Posts Tagged: adoption

Thoughts — 1 Comment
7
Oct 07

Opposing Opinions of Facebook

It’s no big secret that Facebook serves two discrete audiences. The first, early-adopting college students, compose the strong core of the site. The second, a sort of post-Friendster crowd, are discovering social networks anew, their interest stoked by the media and tech bloggers. Due to the structure of large-scale networks, these two audiences are largely invisible to each other – both inside and outside of Facebook, no less. Two Op-Eds this weekend illustrate this nicely.

The first is from Saturday’s Times, in which recent college grad Alice Mathias describes Facebook as a time-wasting, in-joke fueled venue for stalking one’s friends and potential romantic relations. Mathias rejects the utilitarian argument, arguing that it isn’t about the tools or the streamlining of the social life, but rather about performative aspects of identity – students endlessly trying to impress and amuse each other with profile tweaks and crafted pictures.

This view is rejected by Wired contributing writer Fred Vogelstein, who takes the techno-utopian stance in Sunday’s LA Times. Vogelstein claims that the information we share, such as our likes and interests, is verified by our social network – and if we fabricate we get called out. Furthermore, Vogelstein sees Facebook as purely utilitarian – a place to get and give social information. If someone was to break into Vogelstein’s house, he imagines that he’d put the information on his Facebook page and “every one of my neighbors — and the police — will know that too.” It’s sort of Bowling Alone meets the Transparent Society – Facebook as a place where the police are our friend, and they consume all of the social information we share.

What’s remarkable to put the two editorials side to side. Both are extreme; contrary to Mathias’ view, students do take advantage of Facebook as a social utility – it’s not all whimsy and identity play. And Vogelstein’s view is particularly chilling, one in which we turn to a Facebook to mediate even the most personal social information need. To a certain extent, these views represent the two divergent demographics in the site; it’s not hard to figure out what route Facebook prizes – they want to be the Google of human interaction. The question that arises is how much Facebook’s vision is grounded in reality. While there will always be college students looking to play digitally with friends, the prospect of a society taking up tools ala Vogelstein en masse is much harder to envision.

Thoughts — 12 Comments
15
Aug 07

Newsweek and more sneaker metaphors

This week’s Newsweek features a cover story exploring the growth of Facebook. Following up his thoughtful piece on the class divide, I thought Steven Levy did a great job with the story. In the article I talk a little about how Facebook’s attempt to reinvent itself is changing the nature of the service; I’ve previously fleshed these thoughts out in a blog post entitled “Where are Facebook’s Early Adopters Going”.

As the Fall semester starts up anew, Facebook’s efforts to distance themselves from the college market grow more clear. Facebook has decided to drop support for classes, meaning that college students will now have to use a substandard third-party application if they want to see their fellow classmates. On a college campus, the browsing of classmates via “classes” was a core “information vector”, and many loved the feature as they learned more about the people sitting next to them. Now that this feature has been summarily executed, students will reap less informational value from Facebook. Granted, it’s a small change, but an important change; while the site clearly wants to distance itself from its core audience, I fail to see why they feel the need to penalize students.

Facebook’s attitude towards college students might be best summed up in this quote from the Newsweek article – it’s a spin job that would make Karl Rove proud: “Facebook did not change college life, but it changed the lives of the early adopters … many of whom were in college.” (Former COO Owen Van Natta). Yow. And as Facebook focuses its efforts on shutting out its core audience and appeasing the blogosphere, am I the only one left shaking his head and wondering? I get that Facebook wants an older audience, but it’s not like you see Nike leaving the basketball shoe market to compete with Florsheim.

Research / Thoughts — 13 Comments
20
Jul 07

Where are Facebook’s Early Adopters Going?

As many of you are likely aware, the past month or so has been all-Facebook, all the time. It’s an exciting time for Facebook, though the whole “Facebook is the next…” genre or blog post is wearing a little thin. This post was inspired by an article Wired released a few days ago, entitled “As Facebook Grows, Longtime Users Draw Privacy Veil.” The gist of the article is that as more users flood the site, the long-time users are shuttering themselves from the world.

Research I’ve run confirms this; in fact, even baseline privacy statistics are telling. In January, I found that on average, 25% of users make their profiles completely private to strangers in-network; the superset that uses any privacy settings is likely much higher. Compared to 2005 and 2006, where I found privacy rates at 6 and 10%, that’s a very significant jump in just a year. Of course, the “opening” of Facebook is not the only factor at play in the privacy equation. Media reports and “stranger danger” all influence the decision, as well as many other factors.

I think the Wired article is particularly interesting, however, because it sheds some light on how the early adopters are reacting to this change. Let’s face it, “Open Facebook” and Facebook Applications have substantively changed how Facebook feels to the early adopter. These students now have to deal with unwanted friend requests from family members, high school classmates, distant relatives, strangers. Facebook is no longer a protected, bounded community, and this disrupted sense of community is important. In earlier iterations of “openness”, the response was significantly small enough that the sense of community was not disturbed globally (though undergrads who were spammed by high-schoolers may disagree). However, with the extreme interest and ramping adoption of the service as of late, there is a noticeable disruption in the community.

At the same time, Facebook applications are flooding the information space with Spam. Granted, Facebook understands this and is working to fix it (applications now have a Spamminess score), but this state change is also very important. A big factor in Facebook’s growth among college-students was its ability to provide relevant information very efficiently. Students could log in, see what their friends are doing, get information, and go on with their lives. Now, the information space is extremely cluttered. Whereas my newsfeed used to be full of updates about people I cared about, now it feels like an ad stream for applications as people try them out. Let me make a sneaker analogy: I don’t care about every pair you try on and put back when you’re shopping for sneakers, I care about the ones you actually buy. Perhaps Facebook could learn from this, and only notify me when someone has used an application for a while?

Of course, that’s just one issue with applications. While I like them (I’ve even created a few), I don’t see why applications have to come at the cost of information economy. To the early adopters, these changes are very significant. It’s a simple equation: More people into Facebook = less people I actually care about. At the same time, the clutter created in the information space by Applications are further diluting the power of the information “fix” Facebook provides, and I believe this is a very serious issue.

As we look at the early adopters, and see how they are shuttering themselves to the outside world, one wonders what this means about the network as a whole. Networks are living things, and the early adopters make up Facebook’s core network. If these people are shuttering themselves from the storm of adoption and application spam, the network certainly still grows at the fringe, but it is dying in the middle. Granted, networks are resilient, but centrality is above-all, and the center of Facebook’s network is reacting.

The longer I spend studying networks, the less I see them as “revolutions” or even all that different from everything else in life. Friendster, Myspace and Facebook all have had their moment in the sun, but like anything else, the audience is fickle. The early adopters who have shuttered themselves from the storm, the college students who are getting spammed and made uncomfortable by an uncle’s friend request – they will go other places. And it may not be today or in three or six months, but change will occur. Tastemakers are inherently nomads, and I can sense that the innovators (to use Roger’s term) are already out exploring the fringes of what’s next. Perhaps there’s something inherent about “places” – we can only share them so much. And now that Facebook is a place for everyone, and people are acting on this openness, “what’s next” becomes the question.

And so what is next for the innovators, the tastemaking nomads? Well, I’ve got a few ideas, and I’ve seen a few interesting next steps. Open Facebook has forced migration, and the innovators are out exploring a number of potential alternatives, some that don’t resemble “social networking.” But today, I’m not going to blow their cover, so I suppose you’ll just have to keep tuned. ;)

Research / Thoughts — 11 Comments
10
Jul 07

Adopting Communication Practice

Over on the O’Reilly Radar Blog, I came across a piece by Peter Brantley entitled “Working in Facebook.” In it, Brantley discusses a topic I often think about – how we adopt and carry forward technical skills. He argues that the skills students are learning in social networking tools will remain with them as “normal” communications practice as they move forward in their career. He says:

First, this is a fundamentally important shift generationally in what we expect from our software productivity tools. The grad students and young faculty using Facebook have used MySpace, and been Facebook members through their whole adolescent and adult school experiences. They are taking this experience with them into their work. The work of the people that I see most often is in research and teaching. But the lesson is broader: this generation will be working collaboratively in tools like Facebook. In schools, in corporations, in small non-profits, in community centers – people will collaborate and work together in social applications. And that is going to be as natural to them as email and text messaging.

Second, regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established – the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication – these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities. Facebook is an empty wasteland for people who have not climbed over the hump of use. For those who have active community within it, it is this generation’s Lotus 1-2-3.

While I agree with Brantley’s premise, I take issue with a few points. First, Facebook has only been around since late 2004, and really only became broadly accessible in 2005 – certainly not enough time for grad students and young faculty to be users “through their whole adolescent and adult school experiences.” Furthermore, I find there is little academic collaboration inside of Facebook at the graduate level. Facebook acts as a social nexus to find and connect with fellow students, but I’d dispute that many of us are actively and meaningfully working in Facebook. Sure, we can create groups, but the Facebook groups tools are poor at best, and ill-equipped to serve academic needs.

However, the key is that Facebook is a point of centrality on a campus. From this point, well-designed tools could truly serve the student base – there’s a lot of opportunity to develop such tools with the Facebook API. This is certainly an area where monetizing the API is quite possible – the amount of money schools spend on substandard learning- and course-management tools is so immense that even a fraction of the market is extremely valuable.

Back to Brantley’s point, though, I too agree that the skills students develop using social networking tools will persist throughout their lives – both social and professional. The social communication tools we use when we’re developing relationships (say, during college) become the tools of a lifetime. The practice of communicating and forming identity in social networks are normal, and we will continue to use these skills going forward. For those not “socialized” in these tools, the adoption process will be challenging (though not unlike non-email users picking up email). However, this sort of communication – using social networks and associated techniques – is past the point of becoming normal. For a large swath, it is normal, and teachers and designers should work on incorporating these methodologies going forward – the are inevitable.

Thoughts — No Comments
2
Apr 07

Mobile telcos rush to social networks – but are they missing the point?

After reading the BusinessWeek article Mobile Telcos Rush to Social Networking, I’m sort of left shaking my head, wondering exactly what telcos are thinking when they lay out their social networking strategy. In the article, writer Kate Norton describes partnerships between Orange Mobile and Bebo.com, and Vodafone and NewsCorp, parent of Myspace. The gist of these partnerships is that the provider will guarantee (exclusive?) access to the respective social networking service, which I guess is supposed to make people want to buy data plans or some such thing.

My problem with a strategy like this is that the telcos seem to fail to understand that social networking on the mobile is a distinctly different experience than social networking in the browser. As I’ve previously written, social networking is different experience between these mediums; in the browser, social networking has the luxury of being a browsing experience. That is, we can spend inordinate amounts of time traversing profiles on our desktops – which is a luxury not afforded by most handhelds, due to data plan speed and cost, as well as a number of other factors (extremely media-rich social networking profiles do not translate well to the mobile, for one).

What surprises me about these partnerships is that the major telcos seem happy to delude themselves that the experience customers want on the mobile mimics the browser experience. Furthermore, by pushing their customer base onto one social networking platform, the carriers strategic plans break the back of network-effects based adoption that could come from embracing social networking.

If Twitter’s amazing adoption has told us anything, it is that people want information solutions from their mobile device – these being primarily social informational solutions. Twitter operates in the TXT-based context – it isn’t media-rich, it isn’t GPRS dependent, it isn’t locked in to one carrier – but it is better mobile social networking than I’ve seen in years. And you know what? It doesn’t look all that much like our browser-based social networking experience.

Until we live in a world of media-rich mobile devices attached to fat pipes, we’re going to make do with the tools we have. That is, we’re not expecting the mobile to be the browser – and we quite like (or rather, grudgingly accept) the mobile as its own space. The social networking that we do in the mobile is different from that in the browser, and as long as it answers our information needs, we’re quite pleased with the results.

Along with Twitter, Loopt is another fantastic example of mobile social networking. The folks from Loopt (I believe the company has something like a 21-year-old CEO) built an entire product around the answering of a very simple, but very relevant social information need – “Where you at?” The Loopt platform took advantage of the E911 infrastructure and is now providing its location-based services to subscribers of Boost Mobile. Of course, Loopt is not cross-service, heavily limiting its usefulness – but imagine if it was.

Both of these services prove a very important point – the ways we think of social networking in the mobile are different. While the various Telco/Social Network deals make for good ad copy and probably sound sexy to some senior VP of something or another when pitched, the actual value in these relationships will come through implementation. If Orange and Vodafone can look beyond the mindset of simply connecting the mobile to the site as if it were a browser, perhaps they can leverage the real value of these partnerships.

As the article’s expert, Falk Müller-Veerse states, “it’s likely to take three to four years before social networking via mobile phones becomes mainstream,” that is probably the best argument I could muster for rethinking mobile social networking. The handsets aren’t here, the data plans aren’t here, the data speed isn’t here – but if we think of mobile social networking in new and innovative ways – ala Twitter or Loopt – there are tremendous opportunities. And the rub is, these opportunities exist for answering very simple questions.

Until the providers wake up to this reality – and perhaps they never will because their paradigm is so carrier-centric (Imagine a mobile company developing something that would work cross-carrier like Twitter – never!), the market for mobile social networking is squarely in the hands of those who design elegantly simple technologies that solve real information needs. I’m looking at you, readers.

Research / Thoughts — No Comments
17
Mar 07

On Twitter and Youth Adoption

Like everyone else on the internet, I’ve been seeing tons of articles fly by about Twitter, the social-presence/microblogging app designed by folks from the Obvious Corporation (former founders of Blogger.com). As an attendee of SXSW, I had the chance to experience Twitter in optimal circumstances, and I was impressed – Twitter is a prime example of a situationally relevant piece of social software.

For the uninitiated, the simplest way to think of Twitter is like a stateful IRC backchannel. In this analogy, your twitter homepage is your chat room, and your friends are the chat participants. Every time you log in you can see the messages that have been sent to your chat room, so you can instantly keep up with the people you’re following. Of course Twitter also has a strong mobile component, in which your friends posts can be delivered to your mobile phone, allowing constant updates by your friends.

So what makes Twitter cool? The one thing that blows me away is the power of its simplicity. Web 2.0 has been characterized by a race to the bottom in terms of interactivity, with the mantra of competition being “add more features.” My version of Myspace is better than your version of Myspace because my version of Myspace has chat! – that sort of stuff. Twitter, on the other hand has decided to deliver extreme simplicity – the notion that a small amount of text can be a useful social object. And you know what – it works. We can create social experiences around simple bits of text just like we can create social experiences around high-interactivity hot media like video clips.

Twitter is also cool because it leverages pre-existing practices. Twitter feels like a chat room – and the action in the service is very much like setting away messages in an instant messenger app. In a sense, a twitter stream is mostly comprised of away-message type messages – little bits of social information about individuals we care about. By leveraging these pre-existing practices, and simply bringing them into a new medium, Twitter has created a product that feels native – you know how to use it pretty much immediately. This is the hallmark of great IA and great product design.

In a way, Twitter represents some of the best values of Web 2.0 – it is a product that addresses a social need in a simple, useful way. It doesn’t overreach, it doesn’t try to do more than it should. They’ve likely cut more features than they added, which is a design philosophy I really believe in. Its refreshing to see applications like these still viably coming to market – because in the past few months I haven’t seen anything on Mashable or Techcrunch that had had a vague chance of being incorporated into my set of tools.

Ok, so that’s the upside for Twitter – now, what are the challenges the product faces? Perhaps the greatest challenge Twitter faces is making inroads into the youth market. Why? Well, young people have been utilizing and hacking apps to create social presence for many years now. The main vector for social presence is the buddy list. With more young people having their own computers, the buddy list becomes the default location for presence. While I couldn’t find a good stat in the literature, my guess would be that the average young person has an average of one- or two-hundred friends on their buddy list. At the same time, instant messenger has successfully jumped to mobile, so the notion of using the buddy list as a presence notifier is nothing new.

Therefore, to bring these younger users over to Twitter will be somewhat challenging – barring some unforeseen Myspace-like growth in popularity, Twitter’s network won’t be as valuable (in the Metcalfe sense) as an instant messenger network, simple due to the fact there’s more information available in the instant messenger network.

Of coruse, one can argue that Twitter isn’t just about setting away messages – it is also about Microblogging. As it happens, young people have been Microblogging in social network services for some time now – the wall or message board is the perfect example of a microblog. Again, Twitter leverages pre-existing behaviors, but the ultimate question revolves around where the individual’s microblogging is most valuable. For a young person, it may be more valuable to share a link or write a wall post (knowing the wall post will get sent to Feed) in Facebook.

The purpose of this post isn’t to come down hard on Twitter, but to point out that the behaviors and practices it is leveraging aren’t exactly new. And for bloggers who don’t have a robust buddy list, and don’t write wall messages, Twitter may seem revolutionary. However, in the youth market, they already have a place for these practices, and the process of pulling these users to a new place may be rather difficult.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Twitter being the current sweetheart of the blogosphere. 54k meme be damned, its always a good thing to have A-list bloggers loving your product – and they love it for the right reasons. It is actually providing them a useful service, and they love it as a result. However, as I look at my Twitter friend list, a vast majority of users are people I see 2-4 times a year at conferences. Great people, but they’re only situationally relevant during those times.

I think this illustrates the problem for Twitter – for it to catch on in a mainstream fashion, it must be filled with people you care about/interact with on a day-to-day basis. You must be able to log into Twitter and find out what your friends are doing. And considering that we have countless other ways to do this, Twitter faces somewhat long odds. In the end, the value of Twitter is so closely tied to the value of its network due to its simplicity (in my Network Effect Multiplier equation, Twitter lets a small initial value). Getting to this point will be a challenge for Twitter, but they’re off to a strong start, and it will be interesting to watch them grow.

Noticed / Thoughts — 6 Comments
6
Jan 07

Thoughts on Mobile Social Networks

In my recent post about social networking in 2007, my predictions about mobile sparked some good discussion and comments. Here’s what I said:

1) Social networking will not go mobile in 2007.
Sure, lots of vendors are going to offer SNS on mobiles in 2007, but it won’t catch on to become a major force. With data plans and handsets as they are, mobile use just doesn’t match our use expectations of SNS. SNS is about browsing – and until mobiles let people richly and cost-effectively browse, our phones are going to remain glorified address books

At the same time, danah boyd shared some of her great insight into mobile SN’s, and Howard Rheingold linked to a post that was positive on long-term aspects for mobile SN’s. I’m going to effectively straddle the fence on this issue, standing by my statement that 2007 won’t be the year for mobile SN’s, but I do believe that mobile SN’s will be deeply integrated into our mobile experience in a few years.

Ok, so why won’t 2007 be the year for mobile SN? Two things. First, there really aren’t many viable offerings. We have Dodgeball and Facebook mobile, but these services simply haven’t made significant inroads with the mainstream market. There are also some exciting vendor-specific services, but these walled-garden plays just aren’t going to catch on – as long as you have to change your service provider to get access to the service. Second, handsets are behind the curve; many of the target market for mobile SN’s are on Razr’s or less – and it will be another year or two before they cycle out of these handsets into next gen handsets that would actually support media-rich applications. Finally, data plans are prohibitively expensive, and to think that teens are going to shell out 100/month for mobile plus unlimited data is expecting too much. It isn’t that teens don’t opportunistically waste this much money a month, but the mental price point is prohibitive.

These are three significant barriers for the mobile SN industry, and in the meantime we’re going to be using TXT based mobile SN’s like Dodgeball. Why don’t these services have mass appeal? The answer to this comes through use patterns of social networks. In most studies, two main uses of SN’s among young people emerge. The first use is time-wasting – i.e. browsing your friends and their friends endlessly, social grooming by leaving comments and changing your profile, etc. The second use is as a directory – i.e. how do I get in touch with Johnny.

Until cross-carrier rich apps emerge, SN use one (time-wasting) is completely out the window for mobile. It is expensive and annoying to try to browse a social network by text message. And in case two, directories – well, our phones are our directories. As Richard Ling and Bridgitte Yttri showed in their study of youth mobile use, teens clearly use their phones as directories. And what happens when they need a number that isn’t in the directory? Well, they could either waste ten minutes texting with a mobile social network, or just call their friend and ask them to Facebook their friend for them and get the number.

So the problem here is how the teen information needs are answered. Information needs are a large part of why we use technologies. And generally, as rational people, we will use the most efficient means to address our information needs. Until mobile social networks can cost-effectively, efficiently answer our information needs, whether they be browsing/grooming or directory needs, we aren’t going to use them. Yeah, it would help if they were fun, too, but what the mobile SN industry really needs to do is answer these young people’s primary needs, and then build from there.

Postscript: Interestingly, it may not be mobile providers or applications designers that really bring mobile SN’s to the masses – it may be campuses. At many campuses, including UNC, technology departments are looking at ways to integrate ambient intelligence into the infrastructure. With the convergence of RFID, mesh networks and wifi-enabled devices, it may be the campus that delivers the social network to the students. In fact, they’re already doing this at MIT.

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