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Make music, make friends: my social graph

I wish I had drawn out my interpretation of my social communities before I installed the new Facbeook app, Social Graph. What this app does very well is show me how my facebook friends are connected and clustered.

I ran the app, took a screen grab and began to label the clusters. When I loaded the app again, my clusters looked different. In these screen grabs I did not include some of the outliers. Most of those people are friends I made while traveling. There are so many ways to interpret my social circles. The app is slow right now and it doesn’t tell a story. But I can do that:

My Social Graph

Ultimately, what I found is that my techno community links my high school and ancestry communities the most. Media and music are still the center of my social circle here. My current job at the Office for Women’s Affairs is surprisingly barely connected to anything at all. I have two London networks that don’t overlap at all.

My Social Graph

I can see that media and music are the centrally what link me to people and my professional communities. I have strong clusters in Indiana and San Francisco that thickly overlap with my Chicago community.

My Social Graph

I found many of the outliers here to have a specific ethnic quality in common. I also had an absolutely random seeming smattering of “indian people” from all over the country in that cluster.

Overall, I’ve learned that my music communities centrally have guided my social life. I have an enormous high school network, which makes sense because I joined Facebook as soon as I graduated high school. My Bloomington music community is tightly connected to my student media groups which then led me to my job at the Star, the news design community, my Poytner Fellowship and the cluster of friends in Indianapolis who worked at Rolls Royce.

Last year, friends from my San Francisco Tech and Techno Community went to India for a wedding. They stayed with my aunts, uncles and cousins and must have friended each other. There are enough people from my high school who moved to San Francisco, listen to Techno and work in Tech, so we can see those overlaps too.

I was surprised how few links there were between my tech communities and RockMelt, but then again it makes sense because I did not get the internship by knowing someone, per say (which is quite rare). There was a 6-degrees of separation alumni connection there.

I wish I could make some sense of the random smattering of Indian people. That cluster is concentrated with Indian people I know from all over the country and world. I guess we really are all family.

I would love to search for specific friends in this app. Still, very cool. This is also the first time I got to check off every category in my tags!

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What if ads weren’t such a bad thing?

Advertisements are annoying because they interrupt whatever it is that I’m trying to do. Ads disrupt my reading, my hulu-watching, steal attention when during searches and force you to chase your mouse around a dancing logo hunting for the ‘x’ icon. I cannot recall a time when associating your brand with words like annoying and frustrating was a good thing.

We are in a flow when we’re reading. Researcher danah boyd talks about Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory in the context of media online:

Consider what it means to be “in flow” in an information landscape defined by networked media, and you will see where Web 2.0 is taking us. The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant, valuable, entertaining, or insightful. Living with, in, and around information.

boyd is not talking about advertisements here. Not directly at least, but it fits in. Usually, ads are persuading their targets to buy something. Usually. But, often, people do come online, to indeed, purchase something. The advertisements are frustrating when people are not shopping or the advertisements are irrelevant. The ads are frustrating when they don’t fit into our flow and rarely do they.

 

Example: If Cheryl Sundra has been shopping for cameras lately, I bet she would love to know that Kyle Telechan uses a Nikon D3. She thinks his photo is “fantastic!”

But for now, advertisements are a part of our world. Some news companies especially still cling to the ad model for a way to pay for server space and their reporters. But how is it that an entire industry built on paying for their product with subscriptions and ads missed the boat again?

According to insidefacebook.com:

Facebook has filed for an ad targeting patent that lets the company direct ads based on the tastes of a a user’s friends, on top of their own explicit interests.

But it also covers other twists on the idea, including using a person’s browsing habits or actions on the social network to target ads. Although the patent document only appeared earlier this month, the company filed for it in April of last year.

Facebook argued in the filing that self-reported interests often leave out people who might fit within a targeted group for an advertiser. The idea would be to help marketers reach potential customers who haven’t shared enough information about themselves to feed Facebook’s ad targeting algorithms.

Educated, connected readers, probably with credit cards, are reading the news online. Sure, the news sites has access to user browsing habits. But that was when they were just users. Facebook transformed these users into people. People with relationship histories, favorite restaurants and absolute easy access to the kinds of people and places that are important in their lives.

Facebook filed for this patent. But surely the news is already working on something. I’m personally putting a lot of eggs in the news.me basket.

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Viral Seeds

Spreading the joy of Spring

Using a Model of Social Dynamics to Predict Popularity of News points to Hochheiser and Schniederman’s reader to leader theory in some ways. In this paper Kristina Lerman and Tad Hogg study the voting and interaction behavior of users on Digg.

A small number of users dominate the activity on the site, and receive most of the attention of other users.

In this case, on Digg, a small group of people act as leaders, as do they on Wikipedia according to Hochheiser. Lerman also found that sites that initially get many votes do not accumulate many more further on. It seems that viralirty does not exist in the Digg system like we would expect. However, Digg is potentially a viral seed.

Leaders potentially start on Digg and as they “vote on the story, it becomes visible to their own fans through the friends interface.” From there, the content may expand to broader networks with more users who act as collaborators and contributors.

The strength of social influence is measured in terms of the proportion of initial votes that can be made via the friends interface: those coming from the fans of the submitter and previous voters. Social influence during the early voting period and the final number of votes a story receives are inversely correlated.

What we can learn here is that initially, it seems that it takes getting content to the leaders so they will contribute to their other leader and readers which then, and only then, will traffic to the content increase. Earlier this year I blogged asking if it was knowledge or was it the network that is power. Some signs point to network.

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It’s halftime: it’s time to synthesize

Call it expanding and contracting, cycling and then recycling or moving forwards and backwards. That’s the way research goes. I am midstream a thick media reporting project. As I sort through my quasi-professional-identity crisis as a designer, journalist and researcher I have full warrant to borrow tools and techniques from all disciplines.

I borrowed elements of affinity diagraming to draw new conclusions about so much of what I have learned this semester.

I'm supposed to find meaning in this stack?
1. I wrote short summaries of my research findings on individual Post It notes.

Diagram findings
2. I stuck the post it notes on a big blank wall. I organized and reorganized them until they made some kind of subjective, judged sense.

The big topics
3. Then, I gave each stack a topic. I now have organized clusters of thoughts and seeds of ideas about how to move forward.

Questions

  1. What kinds of people should I talk to next?
  2. How does language connect communities and culture?
  3. What are the analog things in our life that mimic the social layer?
  4. What gap is social media sharing expression filling?
  5. What filled the expression gap before?
  6. Will we get social media fatigue (too many chicken nuggets)?
  7. Social media satisfies impulsive behavior and thoughts. What other part of our life does this affect?
  8. Why do we gather where we do online?
  9. What gets left out when shared (broadcasted) content is personalized for us?
  10. How are people who share to social media like and unlike journalists?
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Reader to leader: motivating participation

“One click” tools like retweeting and liking content make social participation easy. Harry Hochheiser and Ben Schniederman say “Social networking tools illustrate the importance of leveraging existing social ties to generate perceived community in From Bowling Alone toTweeting Together: Technology-Mediated Social Participation.

It cannot be accidental that they refer to these communities as perceived. I recently posted about the great resource our social media acquaintances are in my algorithm post. However, there is also the dilution of content in our state of information overload.

Hochheiser and Schniederman’s gently claim that these communities we are in are perceived. Because it is so easy to passively interact with those in our social feeds, do we end up crafting communities that truly exist or are they only perceived. Without going too far down the “what is reality” path, what we learn here is that like in traditional media even in social media, leaders emerge.

These leaders emerge from the group of general social media users. Everyone consumes. Those that only consume are often called lurkers. He says, then, some become contributors, collaborators and leaders. They do not define each role and break down the difference between a contributor and collaborator.

My guess is that a collaborator is someone who posts something on Facebook (a contributor). A friend then comments on that post, which makes that friend a collaborator. If the author responds, he then also becomes a collaborator. Once they are in “engaged participation” in the community, say a Facebook Group, or a long thread of posts, they have become a leader.

The reader, the consumer is playing a role s/he’s never played before. The reader is influencing the experience for other readers. They add value to the content written by the author, may that person be writing for CNN or on Facebook.com.

As a collaborator’s reading experience is hyper mediated by contribution, on say, is their reading experience hypermediated across platforms?

It’s possible that leadership on social media platforms has changed the way they read what professional news authors publish. How then, if at all, should journalists change the way they write and collaborate with their readers and collaborators?

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Top U.S. Newspaper Websites by Share, Rank and Traffic

The New York Times boasts highest shared content and page rank but the USA Today wins in web traffic. So what then is more valuable for a news site? While USA brings more traffic to the site, which in the end is better for clicks and ad revenue, a high share rank means better exposure to content which potentially builds better brand, reader loyalty and arguably more interesting (and therefor better) content.
Statistics and text via Journalistsics.com

Top Shares

While Google PageRank is an accurate gauge of authority on the Web, it doesn’t tell us much about how much people ‘Like’ a newspaper. When it comes to ‘Likes’, Facebook is the authority. It took a little (okay, a lot of) trial and error to find the Facebook Pages for each of the Top 25 U.S. newspapers(you’d be surprised how hard some of the top 25 make it to find), but alas here’s the list of the Top 25 U.S. Newspapers ranked by the number of Facebook Friends (‘Likes’) each newspaper has (click the link to visit the newspaper’s Facebook Page):

  1. The New York Times – 781,655
  2. The Wall Street Journal – 140,515
  3. The Washington Post – 68,152
  4. The Denver Post – 30,690
  5. USA Today – 28,332
  6. The Los Angeles Times – 20,715
  7. The Chicago Tribune – 19,448
  8. The Arizona Republic – 18,002
  9. The New York Post – 8,087
  10. The San Francisco Chronicle – 8,051

Top Google Rank

Clicks is one thing, credibility is another. When it comes to online credibility, Google PageRank rules over all. Few metrics illustrate true authority on the Web more than Google’s PageRank. PageRank is the accepted standard for authority on the Web. If you ranked the top 25 U.S. newspapers by PageRank instead of circulation, the list looks like this:

  1. 9/10 – The New York Times stands alone as far as Google concerned – it has the highest PageRank of the top 25 U.S. newspapers
  2. 8/10 – The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, NY Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle and StarTribune have equal authority at 8/10
  3. 7/10 – The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Sun-Times, Detroit Free Press, Houston Chronicle, The Arizona Republic, The Oregonian, The Star-Ledger, The San Diego Union-Tribune and Newsdayare tied for third place with a PageRank of 7/10
  4. 6/10 – The Seattle Times, The St. Petersburg Times and The Plain Dealer share fourth place at 6/10
  5. 5/10 – The New York Post, The Oakland Tribune and The San Jose Mercury News are tied for fifth place at 5/10
  6. 4/10 – Rounding out the bottom is The Denver Post and Contra Costa Times – each share a PageRank of 4/10

When comparing newspaper to newspaper, PageRank seems like a good measure of a newspaper’s authority. Once you get outside of an apples to apples comparison – or in this case, newspaper to newspaper – it gets harder to determine influence or authority. Take popular blogs like The Huffington Post or TechCrunch for example. Both blogs have a Google PageRank of 8/10 – do those blogs have the same authority as The Wall Street Journal or USA Today? As far as Google is concerned they do.

Visit the Top 25 list of U.S. Newspapers by Web Traffic:

  1. USA Today – 239,425,560
  2. The New York Times – 217,513,400
  3. The Wall Street Journal – 122,397,004
  4. The Los Angeles Times – 94,889,543
  5. The Washington Post – 9,1758,837
  6. New York Daily News – 82,225,690
  7. The San Francisco Chronicle – 46,696,844
  8. The New York Post – 45,903,055
  9. The Chicago Tribune – 33,230,030
  10. The Star-Ledger – 31,836,326
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Do algorithms suppress us or set us free?

There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

…

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

From Malcom Gladwell’s story on activism in the New Yorker:

Gladwell begins a conversation about the Greensboro lunch counter protests. He argues that the social revolution will not happen online. He says our weak ties, our hundreds or thousands of friends let us express ourselves but the impact is significantly lower.

The Facebook algorithm is  designed such that their users can feel comfortable “over sharing.” Only relevant posts should show up in the feeds of their friends. This solves two potential problems for the Facebook experience: information overload and irrelevant content.

Users can post, express and write as much as they would like without the worry that they are writing, tagging, posting or commenting too much something that often happens on Twitter. However, on Twitter, the overshare situation is completely contextual to how many people you follow. If you  write 10 tweets a day, a recipient how follows 50 slow tweeters will feel overloaded, whereas a follower who reads from 300 people will barely notice those ten tweets.

Lets come back to Gladwell’s argument that these networks are both empowered and diluted by their size. Activists and those expressing themselves can do with much more ease. But, they cannot rally the attention that the Greensboro lunch counter could because the Facebook system is designed to quiet noise. It would take many friends posting and discussing a particular topic in a variety of mediums to draw any kind of social stir that the Greensboro counters saw.

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Let go of privacy online or the newly licensed high schoolers will pass you by

I downloaded Napster in 7th grade.  I downloaded a lot of music for free. I bought a lot of CDs. I wore tshirts with my favorite bands’ logos  plastered across my front chest. I spent my weekends bopping around at their concerts dreaming about an autograph. I supported my favorite artists. I never felt like I was stealing from Brandon Boyd, even if I was.

So. I got used to music for free. Kids in high school now–they download music on iTunes. They never had Napster. So they pay $.99 and the music shows up in their ipods, on the bus, in the passing periods, in the hallways streaming through their ears. The world of “free” music doesn’t exist to them like it existed to me.

I’m looking at privacy online very similarly. We live in public–now. I grew up online but I also grew up offline. I did things both ways. We had a shared land line phone and I invited my friends to my birthday by sending cards in the mail. That’s how I made an event.

But my 16 year old cousin in high school? Her life is on Facebook. It’s on her blog. It’s on her Deviant Art portfolio page. Of course, her walls are still lined with magazine pages cute boyz from Tiger Beat magazine. But instead of gabbing on the phone for hours after dance camp, she and her friends hop onto ichat for a 3-hour video session where they kind of do homework together.

They didn’t grow up thinking about privacy the way we do. But they are not bloggers or  journalists or the kinds of people who get retweeted. They also don’t think about privacy online the way do, analytically. They don’t think about it in the same way that I didn’t really think terribly hard about how revolutionary it was to download music for free. They’re not really having this conversation the way we are. So, we don’t really heard as much from their perspective for the amount of weight I think it has. They’re figuring out how to live in public as they go. It’s as foreign and new as it is get your first locker or take your first SAT exam. Everything is new, everything is changing and everything is always kind of a guess in high school.

The articulate, educated, media people are discussing the open and closed social web. But the people we’re designing for, the ones barely passing their driver’s ed test are talking about the cute the new guy on Glee.

It’s going to take a generation for us old fogies (including many of the 20-somethings) to get comfortable with an open, social web. Let’s just throw those fears in the back seat with our unemployment checks and college hoodies and chill out online and off.

Related Posts
NYT: Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline
Telegraph: Facebook Privacy Concerns Overblown
New York Magazine: Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll

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Social Data Portablity

Last week Facebook announced the ability to export your profile “and keep a closer eye on the sites and apps that they have allowed to access the profile.”

Before this, developers could get into user profiles through Facebook Connect. The Facebook and Twitter APIs are relatively open. But this is the first time users have easily been given a way to get a handle on their specific profile. Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Aditya Agarwal, shared with me on a phone interview that the potential for the use of Facebook data is much higher. Content can be personalized to give people a better experience.

A team of researchers at the National University of Ireland in Galway argue for something even more open. In their paper Social Network and Data Portability using Semantic Web Technologies the outlines a vocabulary to structure user generated content in a machine-readable way. This allows the social data to easily be used across services and applications.

I can relate to the problem this group is trying to solve with an example:
I have friends using Gowalla. I have friends using FourSquare. I have friends using Latitude and I have friends now using SCVNGR. I have a circle of friends on Facebook, on Twitter, on Email, on LinkedIn on Flickr and so on. But each of these services require me to reconnect with all the people I’m friends with. So, I use Facbeook Places. Why? Not because it’s more fun, or because the interface is better, but because that’s where my friends already are.

But if I could have all of my friends, everywhere, would there be more competition and therefor better quality of product across services?

What if Match.com could pull up everyone’s Facebook profiles to get an arguably more authentic profile of who you are. For better or for worse, I suppose.

I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see a mega network any time soon where people share all of their content to one service then feed all of it back out. That was the problem with Buzz. It basically became a Twitter Feed with a Like button and the occasional original post.

What I like about this Irish team’s proposal is the human side of problem solving. Their solution gives users more control, more flexibility and potentially more scalability to connect and share easier with their friends. It also has the power to increase and personalize the quality of our experience online as a whole.

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Reporting happens on social media too

In the context of defining news, David Nord calls attention to the matter and methods of reporting in his book Communities of Journalism (32). He says it is related to

  • occurrence (all news are occurrences, not all occurrences are news)
  • current (current in the sense of something being recurrent)
  • public (product of the exercise of political, economic and social power)
  • reporting (plainly, empirically, self-evident)

Let’s make an argument that shared content (status, video, photo, checkin) is a kind of reporting. It’s a dissemination of some kind of news to an audience. It is often reporting about the self or in context of the self since the author is central to the context of the post in the Facebook medium. I’ll make the argument that people who share on facebook practice some elements of journalistic reporting methods that validate it as social news.

  • Occurrence – Facebook posts are often responding to a question about what’s on their mind, which is related to whatever is happening to the author. The act of posting and sharing validates whatever the occurrence may be.
  • Current – Social media outlets are structured by time and timelines. While news sites consider the element of time, social sites float the newest information to the top, always, saving for Facebook’s top news feed.
  • Public – Social media is generally, inherently public. Privacy settings are loose and the information is generally not intended for a private audience, in the traditional sense. The information is published with the intent to be consumed by a network or community.
  • Reporting – I’ll relate this theme to occurrence and self evidence. Much of social media posts are self-reported content. It may not be pubic affairs news, but all of it is a report on the communicaton and identity of the author.

Our friends work as our editors and our audience while they publish and we do the same. The conversation no longer one way, it’s not even two ways. Conversations move in every direction now online. Social online models reflect our social behaviors much better than writing a letter to the editor ever did.