostly consist of people asking me to do stuff, and spam.

    Hmm.

  • Awesome Quote from Clay Shirky

    Awesome Quote from Clay Shirky

    Clay Shirky - Why I Ignore 5 Year Plans
    Clay Shirky – Why I Ignore 5 Year Plans

    Gives you something to think about, huh? This stuff that’s so natural to us is new and game changing. Who knows what will be different in 5 years time? I can’t wait.

  • Mycrocosm

    Last month, I read a paper on Mycrocosm – briefly a site that facilitates “microblogging through stats”. So for the last month I’ve tracked everything I drank, see the graph linked below.

    Drinks

    So – big who cares? Well, I found it interesting! For instance, there was a big jump in liquid consumption when our heating broke, and I could see that I tend to drink more when I work from home, etc. However tracking what I drank did not require much thought or effort on my part. A couple of times a day I just go to mycrocosm and add whatever I’ve drank lately – so it was a good (easy) thing to start with.

    If you have a hankering to track things (I do, hence Wakoopa, last.fm, and 43places) or a need to track something it could be useful. For instance, if you were on a diet you could track everything you ate and your motivator could check up on you. You could even track everything you ate as part of a group data set, so if you were trying to lose weight with friends that might be cute. Or, if you’re training for something you could track that. Triathlon training, for example, you want to balance your training between swimming/running/biking and mycrocosm would easily allow you to track that.

    And then people are using it to track more abstract things like “mood”. For the next month, I’ll be tracking “My Day in One Word”. You can see it here: Day in One Word.

  • The Social Networking Assignment

    My supervisor teaches classes in the business school, and is looking for an assignment on Social Networking to use, perhaps as early as next semester. Of course given that I spend much of my time thinking about, reading about and writing about social networking and most of the rest of it actually socially networking myself, I think I would create a good one.

    So here it is – my social networking assignment. How would you score?

    1. Write about which social networks do you use and why. What are your goals in using them, and what do you get from them? Are they personal or professional? How do you manage your privacy? This post is a guide.
    2. Create a professional profile on Brazen Careerist, if you don’t already have one.
    3. The founder of Brazen Careerist (Penelope Trunk) describes it as being about ideas, and writes a lot about how blogging is good for your career. Why can blogging be good for your career? What are the potential downsides, and what do you need to be careful of?
    4. Do you read any blogs? Blogs are a great way to stay on top of your field and the things you’re interested in. Find some interesting bloggers to follow and use something like Google Reader (or similar) to keep track of the RSS feeds. Bonus: What’s RSS?
    5. Some people describe Twitter as pointless, but many people have made people Twitter part of their lives and find it useful and/or entertaining. What are common criticisms leveled at Twitter, and why do people find it useful?
    6. Find 10 people who inspire or interest you that you would follow if you were on Twitter. What about them inspires or interests you?
    7. What’s ambient awareness?

  • Social Networking

    I got an email from my dad the other day, asking me what I used Twitter for. I wasn’t sure why he was asking so I asked for clarification and got this response: “Just discussing Social Networking it would help to know why you use it and what you get from it”.

    “Social Networking” is a broad term, and not one that I’d actually use to describe what I’m doing when I am “Social Networking”. Right now, I wouldn’t say I’m “Social Networking” – I’d say I’m blogging. Or I’m Tweeting, or I’m on Facebook. These are all things I see as distinct activities, even if they make up what can be called, in a broader sense, my “social network presence”. For each of the “Social Networking” services I use on a regular basis, I have different goals and different things I get out of it – below I’ve written a little bit about what these are.

    This Blog

    There’s the odd bit of personal information on here, and those posts that are more personal than others but my goal here is to write about what I’m working on as it progresses, to share what I’m thinking about. It’s linked to my Brazen Careerist and LinkedIn profiles and my Twitter account, as well as being linked on my Facebook.

    Brazen Careerist and LinkedIn

    These are my “professional” profiles. I don’t have many contacts yet on Brazen Careerist (it’s a new site) but LinkedIn I use to add people I’ve worked with and collect and give recommendations. Brazen Careerist is cool in that it makes the RSS feed from this blog part of my profile. There’s an interesting Q&A session with Penelope Trunk (from Brazen Careerist) and one of the things she says is,

    A good way to think about Brazen Careerist is that LinkedIn focuses on experience and Brazen Careerist focuses on ideas. If you are young and short on experience, ideas is a better bet for you.

    Despite have no contacts on Brazen Careerist yet (I should sell it more to my friends), the site drives more traffic to this blog as LinkedIn does.

    Facebook

    Facebook for me is purely personal. I use it to share photos and organize events with my friends. Because of how we use it for WISE I’m a bit more careful about my profile picture etc now but my privacy settings are fairly high and I’m picky about what friend requests I accept, deleting people who I no longer speak to etc. I wrote more about my mixed feelings about Facebook in this post.

    Twitter

    Twitter is my favorite social network at the moment. I really love it. I use it for communicating with my friends and the ambient awareness of knowing what they’re up to. I also use it to crowd-source my news. Following people whose opinion I respect I get a range of interesting information and links that keeps me informed and on top of what’s going on through very little effort on my part. I tend to tweet about what’s going on and interesting stuff that I find on the web.

    Mycrocosm, 43 Places, Wakoopa and Last.fm

    These are all website where I track stuff. Mycrocosm is really cool, it’s like micro-blogging through graphs. At the moment, I’m logging everything I drink. On 43 places I track the places I’ve been and the places I want to go to. Wakoopa and Last.fm both run on my computer – Wakoopa tracks the applications I’m using and Last.fm tracks the music I’m listening to.

  • Deleting My Xing Profile

    It’s hard sometimes to manage your social networking presence. I have three main ones that I use (aside from this blog) – Facebook (friends only), Twitter, and LinkedIn (professional). I just added a fourth – Brazen Careerist – mostly because I read Penelope Trunk’s blog avidly. Realistically though, I have way more – Wakoopa, LastFM, 43 places and others that I’ve probably forgotten about.

    I signed up for Xing because I was trying to get in touch with my roommate from boarding school after I lost the card with her email address on it. Now she’s seen the light and joined Facebook, and I have no use for it. So I was trying to delete my profile, there’s no point having another profile on a site I never use, which duplicates the functionality of ones I do! I’m fairly confident that data protection laws mean you have to be able to delete your profile, but in practice it can be hard to work out how. In the end I settled for maxing out my privacy settings but when I got an email from them today (suggesting I upgrade my account!) I noticed a useful link that you can use to ask for help.

    So I did, and I was impressed by the quick reply. In case you want it too – to delete your Xing account, go to https://www.xing.com/app/user?op=cancel.

  • The Social Network Business Plan

    So as I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been reading The Social Network Business Plan. The premise of which is that the next big thing will be Social Networks built around products or services, for which there are 18 revenue channels – including subscription, conferences or “get-togethers”, and finally chopping up what people are saying and selling it to companies. He thinks that this will replace advertising and marketing and that the massive amounts of money that used to be spent on such things will flow to the entrepreneurs running Social Networks (but not Facebook).

    He does have a point. My generation have grown up seeing adverts everywhere, and we don’t notice them anymore. I know there’s research in support of this, but I’m not going to take the time to look into it here. Suffice to say, it’s 11am and I walked into university this morning and I’ve spent the last hour on various websites (including Facebook) and my email. I’ve probably been exposed to 20+ advertisements, but I couldn’t tell you what any of them are. That’s not to say advertising is entirely pointless, just that advertisers need to work harder to distinguish themselves. For instance, the Sony Bravia adverts (here and here) really do make me want a Bravia TV (only I’m a student and can’t afford one) and I know that Where The Hell is Matt is sponsored by a company that makes gum – maybe Trident? I even visit the Apple site to watch the Get A Mac ads from time to time, and not just because I’m totally crushing on Justin Long.

    I’ve spent about 5 months in Asia, over the course of 3 trips. And the thing that Westeners find amazing when we go over there is how the streets are lit up with bright, colorful lights all the time (not just November-January, like we do). In the middle of Dalian, China, for example there’s a big disco ball. It’s crazy! But you get used to it, and soon the lights stop attracting your attention and just become normal. It’s the same with adverts, you’ve got this whole generation of people whose attention firms won’t be able to buy anymore – they’ll have to earn it by being genuinely innovative (or finding someone who is genuinely innovative and sponsoring them).

    So I don’t disagree with his premise. Advertising is going to be very different and soon, but I do disagree with his conclusions. A social network might be helpful to self-identify the connectors, the mavens (like Malcolm Gladwell talks about in The Tipping Point), those who influence the opinions of people in their social circle. But I don’t think everyone will be joining one, by any means.

    A subscription model is a big part of the business plan. But of the examples given, each has a differentiation which may make people willing to pay a subscription, which I would argue not everything has. For instance, he gives the example of www.hystersisters.com which is for women to talk about their gynecological problems. A subscription model may work here because women are prepared to pay for privacy, and this kind of deeply personal problem is the kind of thing it’s frowned upon to talk about on Facebook. Similarly with sermo.com which is for Doctors – a subscription buys verification and privacy. There’s been a lot said given the debate on newspapers and the music industry that my generation will just have to start paying for things online, but it’s not that simple. Most likely we will pay if there’s a good reason to (i.e. we need to pay for privacy) but where they’re a free alternative, we won’t. There are a plethora of free places to network on the web, in order to convince someone to pay for something it’s going to have to be really important to them.

    Tipping is another part of the business plan. TipJoy, a company trying to make a business of tipping on the internet went bust this week. The announcement on their blog is here. The most interesting bit is this one:

    We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party. “Simple, social payments” is *the* philosophy needed to do digital payments right, but once a service groks that, they need only to implement it on their own. We’ve been the thought leaders in this space, we see the hype and excitement, and yet we know very intimately the difficulties in gaining actual traction. The only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments – then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along.

    So tipping may work, I don’t disagree with that. If I was very into a social network and someone gave me some useful advice and there was a culture of tipping, I would probably do that. But I think he overestimates the revenue from it. Also, something that he doesn’t mention with respect to tipping, is that whilst in North America tipping is common, expected, and a significant part of the revenue for people like wait staff etc this is not the case in other parts of the world. In China and Japan, for example, people don’t tip. I literally had a woman in China chase me down the street to give me the money back after I tried to tip her. And in the UK, whilst we do tip, we know wait staff are getting at least minimum wage, currently 5.73 per hour for workers aged 22 years and older – so we don’t tip anywhere near as much as it is normal to in the US.

    Facebook is written off as a social network trying to make money from advertisements. I think he overlooks it in two respects. Firstly, Facebook has some very valuable data that they’re trying to generate revenue from right now, likely they’ll end up using the aggregate and sell opinions model, so the networks he proposes may be in direct competition with Facebook. Secondly, Facebook doesn’t rely solely on advertising. Facebook gifts are actually a significant and overlooked source of revenue. Now that developers can charge in the apps they build on top of the Facebook platform, that’s another revenue channel – in fact Facebook suggests some business models.

    There is no mention of Twitter. Twitter has so much opinion and information on there, when they start cutting it up and selling it off to interested parties, it will be hard for anyone else to compete. The networks where people will pay for privacy, as I talked about above are likely the only ones with a chance.

    One of the examples he puts forward towards the end of the book is a network for people interested in the environment. There’s this idea that you can run a for-profit, with an affiliated non-profit. I think some things, such as this one, work better as a non-profit period. I expect there are already non-profits out there. One non-profit social network that I’m a member of is Kiva, because I’m keen to support development. Would I pay to be part of such a network? No. It defeats the purpose.

    Finally, even if you set aside the subscription model so there’s no longer that transaction overhead as a barrier to entry, often what I hear from people I talk to is a need to limit the number of social networks they’re a part of. Even with OAuth so there’s not the issue of remembering so many usernames and passwords, will people join a limitless number of social networks? I think there’s an understanding that we put out data out there and with the maturity of the model and the people using it there comes an unwillingness to do so for the sake of it. Each new social network we join has to be evaluated as to what it will add to our social media experience. This means that with time, I think it will get harder, not easier, to launch new ones.

  • Facebook Lite

    I’m quite excited about this, it’s being talked up in the press as a way for people with slow connections to access the site, but having recently been living somewhere where the internet was heavily censored, I’m more excited that accessing Facebook through a proxy site will be easier and a better experience.

  • Tweeting Normally, Mr. Average

    This week I’m at another conference, this one put on by FOSSLC. It’s an Open Source conference, which isn’t strictly related to what I’m doing but it’s good to get out there and meet people, and hear about what people in industry are saying.

    I’ve had a few conversations about Twitter… of course. I’m really fascinated by how people use Twitter. I follow a little over 30 people myself, don’t actively look for people to follow, but if people follow me and I know them or they look interesting I follow them back. You can see my “twitter personality type” (and check out your own). Apparently my tweeting is now “tip-top”, how flattering! Finally an electronic device that doesn’t disparage me… my wii fit puts me down constantly. However until quite recently it was telling me that I needed more followers and I should try following people in order that they follow me back. I hate that tactic, and, by extension – things like TopFollowed and, this one even more horrifying TopLinked (do they know what LinkedIn is for? Really?!?). If that’s the future of social networking, I want to cancel my internet connection.

    So yesterday, I got talking to a guy about Twitter and he said he had 1000 followers and was following about that many people and of course I wanted to know how he managed it. Following 30 people, my feed is pretty busy (especially first thing in the morning, a lot of my friends and the people I follow are on UK time). He can’t possibly be reading the time-line! His strategy: he has a search for his username running and only saw those tweets directed at or referring to him. Twitter is useful when he wants to ask a question, he gets real-time answers. But clearly given how he uses Twitter he won’t be answering other people’s questions unless they are directed at him. Perhaps his followers don’t mind, and those that answer just enjoy being helpful. Perhaps they haven’t yet reached critical mass in their own following that they need a similar strategy, but eventually, if we all try to use Twitter the way he does no-one will be answering anyone’s questions, except when asked directly. But all this is speculation. Even if his strategy sounds a little free-loader-esque, it’s certainly not going to bring down Twitter any time soon.

    I also met two other people who said they “didn’t get” twitter. One had abandoned it, the other was just passively following and wondering about business models.

    There was also another guy (back to him later) who, like me, had been convinced to try Twitter by the NYTimes post, “Twitter? It’s What You Make It”. Not a very insightful statement on the basis of it – isn’t the same is true of any social network? I might use Facebook to keep in touch with my friends, just to passively stalk people I barely know, to vet prospective employees, or to try and pick up far younger and more attractive women. OK the last one would be hard – but a creepy guy did add me who was clearly doing just that, looking through his friend list it was just beautiful woman after beautiful woman… I blocked him, but I was flattered to be chosen! But I think Twitter is more versitile still, especially with the open API.

    I’m a typical NetGenner I guess, I use Facebook to keep in touch with my friends. I use Twitter to keep in touch with my friends too, but also to get news stories from a specific area of the paper (technology) that interests me (via @guardiantech) – so I don’t get distracted by the front page. And I follow various others who link to interesting / useful articles. But… I want the majority of things that show up on my feed to be interesting. And I’d like to be able to read pretty much everything that shows up on it. Perhaps that’s weird. But I think the truth is – no-one’s weird. I was talking to my supervisor the other day about Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World because one of the things Tapscott says is that his daughter has over 700 friends on Facebook, and that’s normal. Not normal for my circle, and in fact overall on Facebook the average user has 120 friends. Of course you’d want to adjust that for age, which you don’t have the information to do. Anyway, so I said, I don’t think this is normal, and my supervisor said, but what is normal any more? Do we know?

    Probably we don’t.

    So now I’ll come back to the other guy, Mekki. Before, I wrote about Average Users, which was driven by a paper I wrote about Vista. So when I saw there was a presentation on the user’s perspective of switching between Microsoft Office and Open Office I was keen to see it. And so he started his presentation and he too was talking about Average Users, so a little way in, I asked if he’d ever Googled “average users”. And he said, no, what do you get. And I said – sod all. The only definition I could find was in Wikipedia. We talk about our average user a lot but we don’t know who they are, we don’t know what they want, and we don’t know what they do. And he’d come to a similar conclusion. More – Sun had realized this back in 2004 trying to promote OpenOffice. That’s a company trying to promote use of free and open source software, not the company charging hundreds of dollars a pop. Wow. You can find his presentation and thesis here.

    So we don’t know what normal is. We don’t understand average anymore. But we’re trying and, even if it makes our lives as programmers a little more difficult… I think it makes our lives as people a little more exciting.