While in California, I was asked to give a version of my INSNA talk on the Facebook at the Googleplex. It was an honor to be invited, and I tried to give a talk that was fun and focused on the practical aspects of my research. You can view the talk here (Thanks to those who emailed me this morning to let me know it was online).
This summer, I’ll be writing the results of this study up into journal form. Giving these talks and blogging have really opened up how I think about these matters, so I hope to put together an article that will be useful to lots of people. If you’ve got any interesting questions you think I might be able to tackle, please feel free to let me know.
My trip to the west coast was simply amazing. The INSNA conference was great – I’ll certainly make an effort to return in the future. My only regret was not being able to see more of beautiful Vancouver. The IIW was as good as they say, perhaps even better. The Identity Woman Kaliya Hamlin facilitated the best un-conference I’ve attended, I’m already looking forward to next year’s workshop.
And you continue to impress…congrats, Fred!
Hi Fred,
I enjoy reading your blog and the Google talk was great.
To your point in the talk on why students share their mobile number, I can see a couple of things –
1. They consider it a privacy issue.
2. If everyone who sees their number or SMS messages to their bill could be astronomical..
So, I would guess privacy and pocket are the reasons!
On a slightly different note, I would love to get your thoughts on a mobile service I am working on (Mobi53.com). Our focus is to help people/students that don’t plan their lives ahead of time(ex: student community), a way to connect with-in and outside their social network and complete simple transactions using their mobile phone.
If you have sometime, I would love to give you more details. I can be reached at anup@mobi53.com. Thanks.
Regards,
Anup
Jason – thanks so much – and thanks for the kudos on your blog. It made my day when I saw that in my feedreader.
Anup – Absolutely. There’s a certain value ascribed to a phone number, mostly cultural, the makes us afraid to share it. It’s sort of a silly concept in the age of caller ID, but it is still with us. In my talk, I state something to the effect that it provides an information dead-end. There’s little utility in sharing a phone number in the Facebook, and it seems to not fit in. There’s something else there, though. A phone number, or a phone call represents the unique type of full-duplex communication you don’t see in SNS. Whereas communication in SNS is detached and asynchronous, a phone conversation represents an immersive, all-encompassing communication experience.
I think one of the sea changes we’re seeing in SNS or Social Technology is that students prefer face-to-face for their full duplex social interactions, and they’ll go to great lengths to arrange f2f communication. Consider the arrangement of a lunch meetings – it starts first with a Facebook message “Want to meet for lunch,1PM”, it moves next to an IM “We still on, See you at 1″, and ends in an SMS “Running late. CU 1:15″. We haven’t wasted our social energy in preparation for the event, and the communication processes have served our needs (while not distracting us or forcing uncomfortable situations). We go where our needs are met – and when we deal with a full social interaction, our needs may be met but we stand a strong chance of being distracted. If we aren’t going f2f, let’s just communicate in ways that have the highest utility (if we’re passing a small bandwidth message over a channel, we don’t need to read Weaver to figure out what gives us the most bang for our buck).
But you’re so dead-on about cost. Here in the US mobile companies make a killing on SMS, and its clear that we choose SMS for a lot of our needs. That’s a great point, and duly noted.