Social Networks

This post has been stewing for a few days, and its genesis goes something like this.

On Tuesday afternoon, I saw a message (on Twitter) from a person who a few weeks ago I never knew, talking about 2 other people who a few months ago I never knew, who were going to be playing at a gig, and another person I met last year was going to be playing with them. A few quick messages and there I was, and had a great evening listening to some great music, in pleasant surroundings because - strangely enough - the other people on Twitter who also decided to go wound up chatting to each other as well - so going on my own was not a "spare part" story at all..

So, to Lobelia Sabo, Steve Lawson and the Woods, Dodds & Lawson band, and Lloyd Davis thanks for a great evening, you guys rock - and roll, and jam, and sing torch songs, and between the wars classics .

Now, two other things about this.

Firstly, big picture nothing has changed in internet social media in 20 years since the first bulletin boards, the first usenets, the first listservers, the first internet groups - it was ever thus. The internet has always been a social media, because we are social animals, and the 'Net differs from previous comms media in allowing easy group interaction in asynchronous and synchronous mode.

Secondly, like being in a parallel universe where things are not quite the same, everything has changed just that bit. Broadband social media is higher bandwidth, so is just socially more efficient:

- I can tell you that these people are good - but you don't have to believe me - this time round you can go to their websites, follow a link to their music and YouTube videos, and see for yourself
- More context data about the other people attending the gig allowed ice to be broken, conversations to be had etc far more freely - I think this has facilitated more face to face meetings faster - it still happened on the textnet, but took longer.
- It's my view that this extra context allows people of more diverse background to communicate with each other more easily. I think the variety of people mixing via social media is far higher now.If I think about my use of Groupware, it resolved into belonging to many special interest groups rather than "belonging" to many people with special interest.
- This definitely lessens the friction of face to face interactions with people you don't know in strange places you've never been to
- I also think that the fact there is a feedback loop means that behaviour is moderated - be an a**hole and you then have to face those same people on the social net the next day
- Another outcome has been the amount of collaborative group working I'm seeing springing up around me now - I suspect being able to get a bigger bandwidth view of someone allows others to make up their minds about whether they trust someone or not far faster - plus that feedback loop effect as well.
- I suspect this time round its just easier to use, so a larger group of people are using todays comms media - and increasingly they are women too.

But apart from that?

Well, it also gave serendipity - one of the other acts couldn't make it, so up stepped Miriam Jones, who I also thought was rather good - and turns out she is also on my social network, so another connection is made......

There is another post on this - about talent, Zipfs law rewards, and the shift in music business models - but that is for another time.

Fascinating piece in Nature, about some work by Barabasi - who really understands social networks - after all, he wrote the books !

Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues show that most people, perhaps unsurprisingly, are creatures of habit. They make regular trips to the same few destinations such as work and home, and pepper these with occasional longer forays such as vacations.

The distances people covered varied widely between individuals, but follow a similar pattern — most people move on average a short distance on a daily basis, whereas a few hardy souls move long distances in a short time.

The data showed that nearly three quarters of the 100,000 customers surveyed moved "mostly" within a 10 mile radius of home. Mostly means about 67 per cent of the time. There's also significant group of the population that behaves quite differently. Between 2 and 3 per cent of those studied "regularly" traveled to locations more than a 100 miles away. Regularly means almost every week. In other words, the study proves the existence of jet-setters and business travellers.

Seems like our small-world network structure in action to me, though Barabasi notes:

“It’s weird to see such mathematical regularities in such complex behaviours,” says Brockmann. The challenge now is to find out why something as complex as human movement follows such consistent patterns, he says..

Which surprises me, as I would have thought it deduceable en masse from small world network theory. I must be missing a trick - any thoughts ?.

Juxtapose this with this interesting thought from Adrian Monck:

We live in a strange world. I work forty miles from where I sleep. The shopping gets delivered and the garbage gets taken away. The Atlantic and New Yorker arrive by post. Friends, work and everything else arrive via broadband. That’s my life.

There’s not much local about it. Strike that. There really is nothing local about it.

Adrian was talking about the Washington Post's attempt at "Local Reporting" in Loudoun, which seems to have not gone as well as expected. Interesting, since we are clearly pretty localised. Clearly some missing link here.

Still, it is always good to have some real data in Social Networking, an area which too often these days makes fine art look like a data driven subject*

* which of course it increasingly is, or at least the prediction of prices is.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a long essay equivalent on Sarah Perez's* note on the need for Social Media mavens to get out more!



So - two axes - the amount of time you are actually connected to Social Media, from the occasional dip in to the always-on, always there mode - and the other axis is level of active contribution, from total observation to active participant.

Hypothesis - if 90% of all social media users are the very occasional users, they probably fit into the bottom left box.

Those who are always on (I think mobile-heads and/or those who predominantly work from a desk are in this category) but are usually in observe mode are - in my view - what Leisa Reichelt calls being "ambiently intimate". These people are linked to all sorts of social media, drawing them back to their (online) clients in realtime. Those who just dip in occasionally ( the laptop brigade? ), get what they want to, leave their comments and go again - are what I've called "Twitternuts" - a medium that has low persistence and easy input suits them well, as do RSS readers and services like Techmeme. These two groups constitute the 9% who participate and contribute some of the time - but their use of social media requires very different functionality.

And then there are the 1% that are always on, always there, always talking. These are the people with 20,000 followers on Twitter, 5,000 friends on Facebook. For them, Friendfeed and such are a godsend - they capture every conversation, every comment, and store it into perpetuity. Sometimes, observing that these people seem to be "on" 24/7, I suspect they are actually bots (the first turing machines?) - or at least operate in relays?

What Sarah wanted to know was, because she was not as...obsessed...as these high priest mavens, was she in some way less faithful to the cause? :

.......when the weekend rolls around, I crave distraction. I want to trade the glow of my laptop screen for fresh air and sunshine and new activities…offline activities. Activities where Twitterberry may be there for me, but I don’t need to check it as obsessively as one would check Twhirl. This “taking a break” has become more and more of a trend as of late, leading me to wonder if I’m suffering from social media burnout or whether I’m secretly just a luddite who has somehow mastered the tools of an early adopter.

Nope - as my master-chart shows, Sarah is just part of the other 99% of the population who understand that in all things, moderation is best. After all, that is the wisdom of the crowd

(A thought arises about how social media can help get you laid, but the actual..... )

As an aside - and maybe its just me - but I do get tired of seeing the same people saying the same things on every piece of social media. Is there a case for an "Anti Techmeme" where the "top 100" are automatically blocked?

* Sarah was riffing off a post by Colin Walker, but her link love seems to have crashed his blog so I can't read it- and I won't add to his server load now!

Update - finally read his piece, starts off seemingly as a standard paean to Friendfeed / poo on Twitter tribal thingy, but then the second half gets much more philosophical and interesting. This quote resonated with most, because it agreed with this post ;-):

Yes, we appear to have an echo chamber but this is an unintentional circumstance and not entirely the fault of those involved. With FriendFeed likes exposing items to a wider audience via the friend of a friend system the scope exists for a far greater number to get involved but the percentage of those that do is small. Out of Scoble’s thousands of followers you only ever see the same names cropping up as getting involved in the conversation and the same names dominate the FriendZone charts of FriendFeed users. This is not because of any elitist exclusion policy but because of a lack of involvement by others outside of the usual suspects.

I think that's because those same names do nearly all the talking - as I noted above - but, if you care to cut them out, as I have done - using Twitter followings by the way - you will find a great set of discussions going on underneath!

Fred Wilson notes today that he sees a future of social media where:

every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.

Its the Microsoft Gambit for social media, but be careful what you wish for ! I mean, do you really want the banality of all human thought digitised forever

( OK, OK - its a great aim, but can we talk about filtering as a matter of priority then! )

Update - Alex van Elsas pointed me to this post of his - arguing that the killer app is Interaction. As it has been on every social media since it began, brom BBS, via Usenet etc. We forget things so quickly

Whisper who dares....that sacred cow of the Social Media play, the Wisdom of Crowds, is actually being questioned by those who have benefited most hugely from it so far - Read Write Web realises that (referring to the gaming of Digg):

SitePoint's experience is an example of herd behavior or groupthink, where the Digg group acted blindly on poor information, without rationally thinking it through. This is a problem with the wisdom of crowds concept: if unchecked, rather than coming to the best conclusion based on the wisdom of the group, a crowd can come to the worst conclusion based on dumbness that spreads from a single bad node.

This is exactly the problem with Social Media and Wisdom of Crowds stuff - it can be swayed by flashes of Mob Rule. (The madness of crowds)

It's also not necessarily that accurate. In the UK, before Pandora was stopped, I far preferred it to Last.fm because it actually gave me the music I like via its Music Genome database, whereas Last.fm gives me the music tastes of other people who like what I like - not the same thing at all. We both may like A, but I love B and you detest them. With a social media selection, you are going to get B!

Now, RWW lays out 4 rules to mitigate this:

Last year, we laid out a set of rules to get the most out of a crowd. It might be a good idea to revisit those here:

1. Crowds should operate within constraints. To harness the collective intelligence of crowds, there need to be rules in place to maintain order.
2. Not everything can be democratic. Sometimes a decision needs to be made, and having a core team (or single person) make the ultimate decision can provide the guidance necessary to get things done and prevent crazy ideas and groupthink from wreaking havoc on your product.
3. Crowds must retain their individuality. Encourage your group to disagree, and try not to let any members of the group disproportionately influence the rest.
4. Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it. It is important to note that in most of the above projects, the group merely votes on the final product; they do not actually create it.

But in a Social Network, delivering user mediated decisions, point 3 is a tough gig - everybody can see everybody else's reaction, so keeping individual decisions going is hard.

Two interesting observations re Twitter this weekend:

Firstly, last night during the Eurovision song contest a number of people on my network were chatting to each other about it, and having a grand old time. I wasn't watching it, but it was fun interacting with some of them every so often. But what is more interesting is that this was the premise of what watching Joost and the other Web TV plays was going to be all about - you watched Joost TV and used their own IM system to chat to your friends.

The concept was right, but the execution followed a Real Life path of least resistance - what we call "good enoughs" - to execute.

Terrestrial TV is already here, Twitter is already here and - importantly - probably already has a critical mass of people who know each other. The users mashed them together to produce a service they wanted, and did it manually themselves - via laptop. And I suspect that laptop on the lap watching TV is going to be a strong "good enough" for quite awhile - especially if, as we suspect, web TV will go the MyPCTV direction. This I think is going to be a major usage of multicast IM systems such as Twitter (you need the group to make it fun) going forward.

(Update - I note Darren Waters at the BBC also noticed this)

Secondly, I noticed Twitter treated their latest overcapacity issue very cleverly, by keeping the real time chat function going while cutting back on the second order network link-based messaging such as replies etc. This meant the system didn't keel over. I think this is a smart plan, as the 80/20 value of Twitter I suspect is in the live chat (Live chat has been the killer app in most sites that had it 'till now, can't see why it wouldn't be on Twitter). This to my mind draws most of the venom out of the critics of their currently non 5x9 reliability service (stops the feeding frenzy of the Friendfeed sharks ) . In fact, I'm not sure it needs to become a full 5x9 service in the short term if they can keep chat going. (In fact, I see some wag has suggested they could even monetise the downtime )

There have been a number of cases in the last few days that have started to ask "Web 2.0" style social media businesses an interesting question - are they a community service or are they a communication platform - in other words are they responsible if some members of the community are beastly to each other., in this case on Twitter*

Nonetheless, it is an interesting question - is Twitter a Comms platform or a community? Is Facebook? Is there a difference?

If its a pure Comms platform, then its job is to deliver 5 x 9 and allow the members to fully exercise their freedom of speech.

If its a Community, then there is usually some form of moderation and control exercised.

By its actions, Facebook clearly sees itself as a community. Twitter has clarified its position that sees itself as a Comms platform. Both have every right to do so, their risk is commercial, there is no universal service obligation here.

In the paid-service world, even comms players moderate network user behaviour, however. The point that will now be battled out is what powers and rights users who are essentially consuming a free service have. The cost of moderating a service are higher than not doing so, and no service provider wansts to be dragged into higher costs - especially for a free service - so it will be an interesting case study.

If previous history is any guide, the service providers are most likely to gauge the temperature of the user base as a whole before making any decision that deviates far from "do nothing, just follow the policy" - though as Facebook found when it kicked well known bloggers off for infringement, the PR damage soon persuaded them to let those people back on (they still kicked off lessser known people for the same sins of course)

(* Old hands will recognise the above case as a Good Olde Flame War, now blog flavoured, and know that once the C word has been used and The Moderator involved, Godwin's Law is not far from being invoked

I've been reading this post on scaling Twitter on the Twitter blog with a growing sense of Deja Vu. They note that:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we've tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that's introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability.

The Twitter blog then goes on to note that the best advice given to them from the blogosphere was from people who had done it, and pinted to this very good post from Hueniverse - who in one paragraph notes:

The idea that building a large scale web application is trivial or a solved problem is simply ridiculous. In a way it is surprising that there are so few companies out there dealing with commoditizing web developing scaling.

And here's the Deja Vu bit - Broadsight does this sort of stuff, and it was just over a year ago I went to the "Future of Web Apps" in London, and then a bit later a few of us went to the early "Open Coffee" meeting in London, and we got to chat to a whole lot of "Web 2.0" startups. I was left concerned by their technical skills - not because they weren't top class tech guys, but because most of them were what Andrew Orlowski later called "Presentation Layer" architects, who were now trying to build social network based systems, which are essentially based on network service technology, and thus rely hugely on "Infrastructure Layer" expertise.

I mildly suggested to the ones I met that they look in more depth at the transaction/messaging issues, and the issues around database reads etc because after N years in the Internet / Telco / Hosting / OSS game I knew this was where the scaling issues often are, and I knew scaling would be a big issue for them - with network services you can't just throw hardware at them because they behave in non-linear ways. (See this post at the time)

The response I got in too many cases was similar to what the Twitter guys now admit to above - they were not architecting the systems as messaging systems, they were building them as content management systems - because that's what they knew how to do. And - if I may be blunt - there was just a touch of ignorance (not knowing what they did not know) and arrogance (what could some Web 1.0 / Telco old farts tell us, its all different now) and too much "code zealotry" - Ruby on Rails worship was rampant at the time.....

So anyway, I strongly advise ANYONE in a startup building a social network type system to read the post from Twitter, and the accompanying post I linked to, and this one from Dare Obasanjo, so even if you don't believe old farts like us you can learn from these guys' experience - if you don't get network scaling infrastructure people in early, you risk building another Twitter.

And Twitter are being sensible here though.....

Our direction going forward is to replace our existing system, component-by-component, with parts that are designed from the ground up to meet the requirements that have emerged as Twitter has grown. First and foremost amongst those requirements is stability. We're planning for a gradual transition; our existing system will be maintained while new parts are built, and old parts swapped out for new as they're completed. The alternative - scrapping everything for "the big rewrite" - is untenable, particularly given our small (but growing!) engineering and operations team.

As we suggested in an earlier post, that is the best possible approach to take now.

Course taken on Read Write Web over here, takes about 5 mins to read, PhD handed out at door on way out

Its a good starter for 101 and goes through all the usual suspects - Web 2.0, Blogs, Wikis, Facebook YouTube, Twitter etc etc - but as with so much Social Merdia stuff in the blogpress there is sweet FA on why you use X and not Y, when A works and not B, etc etc

The sort of analysis such as we sometimes expose, for example here and here and here

The problem with not making any attempt at analysis in Social Media U stories is that it makes the whole scene looks like one big happy fluffy cloud, without any real structure to where what lies in the Ecosystem, Value chain, etc etc, and it frustrates business minded people who look at all this miasma and say "Where's the ROI? What do I do first? What impact does X have over Y?

( Shameless punt of Broadsight services - we do 1/2 day, 1 day and 2 day workshops where we go through a lot more of our analysis in detail for clients, tailored to their industry - if you're interested, contact us)

Andrew Chen has an interesting post here on what happens in a network if Metcalfe's Law is reversed - first, his diagram:



(I have a small beef - a veal? with his cost side, as he is ignoring transaction costs, but thats for another post). As he notes, this happy hockey-stick growth party goes swimmingly until:

....one or two people announce the intention to leave. If those folks are fun and entertaining, there's an immediate realization that the quality of the experience is about to go down. And yet more people announce their intention to leave, and so on, until you are left with the party hosts and a big mess

In other words, what happens when those big attractive nodes with 5,000 friends start to leave...and take those friends, and blog like mad that they are off etc etc - yes, you get the reverse Metcalfe's Law (Eflactem's Law, as Andrew calls it). Or, to misquote Tom Lehrer, a social network is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it - and if whats being put into it is a giant sucking sound of disappearing people - well, its still your sewer and you are in the effluent.

Andrew notes that Social Networks need to re-learn something that many previous networks have learned to their cost - churn counts. After a while, as growth slows (see our mathematics on that impact here) its as critical to think about retention of existing customers (well connected first, then les autres).

This is basic game theory - if the network's behaviour is continually disappointing the user, the user will go away (if there is another game to go to or a no-game option). "Defective" behaviour is far easier to get away with if there are no repeat / continual interactions, but when many interactions are repeated, then frequent defective behaviour will lead to increasing defections. It is for this reasonn I think Facebook got into trouble with its Application Spam - one poke is fun but 50 later is a defective experience

In fact there must be a basic law in here- in any networked system, as the number of repeat interactions increase, so the importance of designing the system to maximise "positive" interactions increases with it.