March, 2009

Noticed / Thoughts — 4 Comments
5
Mar 09

Facebook and the Death of Networks

InsideFacebook reports on the coming “opening up” of Facebook:

After Facebook’s press event yesterday announcing public profiles and the real-time home page “stream,” I briefly chatted with Mark Zuckerberg about the future of sharing on Facebook. Essentially, Mark said things are headed toward a hybrid model in which some information shared by users can be private and some information shared by users can be public, depending on users’ preferences.

This direction means users will need to think in new ways about sharing on Facebook. Historically, sharing on Facebook has been managed through Facebook’s robust privacy settings, with most of the default settings being set relatively strictly (usually limiting access to most information to others in your school or regional networks). Now, Facebook users will also have the option to easily share some information much more openly – even completely publicly for the whole world (and search engines) to see if they so choose.

While Zuckerberg said Facebook is still working on the user interface that would make such sharing settings robust and easy to use, these changes are going to have significant implications for the nature of sharing on Facebook.

Perhaps.  One of the stories that doesn’t get talked about much is the massive shift towards privacy in Facebook in the last few years.  In studies I’ve run, and in data I’ve seen, there is (and has been) a clear migration towards friends-only profiles in Facebook.  In my opinion, this is the result of 1) increased awareness and comprehension of privacy risks 2) context collapse and 3) the aggressive nature by which Facebook manages the community.  As I’ve written previously, Facebook’s users have adapted to this new reality, and accordingly enforce a high level of information control.  We’ve studied online community long enough to know that users won’t change practice simply because the community has new features.  To that extent, we shouldn’t expect Facebook’s move towards openness to radically affect the community.

I see this move as the death of regional networks. Facebook’s initial genius was to segment schools by network.  Schools are unique; they are closed communities full of individuals who interact daily, who share a strong common bond.  Because of this very strong group identification, Facebook users felt comfortable sharing and disclosing to other members of their school network.  When Facebook opened to everyone, they attempted to replicate this success by introducing regional networks.  As one might imagine, regional networks are vastly different from school networks.  There is no verification for entry, the networks are much larger and much less cohesive, and the group effects are meaningless.  Regional networks were simply an arbitrary segmentation so Facebook could keep up the master-plan nature of its community.

Fast-forward to 2009, and a few things have changed.  Primarily, lots of people have Facebook accounts.  Unlike college students who are heavily focused on interacting in their local, university network, older users operate without a focus on location or geography.  You don’t care about what network Bob from First Grade uses, because the nature of interaction isn’t about browsing Bob’s profile – it is about establishing a friend connection.  For older users, Facebook is much more about point-to-point use than browsing interaction (and if anyone wants to lament the “devaluing” of Friendship, they should consider how the system forces people into friendship to accomplish informational goals).  This nature of interaction has largely rendered regional networks and their privacy functions meaningless.

This takes us back to the original question – will all this new openness radically affect Facebook?  No.  Facebook’s contexts collapsed a long time ago.  Facebook is already open.  Users factor this openness into what they say and do, who they friend, and the privacy settings they maintain.  Sure, publicity seekers will like this new openness, but there may be a reverse incentive for other users.  This semi-openness may make users more findable, forcing more awkward friendship negotiations and context collapse, leading to reduced sharing of information (the lifeblood of Facebook).  This shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of Facebook, but just as a reflection of the social realities of a massive online system with real-world implications.  If everyone in the world was on the same listserv we’d behave the same way.

Upsides for Facebook?  This is a great chance to become a huge peer content-distribution network.  Take photo galleries.  If Facebook stepped their game up a little in photo galleries (hosting multiple size photos, offering printing services, etc), it could easily compete into the territory of Flickr, Kodak or Snapfish (Note: Why FB, with their 11 Trillion photos, hasn’t done this meaningfully yet is beyond me).  There are many valuable products that Facebook could provide via the public profile, any number of which are monetizable and provide real value (i.e. not just network value).  This would mark a serious legitimization of Facebook as a business – sort of like an inverse Google.  In the case of Google, you spread yourself over all of their services.  With Facebook, the individual would be the center of the network, and their profile could be a place for search, hosting, file sharing, chat/videochat, photo hosting, blogging, microblogging, and so forth.  As unglamorous as it sounds, there is still a huge market to be people’s webpage.

Hacks / Research / Software — 2 Comments
1
Mar 09

Managing Literature Alerts with Gmail

If you research an emerging topic, it is likely that you use some form of literature alert.  If you’re unfamiliar with literature alerts, they are notifications provided by publishers and digital libraries to inform you of new content as it is released.  Managing these alerts can be challenging, so I thought I’d share my system.   At a very high level, I manage literature with Gmail labels.  My system is pretty simple, but it has been working for a year or so I’ve used it.

The first step has two parts.  If you don’t have a Gmail account, I assume that you know how to fix that.  Lit alerts are a little more challenging, as different domains will have different publishers.  If you’re doing the kind of research I do, then setting up alerts with Sage, ScienceDirect and the ACM Digital Library (ToC alerts are free, but search alerts require an ACM membership) is a good start (Springer, Wiley and IEEE are also useful).   You’ll need to create accounts with all of these sites for lit alerts to work.

Alerts

Literature alerts come in two forms (as far as I know).  The first is a table of contents alert.  This means you can get notified when a new journal or proceedings is published.  The second is a search alert.  Search alerts are saved searches (i.e. Facebook AND College Student); the system notifies you when new results are found.  You’ll want to set up these alerts and direct them to your Gmail account.

Search

Over the next few days your inbox will begin filling with literature alerts (assuming you’re looking at an active subject).  Because you’re not always going to want an inbox filled with lit alerts, what you’re going to do is set up filters.  For each publisher that emails you, click on the email and select “Filter all messages like this” from the dropdown.  I then set the filter to skip the inbox, and apply the label “Alerts.”  After a few days, you’ll have filtered all of the alert messages to a label – meaning you can process them on your own time.

Filter

alertbox

Two important notes.  First, when signing up for searches, opt in to get the most verbose alerts possible.  You want abstracts, etc.  Second, rather than deleting alerts after they are done, you’re simply going to leave them read in the labeled folder.  Here’s where the fun begins.  Over time, you’re building a portable, personal archive of all new literature on your topic.  And because you’ve set up the alerts across publishers and libraries, you’ll be able to search for new literature across publications easily – without authenticating to a library or running a meta search across publishers.  All of the new literature will be in your gmail, searchable with the “label:alerts” key.  For example, if I want to know all of the new literature matching Facebook and psychology, I simply go into my Gmail and search “label:alerts facebook psychology.”

fbpsych

This kind of management strategy would also work for mailing lists, fare alerts from airlines, etc. In my dreams I’d have a Gmail plugin that would add impact factors in to the subject headings. The rest of my literature alerts come in via RSS (lots of open-access journals only offer RSS alerts), and I’m slowly moving those over email (via RSS-to-email). How do you manage your literature alerts?

Hacks / Research / Software — 5 Comments
1
Mar 09

Citation Searching in Google Scholar

One of my favorite features in Google Scholar is its “cited by” function.  Cited by allows you to see all of the items in Google Scholar that cite the pulbication you were searching for.  In comparison to Web of Science, GS has much greater recall, which is useful when you’re investigating a new topic.

The problem with GS cited by is that there is no easy means for searching within the results.  This is fine if your publication is cited only a few times and you can eyeball the results.  But as the citation count scales up, being able to search within the results becomes pretty important.

The good news is that you can search within GS cited by, it just requires a little URL hacking.  In my case, I was looking for publications about web surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book “The Media Equation.”  We’ll do this step by step:

  1. Open up GS, and search for “The Media Equation“
  2. The first result is the Reeves and Nass book.  Click on the “Cited by 1598” link.
  3. The URL will look something like this:

    http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&cites=12773235514158955901

    You will want to select that list bit, the “&cites=12773235514158955901″.

  4. Now, open up GS in a new tab and run a search for “Web Survey.”
  5. Finally, paste the “&cites=12773235514158955901″ onto the end Web Survey URL, so it looks something like this:

    http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=Web+Survey&btnG=Search&cites=12773235514158955901

  6. Voila!  You’ve found the 337 publications matching Web Surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book.  The first one looks like a very promising publication from some highly regarded methodologists.  Win!

”gsresults”

I was unable to run a comparison in the WoS database as it doesn’t seem to know about the Reeves and Nass book.  Are there any other places you use for Cited By searches (i.e. other databases, vendors, search engine hacks)?  And if there is some easy way to do this search in the GS interface, please let me know.  I’ve read the advanced searching docs and researched this, but it doesn’t appear there is a simple way to search within citations.

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