Social Networks Archives - Page 2 of 4

Recording Life

Posted on January 5, 2009

I just read a great article by Clive Thompson called “Head for Detail” about Gordon Bell‘s latest experieement. Please just read the first 2 paragraphs. It’s about Gordon and how he is recording everything he’s doing (video, audio, emails, web, everything). He’s been doing it for the past 14 years and is able to bring up almost eveyrthing. Clive writes about Bell, saying:

He[Bell] had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics–Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area’s gorgeous weather–Bell’s gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I’d sent him, copies of my articles he’d read, pages he’d surfed on my blog.

This really resonated with me as i am already trying to record my life. I have photos up on Flickr, i have my ideas going to my blog, i have my mundane thoughts going to Twitter, my videos going to YouTube, and my friend interactions recorded on Facebook. I’m already on the web but just in the totality that Bell is. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper it’s gone from $233,000 for a gigabyte in 1980 to less than $1 today. Soon there will be enough storage in your cell phone for your entire life to be stored. I do this because i want to remember. I want my memories to be accesible all the time and reading the article made me realize how inefficent i’ve been in capturing them.

I really like articles like this becaues they make you think about where the world is going and wonder how human interactions and functions will change. It touches on how humans will change when we no longer have to remember stuff. I already don’t remember phone numbers beceuase of your cell phone. What if you don’t have to remember people’s names and interactions and you free you mind to be more creative. Just imagine – that’s what i’m doing now….

Twitter thoughts

Posted on December 4, 2008

I read this article by Tim O’Reilly called “Why I Love Twitter” and it has some good points. Specifically:

“Following” instead of “Friending” – in my opinion, only true/proper social networks that are primarily about social interactions (like Facebook or MySpace) should use 2-way friending. The rest should allow for 1-way following.
“Ambient intimacy” is about deepening people relationships via short messages and thoughts. Similar to how you get to know someone who’s desk is right next to yours because of offhand comments, you can do the same via twitter
Cooperating with others – Twitter allows others, even competitors, to utiilze them. And it seems to only strengthen twitter.
A true mobile app – for me this is the first mobile application that works better on mobile than the web. It has truly changed how i think about working on a mobile device

Twitter is an interesting beast because it’s still niche but gaining steam. People also love to bitch about how it doesn’t have a business model. This is true, it doesn’t but neither did email for a long time and now it’s one of the biggest driver of pageviews and engagement on the web.

How many people can you know? What's your Dunbar number?

Posted on September 19, 2008

In the same NY Times article i just wrote about, there’s a great section the “hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time” and compares that number between humans and apes. It reads:

In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another’s fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend. Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known.

The big question then is: Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

I find my social networks work against/for this number in 2 ways:

For my good friends the relationships are strengthened through social networks and Twitter. I learn more about them and we’re able to interact more often
There are weak friends that i normally would discard and never talk to again but instead they hang around on Facebook and Twitter and i gradually grow to learn more about them. Over time they turn into actual friends or i delete them and they turn into nothing.

Being Digitally Close

Posted on September 19, 2008

There is an article in the NY Times a few weeks ago called “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” and i think it’s one of the best pieces i’ve read in a long time at explaining why Facebook Status, News Feed, Twitter and other new digital platforms are useful and popular.

The online area that the article talks about is “incessant online contact” or as some call it, “ambient awareness.” In the offline world people pick up on moods by little things like body language, sighs, little comments, etc.. In the online world this is being done by microblogging tools like Twitter (140 character updates), Dopplr (where are you traveling?), Tumblr (what web items do you like), and Facebook’s Status Feed. The article asks the question that i get asked all the time, Who cares?:

For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.

This is indeed how many people view it. But the genius of the article is how it explains the subtle usefulness of the information:

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

This is exactly how it works. Now, i don’t have ESP through this but i do enjoy the knowledge of how my friends’ lives are progressing. These tools have enabled that to happen and it has certainly enhanced my relationships with them.

Twitter the most pure social network

Posted on June 27, 2008

Some social network thoughts…..

I’ve been using Twitter more and more lately and i have to say that i’m really enjoying it. I love the simplicity and ease of use. The fact that they limit the characters, is only text and is just a list of your friends thoughts makes it always interesting. Of course, Facebook used to be like that for me too. I’m not sure if it will ever catch on for the masses. The fact that only a subsection of my friends use it makes it more useful for me so i don’t get too many updates. I’m not sure if it’s fun enough for everyone just yet. I do think the mobile aspect of it could tip it over the edge. I wasn’t that into Twitter until i started doing it on my iPhone and then it became a must-have app. I still don’t see much difference between the AIM away-message, the facebook status message and Twitter other than the mobile/cell-ness of Twitter and the simplicity.

More and more i think facebook will develop into a utility instead of a place of expression. I think it will be like the yellow pages – where is a tool people use to look up people, find out about friends of friends and find phone numbers, emails, etc. It’s a social address and people directory. It’s a tool

MySpace continues to be about self-expression and i think that’s a good differentiator as they could never beat facebook at their game. However, i do believe self-expression can be done even better. Something like Uber or Virb or something could be better – if it had more of Tumblr-type experience int it. We did some focus groups the other day and everyone used both Facebook and MySpace. They liked Myspace b/c it really represented them – it was a good badge but they hated the sketchiness about it. “Too many old weird guys” they said. They had facebook b/c everyone had it and it was easy to connect but it didn’t seem like it was fun to them. It was interesting.

What are your thoughts

Building Participation & Cognitive Surplus

Posted on May 5, 2008

Clay Shirky has a great speech about cognitive surplus. A phrase that refers to the free time we have away from our jobs or studies to do stuff. Over the past 30-50 years, what everyone did with this cognitive surplus is watch TV. Sitcoms were the big universal thing everyone did. In fact there is 200 billion hours of cognitive time/surplus in America that is spent watching TV. Over time however, this time spent has been shifting from TV to participatory activities like social networking to video games.

First there’s talking about participation and how it is THE new phenomenon of this generation and how it is hard to calculate. I like this passage:

The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.

It is a big shift from the past when we would sit and watch Price is Right all the time or other mindless crap. I loved those shows but those days are over…

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

The big concept in the speech of the idea of cognitive surplus and how that it is dwindling. We are now participating in activities. Whether it is video games, social networks, or other items online – we are doing stuff.

One good story he concludes with is:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

I do like the thought of all one-way media becoming more interactive. This is definitely happening. It’s one of those concepts like “The Long Tail” that you can feel happening but it’s not until it’s written in a cohesive manner like this speech that it all comes together.

We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

Do you "get" Twitter?

Posted on March 24, 2008

I read a post today by Fred Wilson that his kids finally “got” twitter. He wrote:

We are headed to Honolulu today. I twittered that fact and within minutes Joshua was back to me (via text message) with a recommendation for a ramen place called tenkaippin. I didn’t ask for it, but he offered it and we are now headed there for lunch

Earlier this week Jessica had gotten a text from her friends who were in boston visiting colleges. They wanted a recommendation for a sushi place. Jess asked me and I twittered the question

We got back a half dozen messages, and quickly determined the best place which she texted back. Her friends were thrilled

They used to think twitter was a stalker service. They still do, but they also think its awesome (‘at least for you dad’)

i hear what his kids are saying. I’ve been using Twitter for about a month now and while i see some useful parts of it, the service has yet to deliver the goods to me. I don’t have enough people i know on it and i don’t get enough useful twitter posts. It seems to be simply a way for people to advertise for themselves. There’s no real communication. I also don’t know if i should be following more strangers or if that’s tacky. The strangers i do follow (because their are blogs i read) like Mashable and Calcanis simply repeat what’s on their blogs so it’s pointless. I wish they could take the time to add a little more personality to the medium.

I think it’s hard for kids – or anyone – to understand the utility of Twitter because for the new user it doesn’t offer any immediately positive feedback or benefit. When you first begin, you twitter something and nothing happens – you just sit there. Similar to a typical social network, it’s not until you have lots of friends using it or until lots of users are following you that it becomes useful and even then i’m not sure if it’s much different than a massive chatroom with a better interface

Twitter may hit the mainstream, but i’d be willing to guess that it’s only useful for the hardcore who are actively trying to make it useful. That’s not mainstream, that’s digging for gold. I personally want my web services to just hand me the gold.

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