Frequent thinker, occasional writer, constant smart-arse

Tag: social networking (Page 1 of 2)

The social media police state will be its undoing

Back in 2009, I attended the Identity Common‘s annual conference and met a gentlemen who pitched me his HTML5 social networking app. HTML5 was the flashy new technology of the time and social networking was all the rage due to Twitter and Facebook. Burbn is what it was called and even though I thought it had no commercial value, it was still a memorable encounter. One year later, Burbrn would pivot to Instagram and that gentleman, Kevin Systrom, would sell his company for a billion years later.

Although I was oblivious to meeting the man who would create one of the world’s most impactful social media products, I was nevertheless aware of a coming storm. A year before that conference for example, I wrote a blog post thanking 2008 because we finally had a name for new media, “social media”. A term that was nascent back then but which now dominates our way of life. If you read that history I did, I also correctly predicted our friends would filter the world for us. What I never saw coming was how nation states would commit information warfare, where among many other things these same friends of mine were repeating propaganda which shaped our views.

30282 Super Secret Police Enforcer

“30282 Super Secret Police Enforcer” by Masked Builder is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A wakeup call

This information warfare is apparent on social media these days, suffocating these platforms. I’m currently in Russia and so I rely on a VPN to get access to things as unremarkable as LinkedIn. While this fact is not the reason why Instagram just disabled my account, it’s certainly a factor. I was trying to curate my connections as after a decade of following people my feed was crowded. Meaningful connection with everyone was not possible and I missed the content of those I did care about, making it slightly unusable. (Instagram even understood this as I would get frequent suggestions I create a new account to connect better with the people close me, which I think might be how this thought even got into my head.)

This activity triggered some type of automated alert, which appears to be part of their new way to target “unauthentic” accounts. Instagram said they are reviewing it as a security alert over the next 24 hours. And for a reasons I don’t know, I was then told my account was deleted.

(My offences if I had to incriminate myself is I used an app to help with analysing my friends as it gave better insights with my manual clean up, I’m in Russia which is not where most of my friends are and one of Facebook’s new triggers, and I have a post eating ice-cream to the tune of the anthem of the Soviet Union, which would be identified as a copyright violation to someone who doesn’t understand copyright law.)

Your account has been deleted for not following our terms. You will not be able to log into this account and no one else will be able to see it. we are unable to restore accounts that are deleted for these types of violations.
From another user but this is similar to what I first saw.

Done. Finished. No link to appeal. Never mind I’ve been a good citizen for 10 years: bye bye. And no, we won’t say why, just do not pass go, do not collect your belongings. It’s been a week with no ability to rectify it but that’s for another day because what matters is this is what I was effectively told at first. Suspicious logins, performing a few unfollowing actions and potentially copyright: my account was swatted like a fly that was categorised as a wasp when all I am is a bee trying to make some honey.

Winding back a bit and why I have a post eating Soviet ice-cream, “stories” was a transformational change to Instagram, a concept Instagram copied from Snapchat 5 years ago. When Snapchat made headlines, I’ll be honest: I could not understood why ephemeral content had value. But it suddenly came to life for me with Instagram as I learned content is powerful when generating an experience to connect with people. (A smaller portion of my network is on Snapchat, so the same functionality has less value.) Parallel to this, I saw the increased migration of my network from Facebook due to its privacy scandals. The 500-600ish connections I’ve made there over time, the hundreds of posts I had made including pictures of my children from my old phone or archived videos trying to perfect my technique on one of my hobbies, has meant it only grew in value.

But that’s not why my life was impacted. This is simply a pretext to how how the messaging system grew to become so important to me. The life sharing through stories and private messages as a result of it became a feedback loop where I reconnected with people. To the point where it even built a habit of deferring there first. In some cases, it’s the sole way of me connecting and communicating with people, like former colleagues who’s number I no longer have, former classmates for the reunion I’m organising, and even my yoga teacher in Russia where I (repeatedly) tell her when I’m running late (and boy, was I late this week). This is a utility to my life but even more so, what underlies my human connection.

And just like that, my ability to connect — and prized memories captured as content that I don’t have anywhere else — just disappeared. If you find this entertaining about how I could be so emotionally invested with a product, then consider the panic attack you may have had once in your life when you lost your phone (that had no backup). Swap this out imagine your Facebook or your phone contact list or your email account or whatever you use to maintain human connection– what if today out of nowhere, it was just deleted, terminated. How would you feel about that? Sure, you can start all over again but good luck trying to remember the surname of that dude that you really need to speak to right now that might help you get a job or give advice about going through an illness or to help you locate someone else.

Museum of Communications

“Museum of Communications” by Cargo Cult is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Who has the right to determine who you talk to?

When Twitter earlier this year made the decision to ban Donald Trump on Twitter, it set off a firestorm debate about freedom of speech which is still raging. Regardless of the reason, as freedom of speech in my eyes is a concept that is meant to protect you from oppression of the government, I felt unaffected though as a precedent it was alarming. Having someone in government lose their ability to communicate suits me fine because I don’t want to hear from them in the first place. But it raised a question that we have Trump to thank for pushing the limits on: who has power to make that decision? Twitter by law, had the right to do what they did. However, that decision may one day be regarded as a turning point. Silicon Valley, such as people in my circle who very much are leaders in the industry, and Washington, always talked about in the news, know that change to Section 230 is not if but when.

As I follow Instagram’s painful process to appeal their decision, and learn about how they operate, this incident has made me reflect that because of how overwhelmed they are, they clamp down even on regular people who have done little wrong. That brute force approach might superficially solve a problem of theirs but it creates others. If I didn’t have my intellectual property in the form of photos, videos and contacts on my account and this wasn’t a primary means for me to communicate with people, I probably would not give a damn. But I do: this actually affects my life.

Instagram could be a little smarter. Rather than shut out people, revoking users posting privileges is penalty enough with little downside risk. And yes misinformation and information warfare is a whole big problem that I’m just glossing over now. But the people we meet and the technology we use to connect with them is not a gimmick anymore: it’s what underlies our humanity in the information age. Instagram shutting down my account I consider worse than someone tampering with my postal mail. (Intentionally opening, intercepting or hiding someone else’s mail is the felony crime of mail theft in the US.)

As I said in 2008: “If my social graph is what filters my world, then my ability to access and control that graph is the equivalent to the Mass Media’s cry of ensuring freedom of the press.” In 2021, I’m going to say access to that graph now underlies our human connection and any restrictions on it will result in a revolt from users or government wanting to regulate one day.

The future is decentralised

The ability to communicate interpersonally with someone, or to broadcast to a group of people, or to discuss as a group — like what Instagram offers — is too important to let any one entity be able to control. Cryptography and Blockchain offer a path to building decentralised applications which is a good way to protect against abuse (or incompetence) by a centralised authority.

2015-01-16 22-31-05 NodeXL Graph Server blockchain

“2015-01-16 22-31-05 NodeXL Graph Server blockchain” by Marc_Smith is licensed under CC BY 2.0

That’s not an original idea. Web innovators over a decade ago with a focus on open standards, including the freshly created oAuth that underpins many applications these days, proposed that the future of social networking should be based on the principles of the decentralised internet. They unfortunately gave up to move onto other projects but the vision is sound. Where your relationships to other people and your ability to communicate with them cannot be controlled by any other entity other than the people involved. We already have the technology to do it but obviously implementation is tricky. It’s also something we should not take lightly: when someone works it out, it’s going to be the stuff that will one day topple governments. You would have laughed if I said that in 2008 but it was three years later that social media did that with the Arab Spring. This would be on a whole other level.

If Systrom didn’t sell out as early as he did and went back to his original vision of Burbn, maybe Instagram would have become that. Now that it’s a Facebook product, what is more likely, is that the management of Facebook either can’t understand how this trend is a threat or understands too well because it will disrupt their monopoly but the result is the same: nothing. That almost doesn’t matter because if information warfare continues to disrupt the operation of social media, this heavy handed policing will only continue and correspondingly there will be increased backlash due to the frustrated user base (it’s already happening with the valuable content creators).

Perhaps history will repeat itself where hubris will dismiss the entrepreneurs who will disrupt their product, like how Facebook tried to do with Instagram initially. That disruption sounds like audio right now thanks to the chatter by Clubhouse. However, until we see disruption on the architectural level that can put all the components together in a decentralised way, this is all just the warm up act.

More likely it will take one random person getting disabled, to piss them off enough where they will make that vision happen sooner. But until that happens, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Update: September 7 2021

Given the thousands of people on the Internet that this is happening to, where there is an entire cottage industry of agencies offerings to help you get your account again for a fee, I thought I’d share what happened to me.

  • After initially been shown the wall, I later could apply via a link to say a mistake had happened. I had to put my name, email, username. An email would be sent, sometimes immediately, other times hours later, where I had to take a picture with the code.
  • I did this daily and with different email accounts. The first few times, I responded with a different email account and after two times they would stop sending me an email when I requested it. But after a week and/or sending from the right email, as in the email I put on the form, it started working again.
  • However after fixing that and another issue, where I could see no reason why nothing was wrong I started tracking my emails. Here’s the interesting thing: none of my tracked emails have been opened. As I didn’t track the first few, I can’t say what happened there but this just proved to me the Facebook team is overwhelmed due to their automated fraud platform that’s shutting so many accounts

A few weeks pass and then the other day I get this email. Which I thought was weird, but when remembering my first two photos were sent from a different email, told me they must be about a month backed up clearing the queue.

And bam, the very next day — the sympathy apology email. Looks like my queue was overwhelming them.

Then a few days later, with my daily requests waning, I get this. (Notice that it was sent 2.40am, which means whoever did this is not working at Facebook HQ…which means this happens so often it’s been in or out-sourced)

Why now? Well, other than just giving it time something else happened. I started using a new Instagram account and these above emails happened around the same time I shared my first story which was connected to my Facebook account. It’s almost like the second story I shared triggered the reactivation. Maybe this is a coincidence, but given their automated spam detection platform is what shut my account in the first place, I would not be surprised if there is a correlation. Ultimately, they are just trying to prove you are a real human with a real account.

…And the real humans trying to keep up with this automated Facebook platform are getting seriously burnt out.

Blog posts on Liako.Biz for 2007

Continued on – a series of posts that summarises content created on Liako.Biz

You can also read 2008 and 2005 summaries.

December 2007

November 2007

October 2007

September 2007

August 2007

July 2007

June 2007

May 2007

April 2007

March 2007

Analysing the user experience from two social networking sites

Yet again, MySpace has e-mailed me a useless e-mail that frustrates me more than it gives me value . But what I noticed recently, was another social networking site, taking a different approach.

geni

Whereas MySpace is simply alerting me, which is forcing me to painfully log into their service, Geni is actually alerting me the information without me having to take another action.

A few points of reflection on this:
1) Using my business analysis on the consumer Internet , MySpace is offering a content model (hypermedia is how I referred to this in my post) whereas Geni is offering a Utility computing product. Both these businesses consider themselves "social networking" sites and yet both offer a different product model.
2) This also highlights two different business models: MySpace is a platform whilst Geni is working on a network model. Meaning, MySpace’s business model is premised on you visiting them for you to get value; Geni’s isn’t. To be perfectly honest, both MySpace and Geni are irrelevant for me. However platforms can come and go, but network models always stick around. As irrelevant Geni is to me, I still value it – a network business strategy (meaning you follow the user, rather than expecting them to come) builds a long term relationship.
3) Social networking sites when it’s the core product, work best as utility services and not a content business. Look at what a different user experience it is for me, because I can get benefit from my Geni account despite not having to log in. Although I am not giving them pageviews, I am giving them my attention which is translating into greater brand equity for them. When you treat social networking as a content business, this distorts the service offered to users, as misaligned business views on generating revenue drive strategy in a way that is harmful to the consumer ie, I feel like saying "f**k off" whenever I see those e-mails for MySpace . But "thank-you" to Geni.

The main point I want to get at though, is that the user experience is just as important when the user is not on the site as it is when they are on the site. People shy away from the recently-recognised network model of business, because they don’t get the same traffic. I say embrace it, because the market will eventually correct itself to recognise this is a superior type of strategy.

How many people are there on Facebook?

Facebooks new advertising features allow people to create targetted advertising campaigns. I took advantage of this feature to uncover some data about Facebook’s user base as I designed a mock campaign, because I’ve been curious to know where its strongest.

Although not all countries are listed below (ie, I have friends in Russia and Serbia whose data I could not fetch), this does give a good indication on users by country. The subtotal of 50 million is about the amount of users I’d expect to be on Facebook; the countries not included are obviously small and would make an immaterial difference. Fifty million users is within the ballpark of what sounds right (sorry, no link, but I read it somewhere), so the breakdown seems pretty complete.

I thought it might also be useful to add the data of under 18 year olds, to show social networking is certainly an adults tool now and not just some teen fad.

facebook users in US	Canada	UK	Australia	China	Columbia	Dominican Republic	Egypt	France	Germany	India	Ireland	Israel	Italy	Japan	Lebanon	Malaysia	Mexico	Netherlands	New Zealand	Norway	Pakistan	Saudi Arabia	Singapore	South Africa	Korea, Republic of	Spain	Sweden	Switzerland	Turkey	United Arab Emirates<br />

Update March 2008: I’ve done a follow up posting on March 2008 numbers

Pageview’s are a misleading metric

Recently MySpace, the social networking site that once dominated but is now being overtaken by Facebook, sent me an e-mail informing me that a friend of mine had a birthday. What is unusual, is that although I have received notifications of this type when I had logged into the site, I had never been e-mailed.

Below is a copy of the e-mail, and lets see if you notice what I did:
birthdayreminder

It doesn’t tell me whose birthday it is. In fact, it is even ambiguous as to whether it was just the one person or not. Big deal? Not really. But it very clearly tells me something: MySpace is trying to increase its pageviews.

Social networking sites are very useful services to an individual; they enable a person to manage and monitor their personal networks. Not only am I in touch with so many people I lost contact with, but I am in the loop with their lives. I may not message them, but by passive observation, I know what everyone is up to. Things like what they’re studying, where they work, what countries they will be holidaying in, and useful things like when they have their birthday.

Social networking sites are not just a website, but an information service, to help you manage your life. However as useful as I find these services, the revenue model is largely dependent on advertising, with premium features a rare thing now. So when you rely on advertising, you are going to be looking at ways of boosting the key figures that determine that revenue stream.

Friendster’s surprising growth in May was due to some clever techniques of using e-mail, to drive pageviews. And it worked. E-mail notifications, when done tactfully, can drive a huge amount of activity. Of the what seems like hundreds of web services I have joined, e-mail at times is the only way for me to remember I even subscribed to it once upon a time. Combine e-mail with information I want to be updated with, and you’ve got a great recipe for using e-mail as a tool to drive page views.

…And that is the problem. MySpace has very cleverly sent this e-mail to get me to log into my account. A marketing campagn like that will at the very least, see a good day in pageview growth. But the reason I am logging in, is just so I can see whose birthday it is. Myspace now to me is irrelevant: those pageviews attributed to me are actually, not one of an engaged user.

Pageviews as a metric for measuring audience engagement is prone to manipulation. Increases in pageviews on the face of it, make a website appear more popular. But in reality, dig a little deeper and the correlation for what really matters (audience engagement) is not quite on par.

So everyone, repeat after me: Pageviews – we need to drop them as a concept if we are ever going to make progress.

Explaining APML: what it is & why you want it

Lately there has been a lot of chatter about APML. As a member of the workgroup advocating this standard, I thought I might help answer some of the questions on people’s minds. Primarily – “what is an APML file”, and “why do I want one”. I suggest you read the excellent article by Marjolein Hoekstra on attention profiling that she recently wrote, if you haven’t already done so, as an introduction to attention profiling. This article will focus on explaining what the technical side of an APML file is and what can be done with it. Hopefully by understanding what APML actually is, you’ll understand how it can benefit you as a user.

APML – the specification
APML stands for Attention Profile Markup Language. It’s an attention economy concept, based on the XML technical standard. I am going to assume you don’t know what attention means, nor what XML is, so here is a quick explanation to get you on board.

Attention
There is this concept floating around on the web about the attention economy. It means as a consumer, you consume web services – e-mail, rss readers, social networking sites – and you generate value through your attention. For example, if I am on a Myspace band page for Sneaky Sound System, I am giving attention to that band. Newscorp (the company that owns MySpace) is capturing that implicit data about me (ie, it knows I like Electro/Pop/House music). By giving my attention, Newscorp has collected information about me. Implicit data are things you give away about yourself without saying it, like how people can determine what type of person you are purely off the clothes you wear. It’s like explicit data – information you give up about yourself (like your gender when you signed up to MySpace).

Attention camera

I know what you did last Summer

XML
XML is one of the core standards on the web. The web pages you access, are probably using a form of XML to provide the content to you (xHTML). If you use an RSS reader, it pulls a version of XML to deliver that content to you. I am not going to get into a discussion about XML because there are plenty of other places that can do that. However I just want to make sure you understand, that XML is a very flexible way of structuring data. Think of it like a street directory. It’s useless if you have a map with no street names if you are trying to find a house. But by having a map with the street names, it suddenly becomes a lot more useful because you can make sense of the houses (the content). It’s a way of describing a piece of content.

APML – the specification
So all APML is, is a way of converting your attention into a structured format. The way APML does this, is that it stores your implicit and explicit data – and scores it. Lost? Keep reading.

Continuing with my example about Sneaky Sound System. If MySpace supported APML, they would identify that I like pop music. But just because someone gives attention to something, that doesn’t mean they really like it; the thing about implicit data is that companies are guessing because you haven’t actually said it. So MySpace might say I like pop music but with a score of 0.2 or 20% positive – meaning they’re not too confident. Now lets say directly after that, I go onto the Britney Spears music space. Okay, there’s no doubting now: I definitely do like pop music. So my score against “pop” is now 0.5 (50%). And if I visited the Christina Aguilera page: forget about it – my APML rank just blew to 1.0! (Note that the scoring system is a percentage, with a range from -1.0 to +1.0 or -100% to +100%).

APML ranks things, but the concepts are not just things: it will also rank authors. In the case of Marjolein Hoekstra, who wrote that post I mention in my intro, because I read other things from her it means I have a high regard for her writing. Therefore, my APML file gives her a high score. On the other hand, I have an allergic reaction whenever I read something from Valleywag because they have cooties. So Marjolein’s rank would be 1.0 but Valleywag’s -1.0.

Aside from the ranking of concepts (which is the core of what APML is), there are other things in an APML file that might confuse you when reviewing the spec. “From” means ‘from the place you gave your attention’. So with the Sneaky Sound System concept, it would be ‘from: MySpace’. It’s simply describing the name of the application that added the implicit node. Another thing you may notice in an APML file is that you can create “profiles”. For example, the concepts about me in my “work” profile is not something I want to mix with my “personal” profile. This allows you to segment the ranked concepts in your APML into different groups, allowing applications access to only a particilar profile.

Another thing to take note of is ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ which I touched on above – implicit being things you give attention to (ie, the clothes you wear – people guess because of what you wear, you are a certain personality type); explicit being things you gave away (the words you said – when you say “I’m a moron” it’s quite obvious, you are). APML categorises concepts based on whether you explicitly said it, or it was implicitly determined by an application.

Okay, big whoop – why can an APML do for me?
In my eyes, there are five main benefits of APML: filtering, accountability, privacy, shared data, and you being boss.

1) Filtering
If a company supports APML, they are using a smart standard that other companies use to profile you. By ranking concepts and authors for example, they can use your APML file in the future to filter things that might interest you. As I have such a high ranking for Marjolein, when Bloglines implements APML, they will be able to use this information to start prioritising content in my RSS reader. Meaning, of the 1000 items in my bloglines reader, all the blog postings from her will have more emphasis for me to read whilst all the ones about Valleywag will sit at the bottom (with last nights trash).

2) Accountability
If a company is collecting implicit data about me and trying to profile me, I would like to see that infomation thank you very much. It’s a bit like me wearing a pink shirt at a party. You meet me at a party, and think “Pink – the dude must be gay”. Now I am actually as straight as a doornail, and wearing that pink shirt is me trying to be trendy. However what you have done is that by observation, you have profiled me. Now imagine if that was a web application, where this happens all the time. By letting them access your data – your APML file – you can change that. I’ve actually done this with Particls before, which supports APML. It had ranked a concept as high based on things I had read, which was wrong. So what I did, was changed the score to -1.0 for one of them, because that way, Particls would never show me content on things it thought I would like.

3) Privacy
I joined the APML workgroup for this reason: it was to me a smart away to deal with the growing privacy issue on the web. It fits my requirements about being privacy compliant:

  • who can see information about you
  • when can people see information about you:
  • what information they can see about you

The way APML does that is by allowing me to create ‘profiles’ within my APML file; allowing me to export my APML file from a company; and by allowing me to access my APML file so I can see what profile I have.

drivers

Here is my APML, now let me in. Biatch.

4) Shared data
An APML file can, with your permission, share information between your web-services. My concepts ranking books on Amazon.com, can sit alongside my RSS feed rankings. What’s powerful about that, is the unintended consequences of sharing that data. For example, if Amazon ranked what my favourite genres were about books – this could be useful information to help me filter my RSS feeds about blog topics. The data generated in Amazon’s ecosystem, can benefit me and enjoy a product in another ecosystem, in a mutually beneficial way.

5) You’re the boss!
By being able to generate APML for the things you give attention to, you are recognising the value your attention has – something companies already place a lot of value on. Your browsing habits can reveal useful information about your personality, and the ability to control your profile is a very powerful concept. It’s like controlling the image people have of you: you don’t want the wrong things being said about you. 🙂

Want to know more?
Check the APML FAQ. Othersise, post a comment if you still have no idea what APML is. Myself or one of the other APML workgroup members would be more than happy to answer your queries.

5 observations of how social networking (online) has changed social networking (offline)

Just then, I had an image get shattered. A well respected blogger, whose online persona had me think they were a very cool person offline, is infact, a fat geek with an annoying voice. I can pretty much cross off the list that he can relate to experiences of how Facebook is mentioned in trendy nightclubs on the dancefloor.

Another thing I have noticed: all the major commentators & players of the Internet economy, are usually married, in their 30s or 40s, and almost all come from an IT background.

Don’t get me wrong – the industry has a lot of people that are a goldmine with what they say. They challenge my thinking, and they are genuinely intelligent. But although they are users of web services like Facebook or MySpace – just like the rest of society – they are people experiencing these technologies in the bubble of the technology community. Their view of the world, is not aligned with what’s actually happening in the mainstream. No surprises there – they are the early adopters, the innovators and the pioneers. It’s funny however, that comparable to other services (like Twitter) the adoption amongst the tech community for Facebook has been slow: it was only when the developer network launched that it started getting the attention.

What I want to highlight is that most commentators have no way in the world of understanding the social impact of these technologies in the demograghic where the growth occurs. We all know for example, Facebook is exploding with users – but do we know why it’s exploding? A married man in his 40s with a degree in computer science, isn’t going to be able to answer that, because most of the growth comes from single 20 year olds with an history major.

So what I am about to recount is my personal experience. I am not dressing it up as a thought-piece; I am just purely sharing how I have seen the world take to social networking sites and how it has transformed the lives of my own and the people around me. I’m 23 years old, the people in my life generally fall into the computer clueless category, and I have about 500 Facebook friends that I know through school, university, work, or just life (about ten are in the tech industry).

1) Social networking sites as a pre-screening tool
Observation: I randomly was approached by a chick one night and during the course of our conversation she insisted I knew a certain person. Ten minutes, and 20 more “I swear…you know xxx” – I finally realised she was right and that I did know that person. For her to be so persistent in her claim, she had to be sure of herself. But how can someone be sure of themselves with that piece of information, when I had only met her 30 seconds earlier?

I then realised this chick had already seen me before – via facebook. I know this is the case, because I myself have wandered on a persons profile and realised we have a lot of mutual friends. In those times I would note it is bound to happen that I would meet them.

Implication: People are meeting people and know who they are before they even talk. They say most couples meet through friends. Well now you can explore your friends’s friends – and then start hanging around that friend when you know they know someone you like!

2) Social networking sites getting you more dates
Observation: I met a chick and had a lengthy chat with her, and although she was nice, I left that party thinking I would probably never see her again as I didn’t give out any contact details. That next day, she added me as a friend on Facebook. In another scenario, there was a girl I met from a long time ago and I hadn’t seen her since. We randomly found each other on Facebook, and I’ve actually got to know the girl – picking up from where we left off.

Implication: Social networking sites help you further pursue someone, even though you didn’t get their number. In fact, it’s a lot less akward. Facebook has become a aprt of the courtship process – flirtation is a big aspect of the sites activity.

3) Social networking sites helping me decide
Observation: There was a big party, but I wasn’t sure if I would go because I didn’t know who would go with me. I looked at the event RSVP, and I to my surprise found out a whole stack of people I knew were going.

Implication: Facebook added valuable information that helped me decide. Not knowing what people were going, I probably wouldn’t have gone. Think about this on another level: imagine you were were interested in buying a camera, and you had access to the camera makes of your friends (because the digital photos they upload contain the camera model – as seen with Flickr). Knowing what your friends buy is a great piece of advice on what you want to buy.

4) Social networking sites increasing my understanding of people I know
Observation: I found out when a friend added me on myspace, that she was bisexual – something I never would have realised. Being bi is no big deal – but it’s information that people don’t usually give up about themselves. Likewise, I have since found out about people I went to school with are now gay. Again – no big deal – but discreet information like that increases your depth of understanding about someone (ie, not making gay jokes around them). I know what courses my contacts have studied since I last saw them, and what they are doing with their lives. I also know of someone that will be at one of my travel destinations when I go on holiday.

Implication: You are in the loop about the lives of everyone you’ve met. It’s nothing bad, because these people control what you can see, but it’s great because there are things you know, things you know you don’t know, but now you can find out things you didn’t know that you didn’t know.

5) Social networking sites as a shared calendar
Observation: My little sister is currently going through 21st season – back to back parties of her friends. One of the gripes of 21sts when organising them, is overlap with other peoples. Not only that – but also the physical process of contacting people and getting them to actually RSVP – it’s a pain. However unlike my 21st season experience from a few years ago, my sister has none of these issues. This is because Facebook is like one big shared calender. Another example is how I send my congratulations to birthday friends a lot more than I have in the past because I actually know its their birthday- due to fact our calendars are effectively pooled as a shared calendar.

Implication: Facebook has become an indispensable tool to peoples social lives.

6) Bonus observation – explaining the viral adoption of Facebook
I have a few friends that don’t have Facebook. You can almost count them on the one hand. And when you bring it up, they explode with a “I’m sick of Facebook!” and usually get defensive because so many people hassle them. In most cases, they make an admission that one day, they will join. The lesson here is that Facebook is growing because of peer pressure. The more people in someone’s network, the more valuable facebook becomes to them. When they say 40 million users, it’s actually 40 million sales people.

God bless the network effect.

Facebook poll: how many friends do you have?

One of Facebook‘s new features is the ability to create surveys, targeted to certain groups of people within the community site. One caught my eye today, which asked 1,000 random people “How many friends do you have?”. Although I am not sure of the conditions this poll was conducted under (ie, did only Australian’s see it?), 1,000 random people should theoretically be a fairly representative sample of the entire population.

Whilst the results immediately show some interesting information on the typical size of a person’s network (which is a discussion in itself), I am equally fascinated by the specific genders and age breakdown of people who answered the poll and the correlation with their network size. One theory I have of why people spend so much time on the site, is because people ‘collect’ friends. They are constantly discovering old friends through mutual friends – a friend’s list leads a person to another profile where they may discover someone they have lost touch with. Check the results first, before I continue:

Poll on

Facebook poll breakdown

Facebook poll breakdown by age

Some of my interpretations of the results

  • Despite being open to anyone since late last year, university students still dominate the site as over half the survey was answered by people in the 18-24 age bracket
  • About 46% of males and 49% of females have over 200+ people. It’s impossible to have 200 ‘friends’ – no one can physically see 200 friends on a regular basis This tells me Facebook is now more about ‘contacts’ and keeping in touch with people you know. This makes it more than just a closed network of your close friends and more of a networking tool – validating what some commentators have been saying of late. I could spend a whole blog post explaining the implications of this, but basically, this means facebook is ‘the’ social networking site now and it’s only going to get more entrenched due to the law of cumulative advantage.
  • Of people aged 35 and above, 70% have under 99 friends – which is only the case of 41% of people aged 25-34, and 19% of 18-24. This is interesting, because the people in the 24+ age group didn’t have facebook when they were at university (which is why 18-24 is so dominant in this regard). Over time, you would expect the age groups to be fairly synchronised – in fact older people would have much larger networks. This tells me despite all the hype, Facebook is still not mainstream – there is a heck of a lot more growth to occur.
  • …and leading off where I started the blog posting: the fact that more males answered the poll (53%) – despite women generally outnumbering men in Western countries – implies men are more interested in knowing how many friends people have. So if you tie that with my ‘friend collector’ theory means more men spend time ‘collecting’…in other words, men stalk more!

Tangler

This is the second post in a series – wizards of oz – which is to highlight the innovation we have down under, and how the business community needs to wake up and realise the opportunities. I review Tangler, a Sydney-based start-up that has recently released their application to the world as a public beta.

Tangler is a web-service that enables discussions over a network. Think of discussions with the immediacy of Instant Messaging (it’s easy), but with the persistency of a forum (messages are permanently stored). Discussions are arranged into communities of interest (groups), which are further broken down into topic areas. Click here to see a video overview.

Value

1) It’s a network application. Although it’s got a great design, and looks like a funky website, the real power of this web service is what it’s working towards: discussions over a network. Imagine a little widget with the topic “What do you think of Elias Bizannes?” placed on my (external) personal blog, my internal work blog, my myspace/facebook/social networking page, as well as it’s own dedicated forum on the Tangler site. A centralised discussion, in a decentralised manner. That’s big.

2) It’s community has great DNA. Communities are not easy things to build – my own experience on a getting-bigger-by-the-day internal project has shown that it is a complex science, touching everything from understand motivational theory to encouraging the right kind of behaviours (policing without policing). My usage on the site has shown to me that the active community building currently occuring, is on the right track. Anyone can hire a code monkey, wack on some flashy front-end, and say they have a great product. But not anyone can build a strong community – even Google struggles on this (the acquisition of YouTube happened largely because of community, because the YouTube community beat Google’s own service). Tangler’s community is already turning into a powerful asset – the DNA is there – now it just needs exposure, and the law of cumulative advantage will kick in.

3) The founder and staff are responsive to its community. I posted a question on the feedback forum, to prove this point: I got a response in an hour, on a Saturday. The staff at Tangler are super responsive – which in part, is due to the real-time discussion ability of the software – but also because of their commitment. As I state above – the value of Tangler is the community of users it builds – this type of responsiveness is crucial to keep its users satisfied to come back, because it makes them feel valued. Additionally, the community is driving the evolution of the application, and that’s the most powerful way to create something (adapting to where there is a need by the people that use it)

4) It’s a platform. What makes Tangler powerful, is that it encourages discussions around niche content areas. Make that niche content, being created for free. Low cost to produce + highly targeted content = an advertisers dream. Link it with a distributed network across the entire Internet (see 1 above), and you’ve got something special.

Conclusion

Social networks, which is what Tangler is, are characterised by:
1) the existence of a repository of user-generated content and
2) the need of members to communicate.

Tangler’s user-generated content and communications web make them an interesting fit for both media conglomerates and telecommunication companies (but for different reasons). I see a Tangler acquisition as a no-brainer for the big Telco’s. Integrating a social network like Tangler into Telstra, builds on the synergy between the communication needs of social network users and the communications expertise and service infrastructure of the communication companies. Unlike voice calls that are a commodity now, the Telco’s need to take advantage of their network infrastructure and accommodate for text-based discussions, which can be monetised for as long as the content exists (with advertising).

The challenge for Tangler however – as with any other Internet property – is that the scale of the audience of social networks determines the nature of the relationship with a communications company. Micro-sized social networks are not interesting to communication companies. Massive social networks are, but history has shown they would rather be partners than be acquired. To be attractive to the big end of town, Tangler needs to show to have a scale large enough to grow as a business but not too large to dictate the terms of the business.

My observations conclude me to think that they will be a hit once they open up their application to external developers, which will relieve the development bottleneck faced by their resource and time constrained team. However they shouldn’t rush this, as I still think their performance issues are not completely ironed out yet. An open API would be taken up by its enthusiastic community who are technologically orientated. Not too mention the strong relationships the CEO and CMO have forged with the local web entrepreneurial and development community in Australia.

My boss is currently doing a secondment as acting Finance Director at Sensis, Telstra’s media arm. Maybe I need to organise a catch-up with him, before these guys get snatched up by some US conglomerate!

Social networks as the new e-mail

The other day, I received my first spam message within Facebook, which I thought was reminiscent of the Nigerian scam

Please if you are reliable and Interested in been a commissioned rep with our company we will be glad but you have to be a Trustworthy person. We have sold out to major galleries and private collectors from few parts of the world. We have been facing serious difficulties when it comes to the payment method, i.e The international money transfer tax for legal entities (companies) in Latvia is 25%, whereas for the individual it is only 7%.There is no sense for us to work this way, while tax for international money transfer made by a private individual is 7% .That's why we need you! Branches have been set up in few countries,and the head branch in UK.we are working on setting up a branch in the states, so for now i need a representative in Canada, America,Asia,New Zealand,and Europe who will be handling the payment aspect. so all you need do is cash the Payment,deduct your percentage and wire the rest back.</p> <p>JOB DESCRIPTION? 1. Receive payment from Clients 2. Cash Payments at your Bank 3. Deduct 10% which will be your percentage/pay on Payment processed. 4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay to any of the offices you will be contacted to send payment to(Payment is to be forwarded either by Money Gram or Western Union Money Transfer).

But unlike spam I would get in my e-mail inbox, I could actually check the profile of the user that sent the message to me. It was empty and a dud – which is how I could assess it was spam. Spam through a closed social networking site like Facebook has very different implications to e-mail spam: it’s accountable.

Unlike e-mail spam, you don’t know who is sending it. Sometimes, the e-mail spammers can make it look like it comes from a certain company you trust (like your bank). This also to some extent happens on myspace, whereby spammers do up their profile and deceivingly make it look like a real profile when it isn’t (ie, a pretty girl with her interests filled out – but as soon as you click somewhere, it takes you to a porn referral site). Facebook is different, because people can’t modify their profiles (yet) like you can on myspace, so the person sending the message is a lot more accountable to their true identity. You can judge how real they are by the amount of friends they have, information in their profile, and postings on their profile from other people.

Profile comments are the key aspect – no comments, suggests a fake account – because you can’t fake friends to post real discussions. A spammer would need to create a few dozen profiles, to replicate the thread of discussion via peoples profiles, so that it could make someones profile look “real”: that’s a lot of effort that a computer robot can’t do on it’s own.

A new way of communicating

Aside from this, there is something more interesting: I rarely use e-mail to communicate with friends anymore. Messages or comments/wallposts are now the new way of how people communicate. In the old days, people would forward a funny video – now they “post a bulletin”. People post “notes” and tag their friends if they are mentioned in the note – a bit like writing a story, and alerting those who are involved to have a look. It’s the equivilant to sending an e-mail to a group of people – but leaving it somewhere where all your other friends can have a read as well if they want. That is huge – this open style of communication is something e-mail never did.

I’ve previously written how the “post a comment” feature is one of the most powerful features of social networking sites. When I say these sites are the new e-mail, it’s not just messages that are the means of communicating – it’s actually mostly through these profile comments that people have these discussions. The interesting thing about this new way of communicating, is that two people can be having a discussion, however all their friends can monitor the conversation. For example, I made a tongue-in-cheek comment of a Ukrainian friend of mine on her facebook profile wall, and another mutual (Ukrainian) friend saw the comment and joined in defending Ukrainians!

Social networking sites work because they are creating a community feel, where people interact within a tribe or small village that everyone knows each other, and they communicate in what is like a open forum. If it’s one thing I am sure of, these sites are no longer fads: they are a positive evolution of the Internet as a communications medium. It appear solutions to e-mail spam with clever algorithms that can filter messages arn’t the way forward; the solution is to be found in new ways of communicating, and that is what social networking sites do really well.

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