The Point Of Social Leverage Is Mobile?

I see that my old friend, Keith Teare, has written a guest post at Techcrunch, making the case that Facebook and Google have inherent ‘structural’ problems in the way they manage information sharing which have become starkly apparent with Google’s new privacy policy and Facebook’s endless privacy issues.

Keith Teare, Google, Facebook, Privacy — And You

There is a big structural problem for both Google and Facebook as they contemplate the product consequences of consumer reactions to their product roadmap. In a centralized platform it is incredibly hard to create easy-to-understand controls that give each user the ability to control, at a granular level, what they share and who with. Grand policy shifts, like that which came out of F8 and which we are now seeing from Google, tend to assume all users are the same and will want the same thing.

In reality, users are more complex. I might want to save a private video to a personal storage space one moment, share something with a select group of friends another moment, and broadcast something to the world five minutes later. The web services infrastructure that both Facebook and Google are based on does not easily permit such fine grained control for users without also imposing serious effort. As we all know, that leads users to stick with the default settings most of the time.

So, despite good intent by the teams at both companies, one-size-fits-all decisions are the norm.

Mobile to the rescue?

Structural problems usually require structural solutions. What it seems consumers are asking for is a world in which we all know what we are sharing and who with — but where we don’t have to do a huge amount of work to achieve that. Google Circles seems to be a nod in this direction as are Facebook’s groups. But neither is really easy enough or sufficiently integrated into the flow of the products to really solve the problem. Both require a huge management overhead.

As I argued earlier this week in “Google, Look Out Behind You!“, the spread of smartphones may be part of the solution here. Hundreds of millions of consumers are now carrying around connected still and video cameras with lists of contacts in the address book, often already organized into meaningful groups. Decentralized decision-making is very easy when there are decentralized software clients under the unique control of each user. The ability to be private one moment, selectively share the next and then publicly broadcast a few minutes later is easy to achieve in this decentralized software architecture. And service providers can never become bad actors — simply because they do not own our information or the full social graph. The cloud becomes a means of delivering messages to the phones and the place where we store our media. But it’s not the place we need to trust to make decisions about what gets shared and who with.

So, Keith broadly paints a picture — users being forced into an oversimplified social architecture by Google and Facebook in which groups (or circles, which are a slightly different take on groups) are the mechanism of sharing — and hints that the problem is intractable for web-based social tools.

The answer is smartphones, he suggests: our personal devices, which we already use in myriad ways to connect with and share with others. He must believe — without saying so explicitly — that the solution lies in observing what we share and with who on our smartphones, and to refine that natural body of information into a bottom-up determination of who’s who in our world.

Imagine a Venn diagram of dozens — or hundreds — of sets of friends, where any friend could be in zero to all the sets, and all the sets are constantly in flux. And without us having to create all the scaffolding for it to work.

Obviously, Teare is not content to wave his hand at this: he’s started a company to actually build the solution:

Keith Teare, Seed and Series A Funding

just.me is a new architecture built on top of the mobile, and particularly the smartphone, ecosystem. It doesn’t take the web as its starting point, it takes the highly personal and ever-present mobile Internet as its starting point. As such it is focused on defining a new consumer software experience, not replacing an existing one. It is also focused on the freedom that comes from placing social tools on a device the consumer fully controls, and not building a big cloud service that owns or acts on the consumers data. We don’t know all of the questions this gives rise to yet, never mind all of the answers. But we are really excited about building on this new ecosystem and learning with users as we go.

I’ve been suggesting that the next wave for social networks is the social operating system — where exactly the problems that Teare is talking about are solved by building social primitives into the foundation of our online experience — but Teare is pushing at a transitional step, based on the mobile device as the logical point of leverage in the transition to the next generation of social tools.

Harvard researchers underwhelmed by peer influence on Facebook - Bob Brown via NetworkWorld

Harvard researchers Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez and Jason Kaufman published a paper called Social selection and peer influence in an online social network, and it seems to suggest that peers have a smaller influence on what we like than people may think:

Bob Brown via NetworkWorld

Using the Facebook data from a group of more than a thousand college students at one college, the researchers found that students whose music and movie tastes were similar were more likely to become friends or influence the formation of new friends, though book tastes were less of a factor in either case (maybe it would be different for older people, once the book club years kick in?).  The fact that music and movies tend to be more social activities probably has a bearing on their influence on friendships, the researchers write.  They found tastes in classical and jazz music were more likely to get passed along through friendships than tastes in indie/alternative music, where the aficionado of such music might be the sort to be the token indie/alt music lover in a group.

Devin Coldewey doesn’t buy this at all:

[…] the study is also clearly flawed in ways that those versed in social graphs are likely to easily perceive. Pulling useful data from social networks is like catching lightning in a bottle, and I wonder whether the findings may in fact be, as the study attempts to avoid, “a spurious consequence of alternative social processes.”

The central source of data for the study, in fact, doesn’t strike me as solid. Tracking the interests of college kids is a sketchy endeavor in and of itself, but tracking it via their Facebook favorites (i.e. what shows on your profile, not what you post about or share) seems unreliable.

After all, not only does everyone use the network in their own way, but the network itself has changed. Putting Wilco in your favorites is a different act from liking Wilco’s Facebook page, their official band site, or posting their latest video. Gauging someone’s interest in a movie or band by the favorites factor alone is inadequate. Their findings are essentially that taste doesn’t diffuse the way you might expect. But while the data support this, nothing supports the data.

Flattening huge sets of data and removing potentially conflative or distracting connections (“disentangling,” to use the researchers’ well-chosen word) is the bane of social research, and with a limited window on a huge field of data, like that these researchers had, it’s especially hard.

Who among these people was a supernode? What were their Twitter counts? What was the most common unit of interest? How many total posts, how many total favorite changes, how many total friends? The process of disentanglement only gets harder and harder, and the amount of indispensable data grows. The researchers have used advanced statistical techniques, but the data they were interpreting doesn’t seem to be at all complete.

The study does establish something that I think we perhaps understand is true already: you befriend people because of your overlaps in taste, but it’s rare that your existing friends change the tastes you already have. This is as much true out in the “real” world as it is online.

Coldewey is a bit off kilter with his general pronouncements about the difficulty of pulling factual information from social netwroks: they have been shown in many studies, for decades, to be immensely important predictors of health, happiness, trust, and a long list of other factors.

Still, I have to agree that since the results are so counterintuitive, it might be important to segregate friends from influencers. My hunch is that influence follows the power laws, and so unless you find the people that have super levels of influence — and see what strange gravity disturbances they cause — you might not think that there is anything going on at all.

Some Degree Of Separation

The six degrees of separation meme has surfaced again, based on new research from Facebook — in collaboration with researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano — that suggests the average path length from one Facebook user to another has fallen to 4.74, and has been shrinking as Facebook has grown larger.

The N degrees of separation idea was first suggested in a short story by the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy:

Stowe Boyd, Everything is Different

In Albert-László Barabási’s Linked, the author explains that the origin of the “six degrees of separation” notion that underlies all social networking theory was the brain child of a Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy. In 1929, Karinthy published his forty-sixth book, a collection of short stories entitled Everything Is Different (Minden masképpen van), which is now out of print and apparently lost to us.

Albert-László Barabási, from Linked

The short story collection was a critical failure and soon sank into obscurity. It has been out of print ever since. […] But there is one story, entitled “Lánceszemek,” or “Chains,” that deserves our attention.

“To demonstrate that people on Earth today are much closer than ever, a member of the group suggested a test. He offered a bet that we could name any person among earth’s one and a half billion inhabitants and through at most five acquaintances, one of which he knew personally, he could link to the chosen one,” writes Karinthy in “Lánceszemek.” And indeed, Karinthy’s fictionaly character immediately links a Nobel prizewinner to himself, noting that the Nobelist must know King Gustav, the Swedish monarch who hands out the Nobel prize, who is in turn a consummate tennis player and plays occasionally with a tennis champion who happens to be a good friend of Karinthy’s character. Remarking that linking to celebrities is easy, Karinthy’s character demands a more difficult assignment. Next he tries to link a worker in Ford’s factory to himself: “The worker knows the manager in the shop, who knows Ford; Ford is on friendly terms with the general director of Hearst Publications, who last year became friends with Árpád Pásztor, someone I not only know, but is to the best of my knowledge a good friend of mine — so I could easily ask him to send a telegram to the general director telling Ford that he should talk to the manager and have the worker in the shop quickly hammer together a car for me, as I happen to need one.” Though these short stories have been neglected, Karinthy’s 1929 insight that people are linked by at most five links was the first published appearance of the concept we know today as “six degrees of separation.”

And Now, Everything Is Different

The “six degrees” meme was rediscovered decades later by Stanley Milgram, who engendered an entire branch of science through his groundbreaking investigations into social networking. His initial foray into the field nearly confirmed Karinthy’s magic number five. Milgram’s research was astonishingly similar to Karinthy’s Ford example — getting random people in various Midwestern cities to pass along a letter through their personal contacts, heading toward one of two Massachusetts residents. And after all was said and done, the average number of hand-offs in the successful cases turned out to be 5.5; rounded up, this is the core for the “six degrees of separation” concept.

Another few generations have passed since Milgram’s 1967 experiment, and the principles of social networks have entered the popular mindset. We think of the world as a much smaller place than those that came before us. We are living in McLuhan’s global village, where one person’s actions can lead to a cascade of effects across the Globe: not through some disembodied “invisible hand,” but by the interaction of people who are known to each other. Our ability to influence those that we know means that what we do can propagate through the social matrix that shapes our world, and can open doors, shift political debate, or quell a rumor.

And because we know that this is how the world wags — that even the least networked of us is connected to everyone if he is connected to at least one other person — now, everything is different. So, we have lifted the title of Karinthy’s forgotten book to serve as the initial piece for this journal, dedicated to social networking in business, because now everything is different.

The world of business — where “networking” has been a gerund for decades — is rediscovering the latent power of social networks. Personal and business relationships are being reappraised in light of social networking technology and techniques, in ways that were too costly or simply impossible prior to the twenty-first century.

While the Facebook researchers nodded their heads at Milgrams work, I dug out this old piece and reproduced in its entirety, so that people can see that the idea is much older, and was originally projected to be five degrees, which is the approximate number offered up by this new research. And Milgram’s working hypothesis might just as well have been rounded down to 5, as well.

There is no doubt that as people become more socially connected, as a general rule, the mean path length across the entire world will drop. As that happens, the world grows smaller, and what happens to someone far away can feel as if it was next door.

We can only hope that this will lead to a great sense of community and solidarity, instead of the squabbling and feuding that dominates world affairs.

related

Twitter rose by 115% while LinkedIn jumped 134%. Facebook’s growth was a more modest 54%, roughly on par with Spain’s Tuenti, which was up by 56%.
European Mobile Social Networking Growing Fast (via thenextweb)

(via thenextweb)

The Famous Are Different From You And Me

Shea Bennett via AllTwitter

A recent study from Hubspot has determined that while highly-followed Twitter accounts share a lot of links, they converse less frequently than people who follow less than a thousand people.

Twitter accounts with a million or more followers tweet links three times more frequently than users with 1,000 followers or less, but only about 7% of their tweets are replies, compared with 17% for those with the smaller network.

via visually

I am not sure of the conclusion, that conversation doesn’t grow reach. These twitterers, with a million plus followers, are generally followed for something other than their curatorial and social skills: they are famous for their looks, acting, fiction, music, or some other notoriety. People follow them for completely different reasons than, say, following me.

Better to paraphrase F Scott Fitzgerald, and say that the famous are different from you and me.

I’d like to see a study about twitterers that are a/ not famous for something else, but b/ have amassed large following (more than 10,000 followers). What works for them might lead to better insights for the average joe who wants more followers.

The other findings are interesting, too: a lot of the social gestures in social media — likes, comments, and so on — don’t lead to more views. So, a person who has a dense network of involved friends might not be growing her network as a function of that network’s activities. This is a problem suitable for social network graph analysis, because all networks are not alike, and popularity isn’t the only way to measure impact (see It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence).

There’s nothing to do on Google+, and every time someone figures out a possible use for it, Google turns out the lights.

Google did finally release brand pages this week—here’s Slate’s page—but at this point the effort might be moot. The search company says its network has attracted more than 40 million users in the months since it launched, which likely makes Google+ the fastest-growing social network of all time. But considering Google’s marketing muscle—it hasn’t been shy about directing Web searchers to Google+, and everyone who’s logged in to a Google account sees the Google+ toolbar at the top of every Google page—it would be a surprise if Google+ didn’t have so many users.

The real test of Google’s social network is what people do after they join. As far as anyone can tell, they aren’t doing a whole lot. Traffic-analysis firms have consistently reported Google+’s traffic to be declining from its early peak. Even Google’s own executives seem to have gotten bored by the site. After several public posts in the summer, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped off the site in the fall; they only started posting once more when bloggers began pointing out their absence. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman and former CEO, posted his first public message when Steve Jobs died. That was three months after the social network went live.

I was an early Google+ skeptic. Shortly after it launched, I likened its main feature—the ability to divide your friends into discrete groups, called Circles—to the process of creating a seating chart for your wedding. In theory, it was appealing to send “private” messages to certain groups, but in practice I thought most people would find it tedious to categorize their friendships. And apart from the Circles feature—which Facebook quickly co-opted—I didn’t think Google+ distinguished itself from its rivals in any compelling way. I still don’t.

And yet, I’ve been surprised by just how dreary the site has become. Although Google seems determined to keep adding new features, I suspect there’s little it can do to prevent Google+ from becoming a ghost town. Google might not know it yet, but from the outside, it’s clear that G+ has started to die—it will hang on for a year, maybe two, but at some point Google will have to put it out of its misery.

[…]

Like a bar or a club, a social network needs a critical mass of people to be successful—the more people it attracts, the more people it attracts. Google couldn’t have possibly built every one of Facebook’s features into its new service when it launched, but to make up for its deficits, it ought to have let users experiment more freely with the site. That freewheeling attitude is precisely how Twitter—the only other social network to successfully take on Facebook in the last few years—got so big. When Twitter users invented ways to reply to one another or echo other people’s tweets, the service didn’t stop them—it embraced and extended their creativity. This attitude marked Twitter as a place whose hosts appreciated its users, and that attitude—and all the fun people were having—pushed people to stick with the site despite its many flaws (Twitter’s frequent downtime, for example). Google+, by contrast, never managed to translate its initial surge into lasting enthusiasm. And for that reason, it’s surely doomed.

- Farhad Manjoo,   Google had a chance to compete with Facebook. Not anymore.

I love “Shortly after it launched, I likened its [Google+’s] main feature—the ability to divide your friends into discrete groups, called Circles—to the process of creating a seating chart for your wedding.” Snap.

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).

We’re used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it’s worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

[…]

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90’s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.

My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.

- Maciej Ceglowski, The Social Graph is Neither

In a weirdly obsessive rant, Ceglowski glorously mixes up all sorts of things about social networks, social tools, terminology. FOAF, RDF, privacy, and the aspirations of the people behind Facebook and Google+.

It’s too long, and off base, but also amazingly prescient. Although he doesn’t say it explicitly, he suggests that the current implementations of social networking tools — Facebook, etc. — are analogous to AOL in the mid 90’s, and will soon be eclipsed by a truly social web, where socialiaty is built in, not grafted on as an afterthought.

Thinking About Social Networks

continuations:

This morning on Techmeme I ran across three interesting and thought provoking pieces about social networks (all from within the last 24 hours it seems):

1. Maciej Ceglowski’s “The Social Graph is Neither” (10 points for great title alone) is a hilarious dissection of what’s wrong with explicitly declared relationships and even with the act of declaring relationships.  It is also a blistering critique of Facebook and a bit of a paean to the message board.  Very much worth the read and I found myself agreeing with many of the points.

2. Farhad Manjoo’s piece in slate titled “Google+ is Dead” argues that Google fatally wounded its own social efforts by ignoring important user needs.  In particular the author points to the fight against pseudonyms and the delayed and incomplete brand pages as examples of making Google+ unwelcoming from the start.  His argument rests on comparing social networks to bars.  While I agree that these were big missteps I think it is premature to ring the death knell for Google+. There are parts of it, such as hangouts, that work quite well and those are actually the most like bars.

 3. A piece in Fastcompany by Matt Haber on a site I hadn’t heard of before called Whosay that lets celebrities post information and keep control of it.  The article points to Twitter’s terms of service (which allow Twitter to use content with partners) as a reason that celebrities wouldn’t want to put pictures there but rather put them on Whosay instead.  This seems like an interesting experiment to me because we clearly live in a celebrity culture (Exhibit A: the Kim Kardashian wedding, I mean divorce).  Yet networks like Twitter and Youtube are all about undermining the existing ways in which people become celebrities.

All good food for thought.  A huge takeaway for me from reading it all is that despite what may feel like a huge chokehold by Facebook, we are still in the early innings of what the Internet will mean for how our relationships work online and more generally how society is organized.

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(via underpaidgenius)

If you want a community with stronger ties, provide more definition to your social object.

Chris Wetherell, There’s been some interesting critical discussions of some…

A great aphorism buried in a long screed about the apparent lack of love for Google Reader within Google.

I have long argued that social communities pivot on creation and sharing of social objects: the medium is the message, again. And Wetherell argues that Reader is just right in the scope of its messaging, where people share stories.

He also explicitly disses Google+, arguing that it is too broad in scope:

The social object of Google+ is…nearly anything and its diffuse model is harder to evaluate or appreciate. The value of a social network seems to map proportionally to the perceived value of its main object. (Examples: sharing best-of-web links on Metafilter or sharing hi-res photos on Flickr or sharing video art on Vimeo or sharing statuses on Twitter/Facebook or sharing questions on Quora.)

So, restating: one measure of the depth of connection to a social network by members — and the strength of the connection between members — is the fit between the network’s social objects and the members’ goals.

Flickr and Instagram are great because they pivot around image sharing, and support social interactions around them. Reader, Wetherall argues, does a similar job with stories, but I will quibble there. I don’t think the Reader model is primarily social: it’s sociality seems like an afterthought, as with Delicious, and others. I think Tumblr and Twitter are better places for sharing stories, but neither one is all the way done, yet.

However, his insight, quoted at the top, is worth reflecting on, esepecially for those involved in developing social tools of whatever sort.

(h/t deepthinking)

As Social Network Grows, so Does the Brain

Monkey brains grow bigger with every cagemate they acquire, according to a new study showing that certain parts of the brain associated with processing social information expand in response to more complex social information.

“Interestingly, there are a couple of studies in humans by different research groups that show some correlation between brain size and the size of the social network, and we found some similarities in our studies,” study researcher Jerome Sallet, of Oxford University in the U.K., told LiveScience.

“[Our study] reinforces the idea that the human social network was built on something that was already there in the rhesus macaques.”

via Live Science, infoneer-pulse