Ramblings on Social Networking Services
Clickable Culture notes a new study about how young people use technology which has a number of interesting observations, but this one stood out to me:
Technology enhances, rather than replaces in-person interaction.
I have been thinking a lot lately about my experiences with various social networking services — lately, Facebook. There’s a ton of heat around Facebook right now, with lots of companies landing major funding to build applets to live on top of Facebook; it’s basically the darling of the Valley right now.
I pay very little attention to my Facebook profile. In large part this because SNS’es increasingly seem like mayflies to me — they seem to have a life expectancy. At this point I have been through three or four. The one that seems like it will be stable enough to warrant ongoing attention is LinkedIn. The others — I worked to get a big friends list, realized I didn’t have anything else to do with the service, and moved on to the next one where I repeated the process.
Some services encourage you to limit the circle of friends you accept invites from, in order to make your links meaningful. But in practice, the cycle I have seen with myself (and mentioned in the media) is more of a boom-bust, where you start picky, then loosen up, end up with too many strangers, start a new profile, and do it all over again — sometimes on a new website.
I do think that the platform nature of Facebook will enable it to live much longer than we have seen in the past, but I think that fundamentally, an issue with social networking services is what they are for.
I’ve got a younger sister. Half-sister, specifically. She’s a teen, and she lives halfway across the country. She never sends email. In fact, I can’t ever find her on IM, once the supposed refuge of chattering teen girls. I could probably text her, I suppose. Instead, she does all of her “email” and whatnot via MySpace and Facebook. (She’s never even heard of Orkut or Friendster). But a huge huge portion of what she does is about being in touch with people who are within physical interaction distance.
This was also the key driver behind Facebook in the first place, and often behind MySpace (though music was obviously also a huge thing in that case). Facebook was originally meant for keeping up with places, not people. Or at least, with people aggregated by place. It still focuses on that to the degree that it tries to get me to join groups about San Diego, which is a basically pointless group to join.
I’ve also read with interest about the age gaps in audiences between the users of various social technologies. It used to be a clean line: you used MySpace in high school and Facebook in college. In fact, abandoning your MySpace profile and getting a Facebook one was seen as a rite of passage. But once you hit the work world, you were forced to move to email. The same email that the young tend to disdain. Now Facebook is making inroads into MySpace’s audience.
But I don’t know that it will make serious inroads against email.
For one, it’s interesting just how closed even an open app like Facebook is. I get a message there, I get told by email — but the message isn’t included. I have to go log into a website to see it. This is not very Internet 1.0, much less Web 2.0.
For another, I wonder how much the utility of SNSes to the young fades once their friends are scattered across the country in various jobs, and the “local” nature of the SNS starts to fade. Reading the blogs and profiles of folks who are keeping in touch with folks far away is very very different from reading that of folks who are all on the same campus.
In college, we all had little whiteboards on our doors, and we left messages for one another there. That’s Facebook’s “wall.” That would be close to useless to me now. They are too contextual. To communicate something to my friends about how life is going, I need more than that space, because most of my friends are too far away to know what’s going on in my life on a day to day basis. (This is also one of my objections to Twitter and lifelogging; since I am terrible at staying in touch with people, you’d think I would like to have constant little updates about people, but in practice, I don’t).
Thirdly, it’s interesting to me that the SNSes are all about asynchronous interaction. Bottom line, I don’t believe that when I see it. Synchronous interaction is too important. And that suggests to me that if someone’s locus of communication online is on an SNS, they’re probably doing a lot of synchronous interaction in person.
Anyway, these are all just ramblings. Bottom-line, I think we tend to forget just how intensely local our lives are in high school and college; I am unsure that the principle is applicable to life after that. But maybe I am just misled by my very non-local circle of friends and life.
The principles of social networking services are clearly here to stay. But it doesn’t feel to me like we’ve entirely wrapped our heads around what they are yet. If anything, they could/should long-term be a play for a competitor to OpenID… and probably not be a website.
16 Responses to “Ramblings on Social Networking Services”
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services are clearly here to stay. But it doesn’t feel to me like we’ve entirely wrapped our heads around what they are yet. If anything, they could/should long-term be a play for a competitor to OpenID… and probably not be a website.” – Raph’s Website » Ramblings on Social Networking Services
postponing my business for a year. And I thought to myself, “But then Facebook will be gone and I won’t have such an easy marketing arm anymore.” Replies welcome. Relevant post: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/07/declaring-bankr.html Also relevant: https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/07/25/ramblings-on-social-networking-services/
amen, my friend. microformats and the edge-in semantic web ftw!
m3mnoch.
Yeah, I think a big issue is that it’s still a novelty to a lot of the techinificient. 16 year old kids see the ability to stay in touch, for free, without needing to stand up, and they jump at it (as with the huge popularity of ICQ/AIM/MSN/myspace…pretty much in that order) and it attracts the same age group each time. Facebook achieves similar ends to myspace with less custimisation, so you don’t have trashy javascript eye-sores on everyone’s profile, so it maintains a professional edge. This is one reason I can see for the big book’s potential to last.
I think you are right on target by mentioning OpenID. The power of social networks is that if one ever reaches critical mass, it will provide a game-changing data source for identity and reputation.
Think about being able to look up a potential employee, boss, friend, business partner, and get useful reputation information in the form of common relationships, testimonials, certified awards and accomplishments. Reputation will also provide some quality management for user-driven content. It could be integrated into both automated filters, or made transparent to facilitate individual judgment calls.
On a related note, there’s talk of social networks being the future platform for search, since content that is valued by your friends is likely to be valued by you. This is essentially applying the concept of “reputation as quality control for user-generated content” to the search domain.
No network exists right now that has the critical mass of users, data, and testimonials to accomplish this. But I think Facebook is in the right place to become this by opening up their platform. In the long term, I think they’ll essentially become a data repository, which is where all the network-effects stickiness is. Other companies will experiement in building different front-end applications until they find ones that work well for different domains.
Not just the valley: http://gamesareart.com/2007/07/21/social-play-with-your-ego/
For me facebook bridges the gap between my “local friends” and my other friends across the country. As someone who has been in school in both Texas and California I would always have difficulty keeping up with friends from other states. Collecting peoples email addresses is clunky, and a bit awkward.
Email can sometimes seem “too personal” and thats were social networking sites really help.
I strongly disagree; of course, I strongly believe in the significance of heritage. Obviously, you moved to San Diego. You weren’t born here. I was born here. This is where I live. This is where I work. Most of the people in my LinkedIn network are local. Almost all of the people in my Facebook network are local. And I’m involved in several local organizations to help local people connect and stay connected. The people who have moved away from San Diego want to come back, they want to remember, and they want to reconnect.
It’s never been easy to keep track of every individual’s e-mail address and phone number. It’s never been easy to contact every individual to learn about what’s been going on in their lives. That’s where SNS comes in. You need to remember only one address for your entire network. And you don’t have to call anyone to learn what they’ve been doing because they “tell” you by updating their profile.
Sometimes I wonder if replacing the need to contact people with the need to update a website is good or bad… I wondered the same about answering machines and voicemail and instant messaging. These technologies—I don’t think they “enhance” in-person interaction. What they actually do is make interpersonal relatonships more pointed.
Making contact with people is so easy that we only talk to people when we need to talk to them. The other night on television, I saw one of Bill Maher’s standup comedy shows. He was joking about how surprised people are when they call and someone actually answers. What do you do then? You just wanted their voicemail. They’re so rude to answer. Argh! *click*
That gives us breather room, but I think that space more strongly benefits the people who make the effort to contact people when they don’t need to talk to anyone. They make talking to people an artificial requirement of socializing and even of business. That’s what I call “cultivating meaningful relationships.” That’s “community relations.” That’s “networking.” That’s “just being friendly.”
In business, I think it’s very important to embrace the power of locality. Your brand doesn’t start growing with your first customer or the first person outside your company to hear about you. Your brand starts growing the first time that you the entrepreneur thought about your business. The people who are most important in the early stages of your brand are the people who grow up with it, so to speak, and those people include you and your employees first before anyone else. Everything begins from the center of a circle.
A small business usually doesn’t start out competing on the international front. A small business usually starts in a local market, surrounded by equally hungry local businesses, with local customers. Investments usually come from local friends and immediate family, not from venture capitalists hundreds of miles away.
With any business, I really believe that you have to “think local” and progress outward from there. I guess that’s really what the “think global, act locally” mantra really means, but I think the “big picture” should be about where you are and how you got there first before being about where you want to be.
Ramblings on your ramblings… (Tags: Random, possibly nonsensical)
Re: “I am unsure that the principle is applicable to life after that. But maybe I am just misled by my very non-local circle of friends and life.”
I’ve pondered that one a lot too — I can’t help but wonder every now and again if I’d be able to “get it” a lot better with these services if I instead had a life that caused me to stick around physical groups of friends a lot longer than I have so far, especially during those HS and College days you mention.
Whenever I do wonder, I can’t help but try to compare it with what we did back in those BBS/MUD days, where we had a group of anywhere from 15 to 50 people that got together every week for random outings. Online was very much a way to enhance RL connections even back then. Same thing? I honestly don’t know.
Of course, to look at the analogy from a 180 degree angle, I suppose the same could also be said for people who meet people primarily in MMOs or VWs, and also talk in SNS’es — Using somewhat-less-virtual SNS’es to enhance wholly-virtual lives.
Dunno, Facebook has done a good job of giving a (false) sense of privacy and combining a young audience (non-boring) with a boring design which makes it less confusing than more featureful solutions. I.e. removing things that feels intimidating. I think they will be able to retain younger users until a more fun solution takes off, because design-wise it is easy to compete with and many users of such sites are there in order to sull their boredom or procrastinate. For Facebook in particular I think there are too many glooming public relation disasters that might arise in the wake of the upcoming court case. To quote wikipedia:
Sounds like he was kicked out for unethical behaviour, but who knows? SNS are relatively new, there are lots of public relation disasters to be made. Younger people might not care, older ones probably do. Sites for personal communication that doesn’t allow you to delete your account and information complete never leaves me with a fuzzy feeling… Trust is hard to build, easy to kill. Putting so much personal information in one place is just a very very bad idea. The worst thing isn’t what you put in yourself, but that your friends describe you as well.
My guess is that a few business oriented sites will survive in their own niche and that the more personal sites will fracture as one size does not fit all, but that there will be some generic hubs that allow cross-site communication as others have alluded to is very probable.
Hmm, for a change I think you’re not quite on the money with this one, which is strange because I’d think good MMO developers would ‘get it’ straight away. The problem is that you’re judging it as a tool and evaluating its mundane utility. That’s like taking a persistent online game and judging it’s virtual world aspects while ignoring the gameplay. These sites aren’t just about communication; they’re also about entertainment. They’re ultimately about chatting for the sake of chatting, or exchanging trivial information, underpinned by a scaffolding of useful event-arranging facilities.
Posting flippant messages on someone’s ‘wall’ communicates some information without the implied requirement to reply that you have with email or instant messaging. It’s also a shared space where third parties can view and comment, much like your typical web forums. As Michael W said above, email and instant messaging is too personal in some cases. Similarly, the numerous quiz results that many people broadcast to their friends on MySpace are not there to impart information but to provide entertainment to all who choose to read it, at a time of their choosing. Nobody would want to receive that sort of data ‘synchronously’!
I also disagree that extensive use of social networking implies a lot of synchronous interaction in person. Just as with other online situations, there are many people who seem to do a lot more talking online than off. Indeed some seem to use Facebook and MySpace as a way of getting to know vague acquaintances better, who they can then potentially spend time with in real life, when they may not have had the social skills to become good friends with that person in a typical face-to-face situation.
The features apply equally well to people scattered around the country, when viewed as an enjoyable way of communicating with people, instead of the purely utilitarian view of using it to arrange social events or to transfer information. At a risk of further butchering unnecessary buzzwords, it’s Chat 2.0, not Email 2.0.
It’s an interesting subject area, and you’ll have to forgive me for rambling some myself on the matter.
It has been my experience that as we go through life, our in-person social patterns change. In high school, the forced close proximity of people with no other connection aside from the place that they live, results in a perception of a massive social group. News travelled fast, and gossip was power. Then you leave for college, and your perceived social group size tends to shink (as you are no longer in such forced proximity to 600+ others all the time), but they also grow closer. You’re now living with your peers, studying with others who have chosen the same subject, and can find societies with shared interests. Remember how dead the summer can seem, away from your new friends? Then comes graduation and getting a job. Your college friends part ways, and it’s suddenly harder to actually meet people outside of work. There’s a reason many universities end up with an ‘old fogey’ following in the local area. As you move around from job to job, only the closest of friends tend to stick, especially since the pressures of work and home life result in less time to spend with friends.
I really need to find some data to back this up, but I’d argue that most social network users (before they get too kind and add everyone as a friend) tend to fall into two distinct groups. There are those who use the social networking site to network with where they are and the culture of that place. They are likely to have hundreds of ‘friends’ and to write on ‘walls’ a lot, prefering a style similar to their lives in person. These people are most likely at school or their first college. For these people, Raph is undoubtably correct in saying that if they are actively asynchronously communicating, they are probably synchronously communicating in person also.
Then there are those who use social networking sites as a means to aggregate communication with but those people they really want to keep in touch with and tend not to see regularly in person. These people have likely moved on from their college, and now have jobs or have moved away from their old friends (who may also be getting work). They may well frequent forums when they may once have attended student societies, so their social place networking happens on the forum itself. They are likely to be more self-concious about their profiles, as their workmates may have requested to be a ‘friend’ and they do not wish to rock the boat. Due to work and family constraints, communication with their friends is generally fairly infrequent or asynchronous, and indeed the asynchronous nature actually can help in arranging to meet up with their old friends. They’re likely to have less than fifty listed, but each friend to them actually means far more and is more likely to actually be a friend. Just like the social place networkers cannot synchronously communicate with all their ‘friends’ regularly, neither can the social friend networker, but the social friend networker still manages this despite the distance. They are highly likely to instant message and phone a few of their friends several times a week, making time between work and home.
Trivial interactions, such as those offered by twitter or the ‘walls’ are important to human communication. Life itself is generally fairly trivial. Again, I should look into this before making wild statements, but I’d hazard that the exchange of trivial information helps people feel closer to eachother. However, in the long term, this is only of value for those absolutely closest to you – with time comes confidence in friendships, with which comes a lack of fear of the absence of communication.
One thing I suspect facebook may be able to lever is it’s ability to offer you a local network. Certainly it can be very hard for someone moving to a new place of work in a new town to feel like they are part of any community. The modern internet generation is less connected to their local area than any that have came before, but facebook’s local community offers a protected means to feel a member.
Interestingly enough, however, I actually found setting a primary network on facebook reduced it’s usefulness for me. I use social networking sites to keep in touch with old friends that are distant, but by adding a primary network shared by some lesser acquaintances, these more important friends were relegated to be behind a link.
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Ben Sizer said, That’s like taking a persistent online game and judging it’s virtual world aspects while ignoring the gameplay.
*glances at Second Life*
The gallant thing for me to do would be to not say anything.
He continues, Nobody would want to receive that sort of data ’synchronously’!
I used to post quiz results on IMs with my friends and we’d talk about it and gather interesting philosophicals from the conversation. I’d love to do quizzies synchronously.
And concludes, At a risk of further butchering unnecessary buzzwords, it’s Chat 2.0, not Email 2.0.
But chat is synchronous, which is one of the two central issues. Facebook is painfully asynchronous, and this makes it, for me, an email app with more features than gmail. I’ve done wall-to-wall conversations in near real-time, and then I got sick of it and demanded we take it to IMs.
I don’t know. I’m not sure where Facebook is going, but I get a very bad vibe from it when I think about its future. I can’t back up my feelings, or I would, but I don’t see a future for fb. Something’s wrong with it.
Michael,
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make regarding Second Life. You can’t compare an apple to an orange and complain that the apple falls short on orangeness. Facebook isn’t trying to be purely a networking tool any more than World of Warcraft is purely trying to be a virtual world. That doesn’t make Facebook somehow worse than LinkedIn, nor does it make World of Warcraft worse than Second Life. They’re just doing different things. And if you try and judge something on what it’s not doing rather than what it is doing, then of course you’re going to have a skewed perception of its usefulness.
If you started broadcasting random quizzes across your instant messengers for ‘synchronous’ feedback, then you’d start getting blocked rather quickly. The kind of information that Facebook and MySpace users want to broadcast tends to be the sort of thing you don’t want to be compelled to respond to. It’s like placing the articles in an RSS aggregator, in the full knowledge that you won’t care about most of them.
Whether chat is synchronous or not depends on what sort of chat you’re referring to, though I suppose it’s often synonymous with instant messaging. If you look at web forums, USENET, mailing lists, they’re generally a slow-moving form of chat, and Facebook/MySpace do that sort of communication very well.
With your comments on wanting to discuss quizzes in person and to take chats to IM, it seems like you’re faulting Facebook on not covering every possible way you might want to interact with another person – but since when has that been a significant downside to a service? It doesn’t provide instant messaging, but then it doesn’t provide music recommendations, auctions, or rats to kill either. (Excluding the various add-ins, anyway.) What it does provide is a suite of functionality that a lot of people are finding useful because it does what they want, which isn’t email, or IM, or blogging, or disparate web forums.
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