May, 2008

Noticed — No Comments
28
May 08

Reminder: Personal Democracy Forum 2008

I wanted to remind you that my great friends over at techPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum will be putting on the Personal Democracy Forum 2008, on June 23 and 24 2008. I’m totally bummed that I’m not able to attend, but the folks over at PDF have told me they’ll offer discounts to any Unit Structures readers who would like to attend. In my opinion, the PDF conference is the vanguard event in the poli-tech space, and if you’re working/developing/interested in the space you should absolutely attend.

If you’d like to get the discount, just drop me an email and I’ll connect you. To register for PDF 2008, visit http://pdf2008.confabb.com. Find out more about the conference at the PDF blog. On an unrelated note, I’ll be up in NYC later this week. If anyone’s around and would like to meet up, drop me a line!

Research / Thoughts — 8 Comments
27
May 08

Imagined Identity: Envisioning the Future of Social Networks

This past weekend, I was in Los Angeles to attend the wonderful HASTAC conference. Highlights included Howard Rheingold’s keynote, Curtis Wong’s discussion of the World Wide Telescope, and Bill Tomlinson’s demo on human-mediated networking. I was asked to join a panel entitled Trends in TechnoTravels/TeleMobility, so I thought I’d share what I spoke about here – a talk entitled Imagined Identity: Envisioning the Future of Social Networks.


The talks on the panel were short, so rather than presenting research I mined Unit Structures to talk about some emergent themes I’m observing in social networks. Readers of my blog may recognize these themes: Closeness, Curation and Imagined Identity. A lot my thinking is influenced by sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Muxtape and even ClaimID – sites where people are being social in smaller, more focused ways. Here’s the quick explanation, with links to reference posts with longer explanation:


Closeness: I see closeness in social network sites as a function of smaller friend networks and more personalized content. With more focused networks, the contextual challenges that lead to self-censorship are diminished. Compared to a site where one has hundreds of friends, including the boss, family members and friends, in a close site one knows their audience and engages them personally. Examples: Twitter, LiveJournal, Tumblr.

Curation: Curation emerges in sites built around social objects. Unlike Friendfeed, which is a decontextualized mess of everything a person creates, a curation-oriented site focuses on limited, curated content. Our identity wants to be faceted, and curation-oriented sites allow us to best present certain parts of our persona. Examples: Muxtape, Flickr, Vimeo.

Imagined Identity: Some sites are moving away from first-generation social network profile, one in which your identity is explicitly enumerated. Next-gen sites induce identity in more nuanced fashions. In Twitter, your bio is limited to 140 characters, meaning your “profile” or “identity” in more a function of your production. This is engaging, as the identity you produce naturally winds and changes as you “update” your profile by sending messages. Certainly more interesting that listing your favorite movies and changing them every six months. Examples: Twitter, Seesmic.

I was also asked to think about mobile social networks. I’ve been notoriously down on MoSoNet (or whatever it’s called) because so much of the technology requires freshening of handsets. If we have to wait for the whole world to get iPhones or Boost mobile devices, and then we have to get those devices to work together on proprietary networks, then we’re going to be waiting forever.

Thinking about these themes – Closeness, Curation and Imagined Identity – I see a push back against the ideology of bigger, better, faster. Perhaps mobile networks that leverage these simple themes may be able to construct meaningful social networks across devices, with simple tools and techniques. There’s still a lot standing in the way of mobile networks, including cost and carrier interoperability, but perhaps this simpler approach may be beneficial.

There are a number of caveats attached to these themes. They are inherently emergent, meaning we’re not going to see the social networks market change to them overnight (or anytime soon). They also don’t reward the “biggest” networks, instead concentrating on smaller clusters. This is clearly in opposition to the goals of large players like Google, Myspace or Facebook. Perhaps these tools enable the long tail of social networks, which I think is an interesting possibility. We always though niche social networks would be the long tail of social networking. While niche networks will certainly represent a part of the tail, perhaps it is close networks, with inherent small-group personalization, that offer us a way forward.

Research / Teaching — 5 Comments
21
May 08

New Manuscript: Integrating Web 2.0 Technologies in the Instructional Process

For the past two semesters, I’ve taught a course on Online Social Networks at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. It has been a great experience, and I’ve had an incredible bunch of students. This course has also been an experiment, both in subject matter and instructional technologies. Using Facebook, Del.icio.us, YouTube and a wiki, we created courseware from Web 2.0 tools. Now that the course is over, I’ve had some time to reflect on the challenges, pros and cons of integrating these types of tools into instruction. Integrating Web 2.0 Technologies in the Instructional Process (download PDF) is an early manuscript documenting and reflecting on the process.

The manuscript is a case study of the integration; it combines a survey with analysis of some of the benefits, risks and challenges. I’ll be submitting the manuscript, but I wanted to post a draft here for other instructors. If you’re thinking about integrating Facebook into your course, or you’ve been paying attention to products like Blackboard Sync, this manuscript may be worth your time. This paper focuses on the contextual privacy issues of moving instruction into student spaces of sociality - a complex issue indeed.

I’d really appreciate feedback. This is an early draft, and I’ll be revising it a few more times before I submit. With regards to submitting, I’ve found a target publication, but if you know somewhere this paper might fit nicely, I’m all ears.

Back to my students. Over the course of the past two semesters, I’ve had the pleasure of working with about 40 students with interests all over the place. They’re working on incredible projects, like Monte’s VoiceThread and Daniel’s StartupWear and Macrophi. The students are also doing great work in Facebook, creating lots of apps (that I hope to link to some day when they let me) and groups/pages/etc for their jobs/internships. If you’re ever looking to hire someone with social networks knowledge and experience, I’ve got plenty of undergraduates and graduate students I can recommend!

Thoughts — 11 Comments
5
May 08

Twitter, Imagined Identity and Flux

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and thanks to Techcrunch, I’ve finally got my excuse. TC describes a scheme for making Twitter “portable”, with a goal of solving the service’s technical problems. According to the post, if you glue enough “standards” together, a Twitter-killing Phoenix just might rise from the ashes, and service outages will be a thing of the past.

Part I: Economies of Cooperation

As someone who spent almost seven years working in open source, I’m the last person who will argue against openness, but there are a few things wrong with TC’s notion. Most important, “open standards” have to work in cooperation with business, not in fierce competition. As anyone who has worked in the industry knows, free software is anything but free. Both the cathedral and the bazaar have extensive present and built-in costs.

So what does this have to do with Twitter? The idea of the “open Twitter killer” is built on an open service model. Open services are the Web 2.0 version of open source software. Just like open source software, open services have built-in and present costs: hardware, data centers, staff and developers. Because open services are standards-based, there is implied future-protection justifying the provisioning costs. Putting it more bluntly, open services can’t exist without business, especially at Twitter-scale.

When the founder of DataPortability.org publicly brainstorms ways to kill Twitter on Techcrunch, he’s taking the movement backwards. Anyone with engineering skill can dream up a way to “open” a service; the real challenge is bringing companies in to the fold to support open services. Talking about how to kill them is not a good way to do this.

Part II: Interaction and Next-Gen Social Networks

This brings us to our second point: does an open Twitter work? Even if some large companies stepped up to support the cost of an open Twitter, one that never suffered downtime, would we migrate to it? Barring a complete failure by Twitter, the answer is an obvious no. Why? While the DataPortability folks and TechCrunch think Twitter is just a messaging service, the other 99.9 percent of us see Twitter for what it is – a social network service.

I’ve always had a big-tent approach when it comes to social networks; a social network is something you feel, rather than something born from a set of features. Twitter only marginally stands up to the boyd/Ellison definition: Is Twitter bound? Does a 140-character bio really count as a profile? I believe that Twitter forces us to rethink some of the assumptions around social networks. Here’s how Twitter pushes thinking on the subject forward:

  • Message-centricity, as opposed to Profile-centricity: The core of any social network is messaging/communication, as illustrated by Dunbar in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. In profile-centric social networks (Myspace, Facebook), messaging has largely taken place through the profile (I talk through my profile, you respond through my wall/apps/etc.). By locating the network around the profile, we were really locating it around “communication”. In Twitter, the “profile” is our communication, an always-on, interactive wall.
  • Imagined Identity: In focusing on interaction and communication, Twitter has eliminated many of the social network profile elements that make people uncomfortable. In Twitter, you’re not expected to list your favorite movies and upload lots of pictures (which, to many late 20’s and 30’s users feels like online dating). Rather, your identity is imagined – constructed through your communication and relation to your followers. For those who aren’t in social network expansion, the imagined identity (as exposed to the explicit identity of dating sites/Facebook) is much more comfortable.
  • Close Community: I’ve often described Twitter as a “close” community. While outlying bloggers have thousands of followers, most of us are followed by far less than 100 people (not including spambots). The knowledge of one’s disclosure community in a social network makes interaction more personal. A close community prevents some of the context leakages of monolith social networks; of course, Twitter needs a better approach to scale close community forward.
  • Constant Flux: The previous three elements – message centricity, imagined identity, and close community – interact to create a constant state of flux in Twitter. This is Twitter’s killer feature. For those who use Twitter in a close network, you constantly renegotiate your friends’ “profiles” throughout the day. As your concept of a “profile” is your friend’s last few posts, each new post is new information. This is why you keep checking Twitter throughout the day – people you care about are updating, communicating, and sharing.

Twitter isn’t a platform, it is a unique social network. It is a social network stripped to its most essential elements. Twitter provides social network designers a roadmap forward, a way of thinking about social networks more fundamentally. An “open” clone offers very little by way of competition. Further, an open clone that lacks the design or interaction aspects of Twitter would actually feel very different. Twitter is really about the user experience – something that simply can’t be replicated via an open standard.