Social Networks

Two "Social Media is Dead" posts hit my blogoscope today, so this must be an emerging meme. Firstly, Adriana Lukas who was an early ingurue in this field, notes that, like tourism, it is being strangled by over-(ab)use by the people for whom it is the golden goose, ie the PR/Marketing profession (aka the Tragedy of the Commoners ) :

First of all, social media these days is whatever most people do online. To someone like me, it was about blogging and social bookmarking, with upstarts like Facebook and Twitter playing a secondary role. To most people these are social media with an assortment of web apps that involve interactions and scale to high heaven. Where is the line between the web and social media for most people? Once they are on Facebook and/or Twitter, it blurs beyond definition.

Secondly, social media, whatever it means to different people, at its most fundamental level is the combination of the internet architecture (i.e. a distributed network) with technology that enables individuals to publish and distribute online without the need to code and without a prior permission from an institutional authority. This, in the long run, will be as impactful as the printing press. (That said, with the rise of the super-platforms, individuals online are herded into silos, their autonomy and privacy taking a beating. But that is a different rant.)

All this has little to do with media, advertising, marketing and PR. Other than undermining them. Watching people from these industries discuss and pontificate on how to ‘do’ – read use, abuse, benefit from, exploit etc – social media is like listening to producers of leather harness for horses, carriage drivers and stable owners talk about cars and how they are going to use them blasted machines. After all, it’s all about transport. Right?!

Social Media is dead as a driver for change. It was killed by the very people it meant to change. Ironically, just like the barbarians at the gates of Rome, they didn’t mean to kill it, they just wanted to have a part of it. But without changing themselves.

The other article is by Seth Priebatsch on the HBS website, who argues that the special layer of middlewars that is "Social Media" is now built out, and will, like previous layers of new new things (VOIP, email, etc etc), just fade into the overall infrastructure:

I don't mean that we will stop using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to share with our friends, colleagues and families. In fact, quite the opposite is true, our combined usage of these social networks will continue to increase. Rather, the decade of constructing the social layer is complete. The frameworks that we'll use to share socially are built, defined and controlled. Construction on the social layer ended with the launch of Facebook's Open Graph protocols over the last several months. All the interesting social stuff that will occur over the next decade (and there'll be lots, I'm sure), will exist within this predefined framework built and controlled by Facebook. In short, the decade of social is over.

He believes, by the way, that the Decade of Games is now coming - and that is a good excuse for another post, but more on that later.

But what to make of the Death of Social Media?. My take is partly a combination of the two above, in that I think:

- I agree with Seth Priebatsch's view that it will fade into the architecture over time, raher than die

- Adriana is however right in that dumb commercialism will kill a lot of Social Media's usefulness (like Spam hurt email), and I shudder in anticipation of the abuses that will be committed under the term "Social Commerce" in the next year or so before it dies, crushed under the weight of its own bullsh*t

Where I would disagree/amend their theses is on the following points:

(i) Social Media progress isn't over yet - I think we are in the "OSP" stage - as with the Online messaging world c 1994, you know how it will work architecturally but its still locked up in walled gardens (AOL is Facebook, CompuServe is MySpace, etc etc) and we are waiting for the emergence of the Social Netscape platform.

(ii) It won't die - older comms media is subsumed by the next new things, but it desn't die. (That's called Riepl's law by the way). Like email, Social Media is too damn useful to too many people. But, like email (and VoIP) I doubt it will make the money that the current crop of hopefuls think it will. In fact what is interesting is a trend by the self-declared social media gurus who banged on about "Microblogging" and Facebook is they are now charging back to Blogging (yelling "follow me" as they elbow to the front to "lead" the crowd moving in that direction anyway )

(iii) Like email, it will be abused by every Marketing/PR jock out there - but again like email, we will adapt tools, filters and attitues to cope with the spam. We at Broadsight have predicted for 2 years that Twitter clients will look like email clients in 3 years time (ie by end 2011), and I reckon we are still in good shape to win that bet.

(iv) Bandwidth always changes things - there will be evolution as bandwidth increases, so I don't think the technology development is over yet either.

In fact, rather than a a Death of Social Media, I think right now there is a Dearth of the open social networks that will be - in my opinion - the next phase. Who wants to be Netscape this time round?

This morning I picked up my trusty Twitterscope, but to my horror I saw 3 things I am increasingly seeing from people I follow who, though basically good eggs, are sometimes tempted to overshare:

- The conference/conversation/date they are getting to/at/with, via a stream of 140 character updates

- Every so often they are tempted to pimp (or worse still, retweet one of their idols pimping) something fairly vacuous and inane.

- Generally pumping up their own volume

What I want is a temporary filter that "turns them off" for a bit. I don't want to go through the hassle of unfollowing and then having to remember to refollow, I just want them turned off for a few hours or so until they get over it.

In other words, rather than wave the Red Card and send them off the field, this idea is like the concept of "Sin Binning" in sports like Ice Hockey or Rugby, where temporary overenthusiasm is met with being sent off the pitch for a few minutes.

Even better if they could (optionally) know that a whistle had been blown so they could (ahem) reflect on their tweeting behaviour, something like:

@curmudgeon has sin binned you for being boring dahling ..... (and then you can either add the reason or not)

This of course is in addition to my keyword filter which would of course come preloaded to filter any twts with the words "awesome", "kitteh", "om nom", "special" or "lunch" therein.

Now that would be awesome.....

Daring Fireball makes an interesting point about Ping. Yes, it's cr*p on your PC, but better on a mobile:

Ping on the iPhone feels like a decent native client to a social network. Ping on the desktop (Mac/Windows) feels like an afterthought to iTunes — one little source list item halfway down the list, with content that doesn’t seem designed at all. Not that it’s poorly designed, but un-designed. It takes the shape of default iTunes Store content.

There is an interesting thought here - simple, low grade socnets will work beter on mobile, more subtle ones that need more subtle interaction with others also need more UI with the machine.

Sort of a Shannon's Law for Social Nets, ie the bandwidth of the channel determines the social information it can carry.

Article on TechCrunch arguing that the mobile address book is the next obvious area to be mined in the interests of social graphings:

I’ve written before that I think location is the bridge between social networks and actual social life. But why do we even need that bridge? Why are so many startups content to build on top of the Facebook or Twitter social graph, when a lot of them can access your actual social graph in your mobile contact book? We’re seeing more and more apps go “mobile first, web second” these days, and that’s likely to increase going forward. This means that they start as services on mobile devices. So again I ask, why not just get to your actual social graph through your contacts there?

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It seems that companies like Apple and Google are sitting on a treasure trove of actual social data with these contact lists. Calls, texts, emails, it’s all right there. Google obviously has tried (and failed) to build a social graph through your email contacts before — but they went about it wrong, and they did so on the desktop. Mobile is the key to this.

I fully understand why every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to monetise the mobilo-socio-location world wants this data, but all the human factors research we have ever seen or done on mobile says it is Personal - and that also means a lot of it is Private. One would have thought after Buzz's debacle with the email address books the penny would have dropped re using people's "hidden" social graphs and making them visible.

A mobile address book is even more sensitive than an email one as (i) like email, it's a far wider social graph than what most people will happily let others see publicly and (ii) it holds phone numbers which are even more "private" than email addresses. As with Buzz, people have phone numbers of people that they would far rather others' didn't know about.

As one commentor on the TechCrunch piece wrote (summing up many of the other comments):

“When was the last time the address book saw any innovation?" Well - actually - it was when malware authors discovered they could mine your Outlook address book as targets for spam and viruses, that's when! And if the mobile "app developers" let iPhones and Androids be compromised in the same manner, people will take their phones and chuck them in the nearest body of water - assuming that the malware hasn't bricked them, of course!

Keep your bloody hands off of my address book, OK?

It would take just one Buzz type incident to blow any one player's credibility for good, which of course is why the Telcos have been so careful so far.

Apple has released a new social network around music, called Ping! This post is not to bury it, nor even to praise it, but to understand why they have launched Yet Another Social Network, especially into the crowded space of Music and the resounding cries of "where is Last.fm now" et al....

Giga Om says that Ping! is The Future of Social Commerce:

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Our review of Lala strategy is over here by the way

From MySpace onwards "Social" music has failed to deliver the goods, for a whole host of reasons but primarily its not a big enough "Social Object" to capture enough attention for a full grown sustainable Social Net. Music is a subset of why and how we interact with people, not a reason (in fact, based on some of my friends' musical tastes its probably a reason to drop people....).

Now, GigaOm is sounding Ping's praises from the rafters, but whether they were paid to do it or not, I ain't buying it as the Future of Social Commerce. My hypothesis is that "Social" and "Commerce" are uneasy bedfellows at best.

But Apple are no fools, they will know all this. In fact, I would hypothesize that Apple does not need this to be a sustainable social network. All it needs is for a sufficiently large crew of volunteers to add sufficient folksonomic aggregation data around iTunes to ramp up its purchasing attractiveness some more.

No, the real play here is harnessing this to the iTunes store - this is all about selling more songs, not about being sociable. It's about getting a Folksonomy going - Folks do the heavy lifting (recommendations etc), Apple gets the economic benefit (aka the loot in extre spending). I await with eager anticipation the use of kickbacks to "influential" super-users.

Think Social Recommendation Engine, not Social Network.

And of course, getting some more behavioural data about YOU never hurts in the Social Network game...

Today Facebook announced their much pre-heralded Location service, Places. The interesting thing is how they are treating competitors such as FourSquare and Gowalla - are they partnering with them or planning to eat them? TechCrunch:

Representatives from both Gowalla and Foursquare were invited to take the stage at the event to talk about how they plan to leverage Facebook’s new Places API. Both will allow you to check-in and publish the data to your Facebook feed. Your badges and pins from each of those apps will transfer over as well. As we expected, Facebook is playing nice with these guys — and they’re clearly excited to play nicely back given Facebook’s 500 million users.

Yelp and Booyah (maker of MyTown) are also launch partners for this new API. Booyah is actually making a new app called InCrowd build on the Places API. WIth Yelp, you’ll be able to transfer your check-ins both to and from Facebook as well.

Its easy to see why Facebook wants this, and the probable outcome is predictable (recall the wailing when Twitter started to eat its own ecosystem?).

Foursquare and Gowalla are cleft on the horns of a dilemma - collaborate and (maybe) get access to 500m users, but you are then on your large competitor's platfotm and at their mercy. Defect and you will probably struggle to recruit Facebook customers, unless of course users want independent alternatives (I would, as I'd prefer to keep my data split up among the dataminers, as a first line of defence). But the facebook logo - a pin through the heart of a 4 in a square - may say it all....

But they have clearly taken the Remora option - stick around to get scraps from the big fish, hope you can clamp on, and avoid being eaten.

Watch the body language of the Foursquare and Gowalla people at the announcement (its on the techCrunch link above), they looked somewhat uncomfortable as "guests" at the feast. There is no such thing as a free lunch, unless its you......

Yelp and Booyah are in a different position as they are not direct competitors.....yet.

Interesting article by Paul Carr in TechCrunch today, in essence he is pulling out of most forms of social media:

I’m probably not the first to have decided to delete Facebook, Foursquare, Blippy, Google Buzz, LinkedIn or Delicious either. I may be the only person this year to have deleted my Friendfeed account, but only because I’m probably the only person this year to remember that he has a Friendfeed account.

No, I would hardly be the first person to decide to embark on a Social Shutdown (as Blippy’s Philip Kaplan termed it) having grown tired of the relentless look-at-me-ism of the Status Update Generation. And I wouldn’t be the first to realise that there’s more to life than feeding the insatiable blood-eating plant of social media – imagine Audrey II in Little Shop Of Horrors – just to keep the fifteen people who care appraised of my every move.

His reasoning is at first glance counterintuitive:

But that’s not why I’m doing it. Quite the opposite in fact: I may be the first person to decide to close down most of my social media accounts for purely narcissistic reasons.

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As I shared more, though, I started to notice a funny thing happening. Rather than people becoming more fascinated by my life; the exact opposite occurred. “I loved your book, so I started following you on Twitter” people would tell me at parties. And then their expression would change: “your real life isn’t as interesting as you sound in print.”

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Social media allows us to become familiar with people who in a previous life would be unknowable “stars” — and we all know what familiarity breeds. There’s a reason why reality stars fade from the limelight so quickly and why none of the movies on Project Greenlight became a success: to mix a metaphor, you can’t become a star if everyone has seen the sausage being made.

Now Paul is a self confessed media-whore, but he is also (i) fairly intelligent (he tries hard to hide it, I know ) and (ii) is in my view one of the earlier adopters in this game so its worth watching for that reason.

And I think this is a trend worth tracking, as another memetic swallow has just been spotted - Jeff Jarvis points out that privacy is now the scarce resource, not publicity:

At the latest New York Tech Meetup, Drop.io founder Sam Lessin did just that with my favorite topic: privacy and publicness. In a rebuttal to Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus he said:

“Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive.

“Now the opposite is true: You have to pay in a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy.”

Whether your reasoning for Social Shutdown is contrarian media-whoring, a desire for a bit more privacy, or just that it is too hard to keep a profile going on so many and varied networks, I think this is a trend that will grow in social media usage - people will rationalise onto a few ( 2- 3 in my estimate) social networks. Probably one "professional" one, one "social" one, and probably something like Twitter which is more of an Alerts + Chatroom service. (I've pretty much rationalised to this blog, Twitter and Linked In - plus all the Yahoo special-interest email groups of yesteryear, but they are very easy to manage)

Add to this the growing worry about massively intrusive datamining from Facebook, Google et al (I wonder if that is actually driving this reaction in some indirect way) and I think we are possible seeing the start of a Social Mass Media backlash?

Today Twitter released its new "Who to Follow" List (I saw it on Techmeme). If you sign on to the Twitter Page for your account, on the right hand sidebar you will see it - 2 or so recommends amd you can click through to a whole list.

It seems to work on the logic that if several peopel I follow also follw X then logically I also should like X. It is the same problem I had with Last.FM's view of my taste in music - if 3 of my friends had the appalling bad taste to like Led Zeppelin, then so should I.

It is also, as Stowe Boyd points out, probably optimising around "most popular" which just makes it another Digital Social capital "Rich Gets Richer ratchet".

(By the way, my Twitter Inbox is deluged by people I follow who are p*ssed off with the Twitter "Who to Follow" function for the above reasons. So I don't think its a success, as yet anyway, except in the posts by the paid-for press and tame bloggers)

But that was not what intrigued me - no, what was more interesting was that of the 30 or so people it suggested I follow, I counted 21 people I was pretty darned sure I was following already! Now I didn't deliberately unfollow them, I don't think they can do a reverse unfollow of me (Can they? You b*stards?). Also, none of them are the sort of sleazoids (well, not on Twitter anyway) that Twitter picks up and automatically rubs out.

So how are they being unfollowed if I am not doing it?

Paul Clarke hypothesized that Twitter was doing it deliberately, a bit of Socal Fuzzines, a White Lie in the machine, so we can oil the wheels of online social intercourse with the "no - sorry - never saw that" or "odd, I was sure I was following you" gambits and the other person knows it might be true and takes no offence, rather than thinking that you are a b*stard who doesn't want to know them anymore.

And if so, how does it decide who to (randomly?) unfollow. I would love to have a "time-out" unfollow algorithm - 3 in a row of Sleb RT's, cats, lunch or using the word "Awesome" and you're in Purdah for a week

Or is it just glitches in the machine?

Interesting post by Ethan Bauley on HP Labs' research on Influence on Twitter - confims something our own analysis was telling us:

According to the research, it is important to separate the concept of “influence” from “popularity.” While a user on Twitter may have a large number of followers, his or her influence is more strongly associated with their engagement with the network, rather than the raw number of followers or retweets.

To automatically identify influencers, the authors devised an algorithm called the IP Algorithm. This algorithm assigns a relative influence score and passivity score to every user:

- “Passivity” is a measure of how difficult it is for other users to influence him or her

- “Influence” depends on both the quantity and quality of the user's audience

The paper concludes: “This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”

As we remarked about a year ago, our initial analysis showed that the then-popular metric used by all the PR agencies of equating "Influence" and "Social Capital" on Twitter with "Followers" was miidly correlated (ie lame) at best.

The actual HP paper is over here and makes for interesting reading. I'd love to see their algorithms

Twitter is becoming quite the Digital Anthropology testing ground, the Digital Rwanda, as we noted a while ago on Twitterers in the Mist dealing with recent research on monitoring Twitterer happiness.

Also, at our TEDxTuttle 2 session we had the fascinating Dr Caroline Wiertz of Cass Business School giving us a sneak preview of their work looking at how Twitter influences consumer reaction to things like movie selection (especially opening weekend movies - Movie Critics beware).

It's interestng to think about why Twitter is such a good research ground. Our own experience is that it:

(i) Is very easy to parse as it is all easy to scrape
(ii) The tiny message size is (relatively) easy to analyse for meaning
(ii) The linkages are very easy to analyse and map so it really lends itself to mathematica analysis
(iii)There is a a large heterogenous population which is growing so it is increasingly representative
(iv)Topics covered are vast, from the sublime to the ridiculous via the intelligent and the lame.

I predict a plethora of PhD's in Digital Anthropology using Twitter. I do recall a piece of work done some years ago on predicting infidelity from telephone call patterns, so not all of this new analysis is going to be comfortable reading.

You have been warned

Update - by the way, my Twitter Inbox is deluged by people I follow who are p*ssed off with the new Twitter "Who to Follow" function. Could be that Twitter needs to get HP Labs and Dr Wiertz in there fast!

Overhyped, overspecced, and....over:

Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.

No, it was just over-egged - like Friendfeed before it.

The lessons were there for the learning, but Google didn't. As we noted earlier, Social isn't yet in their DNA and this was Social Networking by Numbers.

What is encouraging is that Google is prepared to experiment, but even more that it is prepared to kill it.

Update - Dave Winer makes a good point - when Google elsaed Wave, it was "Invite Only" anfd oogle controlled the invites so you couldn't invite your friends. Worked for hyping Gmail etc, but not for systems where the value is having your social network on the same system. Talk about not "Getting" Social Media.