Category: Social Software

The session on data sharing and privacy was combined with Kevin Marks session on digital publics. We talked about people’s experiences handling the increased visibility of internet life.
Managing reputation
People share about their experiences in order to get their side of the story out and create a public image. Among digital natives, “it’s not a real breakup until you’ve listed it on facebook.
Handling fame
Before the internet, there were only a small number of people who had more followers than people can comfortably manage socially. Now many more people do. More widespread fame means that more people have the issues with stalkers and pestering fans.
Cautionary and instructive tales
At the session at the data sharing summit, the conversation turned to cautionary tales about social data sharing gone wrong.
Failed white lies
Someone begs out of a work-related social event by claiming the flu. His boss discovers a picture on flickr of the guy wearing a skirt and holding a drink. The picture is timestamped at the same data as the work party. His boss sends him a note suggesting that that may not be an effective way to recover from the flu. The lesson here is that some things that feel private are more public than we think.
Social network molting
It is socially awkward to unfriend people. Some people get around obsolete lists of friends by “forgetting” their password and needing to invite their current lists of friends with a new password. The lesson is that declared, public friends lists are in
The ex-girlfriend effect
The list of “people you should know” in social network recommendations often includes exes and enemies. These are people who are part of your social graph – but you are not connected to directly. In an organization, similar algorithms might locate internally competing projects. The algorithm doesn’t know that some gaps in the social graph are deliberate.

At Recent Changes Camp, I heard signs from two very different directions — fan fiction and biomedical research — that open content business models are finally reaching the mainstream.
Laura Hale of the Fan History Wiki talked about how, since 2005, big media companies have stopped harrassing independent fan groups with takedown notices and other threats. Instead, they have set up their own commercial fan hosting sites, and use those as a way to promote their brand’s content. Independent communities still exist. The big media companies can dismiss them as “unauthorized”. The indies think of themselves as un-coopted. The main story is, the business model has changed, and the media companies think of communities as ways to make money, and not worth legal prosecution.
Ehud Lamm, a researcher in the philosophy of science, shared that the NIH, after years of debate, had mandated that researchers taking NIH money must make their papers available to the public. This decision was ratified into law in December of last year. Since the NIH is a major funder of biomedical research, this will have a transformative affect.
When the internet reached the mainstream, models based on open access to content and active user communities became more powerful than models based on limited access to physical artifacts. It’s taken a decade for institutions and business models to adapt. But the times are changing, and the participants in wiki communities are seeing up close the results of the change.

Ralph Koster gave an interesting talk at etech about lessons from game design for social software. There were several things that seemed right and useful.
* challenge. Overcoming challenges and learning are key to fun. Games are designed to provide a successive series of challenges. By contrast, the software design paradigm is focused on ease of use. This is right for an ecommerce site that a user uses once, but is wrong for applications that people use and learn over time.
* contextual interfaces. in a game world, the monster acts differently if you approach from the front or behind. Game designers create information architectures that present different behavior depending on context. By contrast, the software IA paradigm is about consistency.
The talk was also missing a few things, I think. His psychological model was individualistic. It was all about the individual player, and didn’t talk about the social factors – decoration, storytelling, came creation. And his social model was purely competitive. “Of course,”, he says, “people are playing the game to win. ” But people play games with a variety of motivations, and social software includes ways to play individually and collaboratively, in addition to competitively.
This topic is really interesting and needs some more fleshing out.

Inevitability is a rhetorical technique used when someone is trying to steamroll some highly debatable activity.
The first time I really noticed the technique being used was when doing public interest lobbying. Legislators pushing a bad bill would say that passage was inevitable. This tactic would put inexperienced activists into a tizzy. But it wasn’t fact. They were just trying to get you to give up. opposing their deal.
Another way this is used is technical determinism. A given action is technically possible, and therefore it is inevitable that it will be used the way the speaker wants. This is bogus. Automobiles can easily do 70 mph. This makes it possible to construct many-lane, banked boulevards that allow cars to careen through neighborhoods. But it doesn’t make it inevitable. The design of the road system is a social decision, not a purely technical decision. Localities can choose speedways or traffic calming.
The folk pursuing the social network graph experiment are claiming that reducing the inefficiency of digital social networks is inevitable, just as 60s traffic engineers claimed that reducing the inefficiency of local roads was inevitable. Some amount of social network friction is socially beneficial. Someday, digital networks will need to make this decision as policy choice. There will be the network equivalent of robots.txt, or some other aggregation calming technique. Brad Fitzpatrick is acting as the Bob Moses of social networks, someday we will need social network Jane Jacobs.

From Facebook Developer Garage a presentation two developers about going into business on their own. “You can write your application nights and weekends. Then, once it gets big, quit your day job. One of the most important things we learned was “time management 101 – the need to leave time to have conversations with people other than each other.”
There was an early-boom land-rush vibe. A tall VC in oxford and chinos lured developers with a pitch that Facebook will go public for billions, and users on Facebook apps are worth $1 to $10 each. The race is on to attract millions of users with viral applications, and cash out before users get annoyed and quit the app. Virality is becoming social spam — one of the apps has come up with a way of doing “reply-all” via SMS. Uh, thanks for bringing that into the world. There was envy and hatred for the “big incumbent players” (who started 3 months ago), who create new million-user apps by cross-promoting from their existing million-user apps.
The atmosphere was reminiscent of dot.com — without some of the sleaziest aspects of fraudulent dot.com business models, but also with less of the idealism about opening information and improving the world. The median age at the event was about 21.5.
There is also a somewhat dizzying look into the future. The handful of developers at Facebook who took questions at the last session were talking about allowing apps to add elements to the API (yowza!), hosting applications (!), strengthening groups. Platform looks like this, not like Microsoft. The decisions that the crew of developers on the couch in front of the room make now will affect how software works years from now.
The euphoria and the leap from virality into social spam still isn’t the interesting bit about Facebook to me. I’ve been walking around with various ideas for social applications for years, and Facebook provides a platform that makes it easy to bring those ideas into reality. There are all kinds of useful things that can be done, with an application based on people being able to communicate with their friends. Some of those things are socially useful, and some remunerative. The “get a bazillion users and sell out to a greater fool” model isn’t so interesting.
I guess that makes me a chump from the perspective of profit maximization, but I feel the same way about quizzes and horoscopes as about celebrity weddings and movies where things go boom — I don’t mind, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of doing things that might be less momentarily popular but are worth doing.

Who cares most about putting together a holistic picture of your friends and associates:

• you? You can eliminate the repetitive task of adding friends to networks
• marketers? They can infiltrate the social network and spam you through your networks of friends
• government analysts? They get to more easily trace people who know people who oppose government policies, attend anti-war demonstrations, protest factory farms.
• insurance companies? They can tailor your coverage based on whether your friends smoke or are sexually active

Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon are enthusiastic about reducing the inconvenience and friction of a disconnected social graph. But it seems to me that the cure is worse than the disease. Reducing friction introduced by different services in different social contexts is moderately convenient for individuals, and very handy for institutions that don’t have peoples’ best interests at heart.
Ross Mayfield pointed to privacy concerns here, and Danny O’Brien of EFF talked about them in a privacy session at BarCampBlock, the raw notes are here

danah boyd has written an interesting and controversial essay documenting an observation she has made in recent months that there seems to be a socioeconomic/cultural division between young people using MySpace and Facebook. Privileged kids are gravitating to Facebook; lower-income and otherwise marginalized kids are staying on MySpace. There are a lot of very serious concerns about increasing inequality and decreased social mobility in the US. And if I was looking for domains to worry about it, Facebook and MySpace would be somewhere near dead last.
Like other folks who have commented on danah’s essay, I would be watching out for change. The demographics of Facebook changed rapidly when they opened it up. The population is likely to change further with new applications. Maybe developers will add apps to Facebook that have more media and decoration features, so kids who want music and more pictures will be able to have those things on Facebook. Without more research, it’s hard to say how much of the relative preferences have to do with overall visual style, vs. features, vs. preferential attachment. Not to mention, sns’s are the subject of fashion, like physical clubs. What is considered “cool” will change in different social groups, too.
I don’t see an increased concern about the creation of an SNS-based caste system. People group themselves, that is nothing new. A person will go where their friends and perceived peers are. We’re talking about MySpace vs. Facebook, so digital divide access issues are factored out. Free social network services have much less built-in stratification than: selective colleges; the ability to pay for higher education or private education; racial profiling in shopping areas and on the street; clothing; transportation; neighborhood safety… any number of factors in the real world that differentiate strongly by income inequality, and are much higher, more persistent, more tightly closed barriers than social groupings on Myspace or Facebook.
One of the reasons that the article was controversial was that danah wrote about her anecdotal observations before going and getting quantitative data. I think it’s fine to blog prepublished, unfinished and informal things. I would very much look forward to danah’s cut of the analysis based on data. Once source might be the Pew data set which has socioeconomic information. The Pew study doesn’t have the psychographic categories that danah is talking about, but they do have household income, education level of parents, race and ethnicity, and age, and might be a place to seek to validate some of the hypothesis.

TechDirt has a snarky article about Toyota’s effort to create a web community with Prius owners, referring to previous flops: a failed Walmart customer community, and an “anti-social software” application that let people sms others based on license plate number.
Toyota’s implementation sounds flawed, but the idea has merit. Walmart shoppers have little in common other than they like cheap stuff and are willing to drive to get it. Prius owners, on the other hand, may have more in common, including maintaining a fairly new product, as well as interests in other green purchases and green policy.
The Toyota site, by news report, allows toyota owners to create profiles of themselves, and search profiles of other people. But what Toyota owners have in common isn’t the desire to date or hire other Toyota owners (the motivation in MySpace and Linked In sites with this format. It’s to share information about owning a Prius, and being generally interested in responsible household energy use.
The need would be better served by a traditional blog/wiki setup, where owners could tell stories about their Prius use, Prius products, and other experiences using and seeking green products. A profile might be a feature for the system — and individuals could choose how much to disclosed about their personal identity — but it wouldn’t be the first thing that a user would do. There are other features more important than profile detail and profile search — the ability to create local “prius club” events, for example. A built-in wiki would help Prius users build information about hybrid technology.
There are reason for Toyota not to host the site themselves, as TechDirect suggests, but to sponsor an independent site. Prius owners might be interested in third party modifications, such as plug-in conversions, that would void a Toyota warranty. Toyota might not be willing to foster plug-in mods under its own roof, although they would certainly benefit from learning from those early adopters. It would be useful to have a ratings service for mechanics and third-party products, and Toyota might not want to sponsor this directly, either. Prius owners might be interested in organizing to advocate green policy at a local or national level. Toyota might or might not be interested in being directly assocated with this.
So, the best solution might be for Toyota to be a sponsor in a third-party hosted community, rather than hosting itself. And, while profiles could be a useful part of the tool set, it wouldn’t be the place to start. Prius owners are probably more into their shared interests than personally interested in each other.

Like Yahoo and Google, but
* with widgets from anywhere to get out of the walled garden
* with lovely slideable ajax boxes that want to be a common design pattern
I hate the “everything-one-one-browser-screen”. It is horribly distracting. Multiple Windows are good.
Back in the day, I used to use a 3M sticky note application that let you type things on stickynotes and organize them on bulletin boards. Only problem was it had godawful memory behavior and if you had too much information it would kill your computer’s performance.
So, like NetVibes but with desktop widgets you can move around, bundle and snap together. Or a physical gizmo, the size of a deck of cards, with 5 or 7 or 12 display cards held together with a keyring. Plastic cards with a matt finish, slightly raised edges like coins, and a display. You can shuffle them so you see one or two or three at a time, or collapse them together. Each one is a widget; a clock or feedreader or a calendar. You configure the widget set from your desktop computer.
In front of your attention when you want it. Away and closed up when you don’t.

Does this exist yet? It’s like the widgets that let you email your legislator, but instead it uses Skypeout, Gizmo Callout, or other service. You have reminder text about the bill number and the topic. You push the button to ring out to the congresscritter and talk to a staffer or leave a message. If the service was developed in a brandable fashion, it could be subsidized by EFF or the Sierra Club or the NRA or whoever.
For that matter, Congress needs VOIP service. A public office could setting up a voice presense handle and use it for inbound calls. Is anybody doing this yet?