Social Networks

Facebook:

We are now making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible as part of the User Graph object. Because this is sensitive information, we have created the new user_address and user_mobile_phone permissions. These permissions must be explicitly granted to your application by the user via our standard permissions dialogs.

For All Facebook, normally more of a fan-site, to wax careful, says quite a lot....

The timing of the post couldn’t have been more questionable — just as most people were leaving work on the west coast and Facebook employees were beginning their weekly happy hour at Cafe 6. Granted, the company’s job is to make this post appear as though it’s just another day at the social network, in an effort to play down the significance of this new functionality. Over the weekend a number of publications began discussing the issue, the most sensational of which comes from Sophos, which writes “Rogue Facebook apps can now access your home address and mobile phone number.”

It’s true. Facebook’s new permissions gives those developers with bad intentions access to a greater amount of personal information. The flip side is that this isn’t exactly credit card information. However, as developers gain access to more information, the question arises: Is the company doing enough to protect our personal data?

There are a number of issues, best commentary I have seen is on Hacker News comments - they are over here, but here are the excerpts that really help in my view - Analysis:

What they are infact doing is now allowing third-parties to request extra, and very very personal, information about you using the same dialog that people have effectively now been trained to basically click-through.

I really think this dialog needs two things:

1) Something that highlights the fact you are allowing third-parties access beyond your basic profile. All personal information is not equal.

2) A way for the user to opt out of sharing this extra information. As a result, the app may have to deny you access if it really really does need your address (why it would is hard to imagine), but this "all or nothing" approach seems wrong to me.

And...

...what I really don't like about this is not that they are doing it, but they won't share it with their users unless the tech world makes a big deal out of it, which they will. So they announce it on the dev blog, but not the public blog, which I think is poor form at a minimum.

I looked through my profile info and I didn't see a way to hide my phone or address from applications, which means that I have to choose to not post them on Facebook, or provide access any time I want to use an app that requests them.

Obviously, this is much more useful to developers than it is users.

And....

I have been wondering that for a while; why isn't there a conditional permissions system that you can choose what gets shared or not. It wouldn't be that hard for app developers to sanity check for what is available or not, and tell the user if it is an issue.

The all of nothing mentality is flawed, much like most of Facebook's decisions it seems. (imo)

[which elicited the reply]

It is not flawed by any means - from Facebook POV.

More to the point, it is probably time to go back to some Old Fashioned Internet advice:

I seem to remember that not so long ago it was standard advice not to give out your address or phone number to people you don't know on the internet.

......

Most people also didn't use their real name online. Facebook played a huge role in changing that.

Sensible advice would now be, in order to protect your privacy, that it's probably time to start using false names, no or false address, and never give out your 'phone number - simply because although no doubt the belief is that the apps using the data are benign, the reality is that some won't be (or at the very least, its worth being careful while watching and waiting) - especially as this is now a high stake game - last word to Hacker News:

With a multi-billion dollar valuation, I'm sure that the majority of Facebook's value is in all information it gathers about you. Is this any surprise to anyone? One way or another Facebook is trying to monetize your info. Maybe it's just me but there always seem to be some kind of news fading away about Facebook privacy. I'm my theory that's why they are worth so much. Don't think they are going to stop doing this anytime soon.

Caveat Emptor, as they say...........

In an action that has been going on for a few months and largely ignored outside of the Arab, Francophone and Internatinal Relations world, Tunisians overthrew their repressive and corrupt government and last night Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled the country. This morning we wake up to the Tech chatterati claiming it was all due to Twitter!

Eh?

Firstly, lets give some credit to the people of Tunisia! Secondly, as Ethan Zuckerman notes, Social Media had a role but it wasn't only (or even primarily) Twitter.

Iran's diaspora was especially effective at promoting the Green Movement to an online audience that followed tweets, Facebook posts, and web videos avidly, hungry for news from the front lines of the struggle. Tens of thousands of Twitter users turned their profile pictures green in solidarity with the activists, and hundreds set up proxy servers to help Iranians evade Internet filters. For users of social media, the protests in Iran were an inescapable, global story. Tunisia, by contrast, hasn't seen nearly the attention or support from the online community.

The irony is that social media likely played a significant role in the events that have unfolded in the past month in Tunisia, and that the revolution appears far more likely to lead to lasting political change. Ben Ali's government tightly controlled all forms of media, on and offline. Reporters were prevented from traveling to cover protests in Sidi Bouzid, and the reports from official media characterized events as either vandalism or terrorism. Tunisians got an alternative picture from Facebook, which remained uncensored through the protests, and they communicated events to the rest of the world by posting videos to YouTube and Dailymotion. As unrest spread from Sidi Bouzid to Sfax, from Hammamet and ultimately to Tunis, Tunisians documented events on Facebook. As others followed their updates, it's likely that news of demonstrations in other parts of the country disseminated online helped others conclude that it was time to take to the streets. And the videos and accounts published to social media sites offered an ongoing picture of the protests to those around the world savvy enough to be paying attention.

....................

Pundits will likely start celebrating a "Twitter revolution" in Tunisia, even if they missed watching it unfold; the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan already revived the dreaded phrase Thursday.

Ironically he calls his post "The first Twitter Revolution" - clearly if a revolution doesn't happen on Twitter it isn't real in chatterati circles. Even if it didn't happen on Twitter.

As one wag noted this morning (on Twitter):

I don't understand how the people of Tunisia overthrew their government without me signing an e-petition or changing my Twitter avatar.

Quite. I recall the #kebab session taking the p*ss out of Twitter's alleged miraculous qualities at SXSW 2 years ago, it was so overblown even then and - well, no doubt in 2012 the Second Coming will all be due to Twitter as well......

Update - quoting Ethan from his own blog:

The punchline of that post: assuming the events in Tunisia end up with a transfer of power, and (we all hope) a democratic and fair election, you’re going to hear any number of theories crediting Tunisia’s revolution to Twitter, to Wikileaks, to Anonymous and so on. Be skeptical. A shift this momentous doesn’t come from a single factor – it comes from millions of people, frustrated and pissed off, who find ways to come together and demand change. Oversimplified explanations do a disservice to the bravery of the people who risked – and in many cases, lost – their lives to take to the streets, and disrespect the people who’ve worked for decades for change in their country.

I hope Tunisia finds its way from overthrowing a dictator to building a stable, democratic government.

I hope so too, re democratic government, but the lesson of history is that an overthrowing of a despot is too often followed by a period of chaos and then another despot, in this case the likelihood is a fundamentalist islamic flavoured one. Let's hope this time it's different....

A recent McKinsey survey on the benefits of social media gves a good relative benefit pfrom different areas (see above).

They define 4 types of "Socially Networked Organisations":

Developing Group
Among respondents who say their companies are using Web 2.0, most (79 percent) achieved a mean improvement of 5 percent or less across a range of business benefit metrics. Respondents at the companies in this group report the lowest percentages of usage among their employees, customers, and business partners; say that Web 2.0 is less integrated into their employees’ day-to-day work than respondents at other companies do; and are least likely to report high levels of collaboration or information sharing across the organization.

Internally networked organizations.
Some companies are achieving benefits from using Web 2.0 primarily within their own corporate walls. The survey results indicate that companies in this group—13 percent of those using Web 2.0—derive substantial benefits from deploying these technologies in employee interactions. Respondents at such organizations report a higher percentage of employees using Web 2.0 than respondents at developing organizations do. Respondents at half of the internally networked organizations reported that Web 2.0 is integrated tightly into their work flows, for example, compared with only 21 percent of respondents at developing organizations. Web 2.0 also seems to promote significantly more flexible processes at internally networked organizations: respondents say that information is shared more readily and less hierarchically, collaboration across organizational silos is more common, and tasks are more often tackled in a project-based fashion.

Externally networked organizations.
Other companies (5 percent of those deploying Web 2.0) achieved substantial benefits from interactions that spread beyond corporate borders by using Web 2.0 technologies to interact with customers and business partners, according to survey results. Executives at these organizations reported larger percentages of their employees, customers, and partners using Web 2.0 than respondents at internally networked organizations did. But the responses suggest that the internal organizational processes of externally networked organizations are less fluid than those of internally networked ones.

Fully networked enterprises.
Finally, some companies use Web 2.0 in revolutionary ways. This elite group of organizations—3 percent of those in our survey—derives very high levels of benefits from Web 2.0’s widespread use, involving employees, customers, and business partners, according to the survey. Respondents at these organizations reported higher levels of employee benefits than internally networked organizations did and higher levels of customer and partner benefits than did externally networked organizations. In applying Web 2.0 technologies, fully networked enterprises seem to have moved much further along the learning curve than other organizations have. The integration of Web 2.0 into day-to-day activities is high, executives say, and they report that these technologies are promoting higher levels of collaboration by helping to break down organizational barriers that impede information flows.

As you would expect, the more networked, the more high impact Social Media has. The only downside with the survey is that it is self reported results, so there is a "they would say that, wouldn't they" aspect to it but to me the interesting thing is the statistical results (see diagram above) showing that there is a fairly high correlation between Social media and market share improvement for the the better players, but its pretty poor for others, but a much lower correlation between operating margins and market leadership. In terms of market share benefits, the main drivers reported were (see below):


The left hand side - internal productivity - is all very nice, but teh beef is in the middle - how does Social Media increase revenues and/or reduce costs.

- Increased market awareness - 63%
- Increased customer service - 50%
- Reduced marketing costs - 45%
- Reduced support costs - 35%
- Reduced Travel costs - 29%

What is unfortunate is the the magnitude of the benefits is not known (eg by how much was market awareness increased). Note only 24% reported an actual revenue increase, so it seems like although the main impact is on cost of customer acquisition/service/retention, the impact (to date, anyway) has been interesting, but hardly earth shattering. still, if you are a large company witha lw profit margin, even a small % increase makes a big difference.

Another interesting article this weekend was on the Web as a Customer Service tool:

That's what I tell my Gutenbourgeois friends, if they'll listen. I say: Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don't just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you'll sell things. (Don't count on your fellow Gutenbourgeois to buy things. They're clicking the little thumb icon on YouTube like everyone else.) If you don't want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It's a better online spend.

Which is interesting. The McKinsey survey feels "kinda right" on 3 counts - firstly the big impacts on market awareness and customer service, secondly the relatively small number of companies doing anything seriously, and thirdly the failrly low correlation - ie this stuff is not a magic bullet, a "just add water" magic pill solution, but is an organisational/workflow issue - i.e non trivial - if one wants to get benefits, and the benefits, though respectable, are not particulalrly game changing for most.

Delicious never really did it for me - I wrote in 2008:

Del.icio.us, that early icon of the Web 2.0 movement that has to mentioned by page 11 in any book that wants "2.0 Cred", has brought out version 2.0 - to considerable interest again, it would seem. Must admit though, my usage behaviour resembles the remarks in Matthew Ingram's piece quoting one Adam Ostrow who:


....never bookmarks things any more — he either remembers something, or searches for it, or asks someone else if he can’t remember the details. It has occurred to me over the past year or so that while I religiously bookmark things, often dozens of them in a single day, I rarely go back and look them up. If I’m writing about something and I remember some details, I type them into Google and eventually track the page down.



I suspect that is true of many people who tried the service - the "hit head" of stuff you bookmark you'll put on your browser, the key papers you find you'll store yourself somewhere personal, and the rest you'll re-search for when you need it. (I also find that stuff I marked 4 years ago is pretty irrelevant now, there is a half life to web pages. Also, I got lazy - I just look at the bookmarks of other people who I know are assiduous markers )

Still, its not the death that is interesting (expiry has been predicted since at least August 2009), it's the disposal thereof. There has been a call that, rather than close it down, give itt to people who want to run it:

There are many who still use Delicious. I admit I am not one of them [That's a standard story, hence it's demise - Ed] I stopped using it shortly after Yahoo bought it. But there are lots of people who use it, just as there are people who still use MyBlogLog (I think my ashimmy.com blog still has their widget on it). Yahoo! could make lemonade out of lemons here. If they would open source these and the other properties they are killing they could garner a ton of good will from the users of these projects, not come across as the hatchet men they are being portrayed as and out Google Google even.

Heck, why not give it away for a dollar, but keep 10% of the share so if others can make it work at least you have an option on the upside?

(Update - they have clearly been reading Broadstuff, the latest decision is to try and sell Delicious. Be interesting to see if anyone will buy, if 'twere me I'd ask everyone who wants to see it live pay £24 into an escrow account for 1 year's service, and if I got 100,000 signups I'd buy the business for a dollar.

Fascinating and beautiful post from Paul Butler on the Facebook blog (see above) - here is how it was done, using teh open source stats package R:

....to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.

Later I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection.

Friendship is beautiful! I immediately was drawn to 3 points from my neck of the woods - the bright point just East of Cape Town and the 2 points east of Madagascar - which were these heights of Southern Hemisphere internet usage (see below)


The bright points in the middle of the Indian Ocean are of course Reunion and Mauritius, who would have thought that such small islands will be so busy! I was interested in the point of light in SA on the coast (turns out it's the George/Knysna/Mossel Bay area).

These are by and large all tourist beach holiday territories*, clearly not everyone can turn themselves away from the seduction of the Internet, even in paradise

The other thing that interested me were these points in the middle of the Sahel (look for th deep V links):


One wonders what those are.....

*Actually, George, Reunion town etc - they are also the local admin towns as well, even paradise needs an infrastructure.... note how George is only really linked to Cape Town and Port Elizabeth rather than up to Johannseburg. Hubs and Spokes and all that.

Given that the blogworld is abuzz with Googlers option-surfi... - sorry, fulfilling their creative potential - to Facebook, it is interesting to think about what will cause them all to surf out again once it IPO's - Dave McClure has 3 assertions on how to beat Facebook (Broadstuff abridged version):

ASSERTION #1: Facebook doesn't get Intimacy.

Facebook is full of my "friends", but it's not a great place to hang with my BEST friends (aka "BFF").....

.....I've got too many goddamn friends on Facebook.

yeah, that's right: i've got over 2,000 "friends" on FB, and it's fucking KILLING me.

ASSERTION #2: The stuff that's really valuable in my social graph tends to the extremes -- very public (ex: Twitter) or very private (ex: email).

look, it's either Gaga, Shaq, & Glee (extremely public, better on Twitter than Facebook) or else it's only my closest buddies (u know, the evil VCs I collude with at Bin38 to fuck over YC startups).

The stuff that's meaningful -- NOTE TO STARTUPS: MEANINGFUL=MONETIZABLE -- that stuff is either better on Twitter, or better with a much more private & select subset of my friends on Facebook.

- the very public: well here it's pretty obvious Twitter has an advantage over Facebook. the asymmetric follow model and constrained, lightweight communication make it MUCH easier to engage aspirationally with celebrities & famous people on Twitter than on Facebook.

- the very private: now, here you'd think Facebook has the upper hand -- and they do, but they're at risk of being upstaged by a more private & meaningful social network (or perhaps via some subset or abstraction layer on top of FB, if they can move quickly)....

...somewhere, there's going to be a smaller more Intimate conversation that enable a different type of sharing... lots of it.

ASSERTION #3: Intimacy depends on Context, Connection, & Continuity... which determine Closeness... and ultimately, drive Commerce.

One might suggest that Intimacy is determined by:

1. Shared Context (ex: basketball, school we went to, fans of Glee)
2. [strength of] Connection (how much we like each other, how strong)
3. Continuity (how long we've known each other, how freq/recently we connect).

For any possible social interaction, and for any potential subset of friends within your social graph, these factors determine a minimum critical level of Intimacy required to initiate & sustain the conversation around that interaction. Too little Intimacy, and the conversation stops. But with the right amount of Intimacy, the conversation literally explodes with information.

I'd buy Assertion 1, and i think he is onto something with Assertion 2 - that the value is in the polarities - but I think Assertion 3 highlights the chimera in all this, ie that it drives Commerce.

It is my view that Social Commerce is a Pull, not a Push, function, and the successful platforms are enablers rather than enforcers. Different culture - and probably revenue model. Since the beginning of time we have gone down to the market square to trade, and the pub to meet friends. Sometimes the pub is at the market square, but it has a different role.

Different places different functions, same people

There has been a lot of hate vibe directed at Malcolm Gladwell by the 'Net bloggerati, for daring to suggest that Social Media activism is more about people sucking up to causes that will yield them online social capital than due to any actual strong feelings, and thus one should not really expect them to die on the barricades, or even put up any money, for said cause. The article was in the New Yorker last week, I read it and thought - yeah, typical Gladwell, state the well known (among the people who study an area) in a new way for mass appeal and get it 80/20 right and I moved on - but everyone seems to have got very huffy this week (clearly being seen to disagree with Malcolm Gladwell is becoming yet another of the causes he critiques ). The core of his argument is as follows:

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. 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.

He highlights the difference between what in game theory are called "strong tells" and "weak tells" thusly:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.

Cue hundreds of huffy Social Media bloggers, including the Huffington Post. More interestingly perhaps, I did a Twitter parse of comments on the subject over the last 3 days or so, and it was on the whole far more positive about the Gladwell article than the Harrumphosphere would have you think - as with the Facebook Movie, the Wisdom of the Commoners differs from their A-List blogging betters.

My take on all of this, since you asked?

(i) Gladwell is mostly right - social networks are by and large comprised of weak links, and those weak links are not what you need to create concerted action. Game theory looks at weak vs strong tells to gauge the likelihood of a player's commitment, and I am sure you would not be surprised to know that painting your avatar green in support of Iran is not a strong indication that you will be prepared to die on the streets of Tehran. Clicktivism is clearly more about garnering social capital than actually doing anything (Tom Lehrer had a go at "slacktivism" in his satirical "Folk Song Army" in the 60's - see above YouTube video of Tom and his 88 string folk guitar)

(ii) But, he has underplayed the impact of Social Networks in informing large numbers of people and allowing them to see that others think the same way (or not) and slowly, drip by drip, change opinions of large numbers over time.

Update on this thought after exchange in the Comments:

- I think what social media is good at is to threaten inaction, eg product boycotts - which is why consumer companies are very responsive, whereas say regime change has different drivers.

- Maybe social media is thus better at Gandhi style passive protest - passivism rather than activism?

As always its in the comments to the blog posts that you get the real gems - in a fairly standard harrumphblog, one commentator (Jeff Rivers) notes:

The simple (sad?) reality right now is that all this connectivity and access has resulted in exponentially more mundane conversation about the minutia of our lives and a fractional shift in social activism or discussion of anything bigger than ourselves. The signal to noise ratio is ridiculously high in social media right now and I don't see that trend changing. Maybe it will when we all get used to playing in these new media.

Gladwell could've saved himself some grief - and you a lot of time crafting this eloquent response - if he'd just subtitled his original article:
"Why the revolution will almost certainly not be tweeted"
or
"If the revolution is tweeted it'll probably get lost in a sea of tweets about Justin Beiber".

By the way, the level of argument in above said harrumphblog is at this leve:

Malcolm Gladwell’s take on social media is like a nun’s likely review of the Kama Sutra — self-righteous and misguided by virtue of voluntary self-exclusion from the subject. But while the nun’s stance reflects adherence to a moral code, Gladwell’s merely discloses a stubborn opinion based on little more than a bystander’s observations.

With enemies like that, Gladwell doesn't need friends

Or, to update Tom Lehrer:

"If you feel dissatisfaction,
Tweet your frustrations away.
Some people may prefer action,
But give me a hashtag any old day"

And the rousing Chorus......

So join in the Clicktivism Army,
Twitter is the weapon we bring
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice.
Ready! Aim! Tweet!

With one's avatar turned green or whatever, natch.......... (marshmallow white says Paul Kedrosky)

I have tuned into the Royal Society's Web Science twitterstream today (#rswebsci) as I am at my workplace, and it was trotting along at a nice pace when (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee twts:

flotsam and jetsam, on the web - dotsam and netsam first time I'd heard it #rswebsci

Cue a retweet orgyspasm as everyone retwts said Tim-thing, totally drowning the #rswebsci column and then my "general" column as more people pick it up and RT. As one grumpy person (not me, oddly enough) then wrote:

{ give us a break } Why retweet someone who has 29k + followers? Ersatz spam #rswebsci

It is, indeed, ersatz spam (I retwt'd that comment though)

Did give me a thought for another function I want in my "Sin Bin" Webfilter though. Why can't Twitter or Tweetdeck or whatever have a function that culls all retweets after the first one into my stream?

(Update - an hour on an the #rswebsci column is still spammed to the gills by retweeters - I think a useul bit of netiquette is if you retweet something cancel the hashtags they've seen it already!!!)

(Update 2 - Article on RWW saying if you haven't seen RT in the hour its over - this was not happening here, it was still going strong 5 hours later. In fact it got worse when Bill Thompson published his blog post so then two RT articles jammed the #tag Twitterstream )

Day Two of the Royal Society's Web Science Conference. Overall it was an excellent 2 days, probably the best conference I ahve been to for quite a while as it was by and large "real" web stuff rather than the hype that so many Web conferences are full of these days. Sara Fletcher has done a liveblog, so I have copied a pen picture from her blog plus my comments / takeaways on the morning sessions (Afternoon sessions will be in a following post - tempus fugit etc):

Nature of Collective Intelligence - Pierre Levy

The mind is not material in nature. It does contain ideas, and connections between ideas, networks of ideas, and as others have said the future of human sciences will involve the application of graph theory to this network of ideas. He defines "idea" as having concepts - abstract classes and categories, percepts, images - sense data, and emotional affects.

We can try to represent ideas in computational form. The mind can be viewed as a consistent universe of operations on ideas in a structured semantic space. We can gather data, images etc electronically and categorise these. We cannot however represent the concept electronically, the meaning. We can represent truth in binary form but not much more. We cannot "see" the concept, it is always represented by signifiers (images, audio etc), and concepts are always networked, always linked to other concepts, like a giant grid of concepts, so a concept itself is a network. He outlines a semantric machine which takes signifiers, manipulation mechanisms, mechanisms to manipulate the signified and semantic circuits.

I'm starting to find this a bit confusing and desperately trying to recall discussions of signifiers and semantics from my philosophy of science course but it's all a bit hazy now!

I will be honest - I didn't have a bloody clue about what he was on about - he used a heck of a lot of very long words, many of them interchangeably it seemed. At the end he put up some diagrams and it turns out what what he was saying (as I far as I could tell) was that in essence we will need more metadata than data in semantic webs, there are different layers and levels required, and a number of mathematical transforms are required to move from on level to another, and he has re-invented the earlier Semantic Web's stuff.


Social Networks in the Internet - what Social Research knows about it - Manuel Castells

The web is providing tools for individual autonomy - creative, political and social. Internet use empowered people though security influence and led to increased happiness, and this is true for groups that need empowering, for example women (?) who are at the heart of the family and social networks, according to a study by Michael Wilmott. This is circular - the more people use the web, the more autonomous they become, the more they use the web.

The deepest social transformation from the internet has come in the last decade with social networks. Social networks passed email use in June 2009 in both time and number of users. Interestingly when people find their needs are not being met by existing platforms they create a new one. The new social platforms are not just about conversation, but about actually doing things, taking action, creating content. There is a connection between the development of social networks and social life, but individuals are taking control of how these develop, not controlled by governments or corporations. The big sites cannot control how people interact - if they do someone will create a new site that does what they want and everyone will migrate there. If facebook tried to go nasty it will disappear, as AOL did, as seen when Facebook tried to charge and retracted this three days later as people went away.

Engaging speaker, but blotted his copybook (in my view) because:

(i) he got some of his facts wrong ( For example he said first social network was in 2002 and was Friendster. No it wasnt - what about 6degrees, FriendFinder etc said the Twittersphere!)

(ii) this may be part of the issue with web science coming in from so many diferent angles, but much of his "what social research knows about it" stuff was fairly old hat if you have been reading the field. To be fair, talking with Jemima Knight over tea break she felt he had pitched correctly for the audience which were all at very different levels of undersyanding.

(iii) he was very much a Panglossianist, ie it's all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and I think the fact that nearly all the questions were challenging him on this spoke for itself.


New Models of Government via the Web - Helen Margetts

The Big Society concept does allow for social media tools to come to the fore, single citizen accounts, citizen surveillance to replace audit systems, social web services within government. Digitization allows for quasi-voluntary compliance with DIY forms, government supers-sites, open data projects freeing public information are all good for governments looking at austerity measures. Delivery of all government information online can reduce costs elsewhere.

Mainly discussed their Digital Area Governance (DEG) as a solution to the "old" model of governance, which is fairly standard stuff among the Government 2.0 crowd, but she injected a dose of realism that is often missing among this crowd as:

(i) The current climate has a cash shortage, and that reduces the options - the cheap stuff will be done, the expensive stuff will be left alone

(ii) These organisms won't change fast - as she noted, of c 240 million transactions at the Dept of Work and Pensions in 2008, about 0.6% was online

I asked a question about what to do about the 1/3rd of people who won't use the 'Net (ie there are no savings as you still have to use the old services for them). Her view is that you move the effort to intermediaries between those people and the web, but as far as I can see that just transfers the cost (at best - at worst you then have to police the intermediaries)


Augmented Intelligence - Luis von Ahn
This is the guy who invented the Capcha - he tooks us through the current 2 word capcha (did you know its being used to digitise all the world's books? They are using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) but its not perfect so the words that OCR cannot recognise are now being used in 2-word Captchas (one is a control word). Now 750 million people have solved a word through captcha - 10% of the global population.

He asks, "If we can use 100,000 people to get to the moon and build the pyramids, what can we do with 100 million?" He has a project to translate the most important pages on the web into the world's major languages. A project called Duolingo uses people who are learning foreign languages to act as translators. This can act not only on text but also subtitling videos and training speech recognisers, simultaneously helping the user in listening and speaking languages. This could enable, for example, wikipedia could be translated from English to Spanish in 80 hours with 1 million users.

In conclusion: we should stop being parasites on computers and allow them to use our brains for processing. Excellent talk from very charismatic speaker!

Engaging speaker doing good stuff - what's not to like with all of us being little angels in the Web Architecture? Questioners quickly homed in on the issue that while his stuff is For The Common Good, other organisations - especially those driving the Walled Wide Web - may not be so benign.

Attended the first two lectures at the Royal Society's Science of Networks conference today, from Albert Laslo-Barabasi and (Lord) Bob May. It was very refershing to hear Social Networking discussed with things like facts, rather than the more usual hype amd half-truths.

Barabasi in my opinion (literally) wrote the book on the subject, pulling together a lot of disparate strands in 2001, so it was interesting to hear what he had to say 10 years on about what was different or unexpected. My big takeaways were that:

(i) You have to differentiate between human and physical data networks. A lot of the initial theoretical work assumed humans would behave more like physical networks like the Web, and that there was less of a spread between richest and poorest nodes on the networks. (Physical networks have more randomness - but humans ones are far from random). It is becoming clear that Human networks are massively skewed towards a small group of very powerful nodes and a very long tail, that the differences (in followers etc) are huge, and that the "rich get richer" due to the preferential attachment principle (Most people tend to follow the most popular nodes)

(ii) This makes human networks more "scale free" than predicted, with far stronger power laws. They are driven by the dynamics of these power laws so reinforce early winners. They are also more "small world" than theory would have it (ie number of jumps from person A to B is low - "6 apart" for very large populations.

(iii) However, latecomers can make it big , but they have to have a higher "fitness" in the ecosystem. Think of the evolution social networks - Facebook is "fitter" than MySpace, which was "fitter" than Friendster. A later speaker showed how relatively small differences in user experience created huge changes in adoption, and that gives an indication of what "fitness" means.

(iv) Robustness is a real problem with scale free networks as the main nodes are so large. They degrade similarly to random networks if the main nodes are not taken out, but if they are the degradation is very much faster and worse.

I have ignored stuff that he covered 10 years ago, these are the big differences he highlighted. sadly there wasn't time for him to get into social networks proper.

Next up was (Lord) Bob May whosew ork I've also followed for 10 yers or so, his main area is stability in natural communities, but he used a lot of network maths to do it. He also applied these tools to the study of disease and to the study of biodiversity. His talk was on networks, ecosystems and a foray into how they can be applief to the financial system. takeaways:

(i) He pointed to a paper that seemed to use Game theory as well as network analysis for predator/prey network stability (Dunne and Gerwin 2008) which I haven't read (yet).

(ii) A interesting point about Sex Epidemic theory in Sub Sahran Africa - shouldn't happen on averag. However epidemiological network theory didn't take avccount of the small number of very active sex workers (shades of Barabasi and the Scale Free surprise) The key is then clearly to focus on these superspreaders and innoculate then, so gives a lower cost way to solve.

(ii) He made an interesting aside, to the effect that the worst thing you can have in these networks is to give the "superspreaders" carthe blanche to prey on the little people, and by the tone used (he has a marvellously dry wit) it was clear he was concerned that the major social networks today are going down these routes.

His next topic was one that has interested me this year, to teh extent that we have dine some work on it - namely using network theory a(and other tools like game theory) to understand Systemic Risk in banking. Big takeaway when they looked at teh banking network was that all the ingenuity that is going into ever more esoteric trading systems with higher and higher returns, but the overall banking ecosystem was being neglected as the big players got richer (shades of Scale Free big nodes and small prey above). The result:

(i) The banking networks is a huge networks of networks, and is massivley interconnected (and, I would conjecture, very scale free compared to other industries). So what happens if there is a shock? They built a model of 25 banks, and found that (as you'd expect from the above) if a big node went down the system collapsed - fast. This was especially true if the big banks had relatively small capital reserves compared to the rest of teh ecosystem - which is of course what they were doing in noughties.

(ii) He believes that the fact that all the banks are interlinked makes the whole thing literally "too big to fail", and he argued for splitting up the network so a failure in part A does not impact other parst - in essence a return to something like the Glass - Steagall act of the Great Depression that separated "casino" banks from high street banking.

(iii) Incidentally, the models showed that teh best thing for banks to do in the bad times is lend and not biuild up their capital, and to build up capital in good times (It's a Pharoah Story) - the very reverse of policy today. The models reckon that the current UK approach this is the best way to collapse an economy, by enrichng the banks and collapse the productive companies.

(iv) The other risk they can see is nanosecond trading is another emerging problem, as there is no governing of these systems. He made the allusion that if you put a half second delay in sending out emails it reduces virus spread.

He also made a good point re the economic "faith":

"There's an idea that some banks hold that there's an invisible hand which protects them, through market action, and not too much regulation, from bad outcomes," said May. "They're on very shaky theoretical ground there. The reason is it is invisible is thst it isn't there"

Actually its all too bloody visible, its called a bailout. The big thing that is missing in talking about banking "fitness ecosystems" is that in a Darwinian model they would all be extinct now, but have been allowed to live, unchanged. I was dying to ask him what he thought would happen next, given that - but they never picked me to ask the question

Sadly I then had to go back to work, but managed to return for the last talk, but that is for another post....... anyway, Sara Fletcher has done a blog of the day.

As I was about to hit "send" on this tonight, I caught an article from Malcolm Gladwell via Stowe Boyd: Gladwell notes that a new era of social activism on social networks is largely bollocks:

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,”

......

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

As readers of this blog will know, we have attacked "clicktivism" too, but from the Game Theory point of view of "weak tells", ie a person who supports a cause from a comfortable settee in London or whatever by turning their Twitter picture green is very unlikely to die for the cause. We get to the same place however.

Stowe's point is that the revolution is below this, at the "small - r" level.

I think Gladwell needs to look at the little r revolutions going on all around us, like the urban food movement, Grameen-style microloan systems, and others. This is where social tools will change the world, one weak tie at a time.

I think Barabasi and May would agree with Stowe's views, but also point out that if some nodes got too big (which being a human system they would probably predict they will without some form of governance), there would be major problems! But I would also love to hear May's acerbic wit on Clicktivism

As to the facts getting in the way of Social Media Snake Oil, I live in hope......