Category: Social Networking

The Stanford Facebook Class

Matt pointed me to a Stanford class on Facebook web site: Home The Stanford Facebook Class: Persuasive Apps & Metrics. Here is a quote from the home page explaining the interest of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab in Facebook,

In 2007 the most effective persuasive technology has been Facebook. People in our lab have researched persuasive technology since 1993, and we’ve found the fastest path to insight is studying what’s working best in the real world. Today’s Facebook experience has so many elements of persuasion, so we’ve decided to dive in deep. Our goal is to understand the psychology of Facebook. This page gives an initial overview of our project.

As a course it is impressive (see especially the speakers they lined up), but I found the press more interesting as they analyzed the phenomenon. Tim Oren in his blog entry, Facebook Apps: Playing the Viral Lottery writes the following,

 You’re better off thinking of a Facebook app as a virtual form of social stroke, a sort of networked take on what we called New Games once upon a time. “Here, have a hug, pass it on.” Indeed, among the most successful of the Stanford apps were hugs, kisses, send Love, and a pillow fight. There were more complex games and multi-user projects, but those were the teams that found they needed to simplify and/or restart with a new application to attract an audience. The summary learnings of the class were simple and to the point: Start simple, go viral, then deepen the engagement – before attempting to monetize. Watch your metrics and learn fast – teams were iterating versions on 12 to 48 hour schedules.

This doesn’t bode well for analytical widgets that are complex, but it is great to see there is still room for the small student team to do something that gets traction.

Digital Scholarship and Digital Libraries

Image of Slide

At the beginning of November I was asked to give a keynote for a Digital Scholarship/Digital Libraries symposium at the beautiful of Emory Conference Centre. My talk was titled “The Social Text: Mashing Electronic Texts and Tools” and my thesis was that we needed to forge a closer relationship between scholarly projects and digital libraries. This is a two-fold call for change:

  1. Scholars develop new methods to analyze and study texts need deeper access to the digital libraries that hold the texts they want to study. On the one hand we need to be able to discover and aggregate study collections that span (often incompatible) digital library collections. On the other hand we need to be able to plug in our tools instead of using the analytical tools built into the publishing engine. I proposed that we look seriously at OpenSocial as a model for hosting social applications.
  2. Scholars editing or creating digital texts need to be willing to accept a much more prescriptive set of encoding guidelines so that their texts can be brought into large digital library collections which then could make the discovery and gathering of study collections possible. Smaller scholarly craft projects will not scale or play well over time – that is a function digital libraries should lead.

A copy of the slides in PDF is up for FTP access. The file is 15 MB.

Flock – The Social Web Browser

Flock ScreenI’ve been experimenting with Flock – The Social Web Browser. It to have integrated support for social network sites like Flickr and Facebook. The interface is confusing, perhaps because of everything it is trying to do, or my not getting it. Some of things it does are:

  • Let you see your Flickr photos in a bar across the top so you can drag them into other services.
  • Upload to social network sites.
  • Track your Flickr and Facebook friends.
  • Read blog feeds.

OpenSocial – Google Code

OpenSocial ImageTwo days ago, on the day of All Hallows (All Saints), Google announced OpenSocial a collection of APIs for embedded social applications. Actually much of the online documentation like the first OpenSocial API Blog entry didn’t go up until early in the morning on November 2nd after the Campfire talk. On November 1st they had their rather hokey Campfire One in one of the open spaces in the Googleplex. A sort of Halloween for older boys.

Image from YouTube

Screen from YouTube video. Note the campfire monitors.

OpenSocial, is however important to tool development in the humanities. It provides an open model for the type of energetic development we saw in the summer after the Facebook Platform was launched. If it proves rich enough, it will provide a way digital libraries and online e-text sites can open their interface to research tools developed in the community. It could allow us tool developers to create tools that can easily be added by researchers to their sites – tools that are social and can draw on remote sources of data to mashup with the local text. This could enable an open mashup of information that is at the heart of research. It also gives libraries a way to let in tools like the TAPoR Tool bar. For that matter we might see creative tools coming from out students as they fiddle with the technology in ways we can’t imagine.

The key difference between OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform is that the latter is limited to social applications for Facebook, as brilliant as it is. OpenSocial can be used by any host container or social app builder. Some of the other host sites that have committed to using is are Ning and Slide. Speaking of Ning, Marc Andreessen has the best explanations of the significance of both the Facebook Platform phenomenon and OpenSocial potential in his blog, blog.pmarca.com (gander the other stuff on Ning and OpenSocial too).

YouTube – A Vision of Students Today

YouTube – A Vision of Students Today is another video from the Digital Ethnography folks at Kansas State. (Remember Your Moment of Inspiration?) This one has students holding up pages or laptops with messages about students, the web and learning. The script is on the Mediated Cultures site. I love the creativity of how they are using video in class and for class. It feels participatory – by students, for students, and about students. Digital Ethnography indeed.

Thanks to Johanna for pointing this out to me.

Cofundos.org: Community Funding

Diagram

Cofundos is a neat idea, that probably won’t work, for bringing people who want programming done together with those who might contribute code. The idea is that projects get proposed, discussed, and bid on. People who want something done bid money to get it done. If there are enough people bidding small amounts there might be enough to entice developers. Evenutally developers are selected. It doesn’t look like any projects have gotten to that point.

The model is worth following. It could be a way to fund academic projects in a community, but I worry that the amounts would never be enough and programmers donating their time wouldn’t want to be constratined by such a process.

Wayfaring

LogoWayfaring is a site where you can create personalized maps using the Google Map system. You could create a map of your favorite Indian Restaurants.

Like many social networking sites, Wayfaring has commenting and tagging features. Maps can be shared, and they can be dropped into other web pages like YouTube videos.

The interface is slow, and the search is bizarre, but Wayfaring is young.

SlideShare: Sharing slide shows like PowerPoint

SlideShare is a beta social network site for sharing slide shows. You can have shows with audio attached, or just plain one that you click through.

I’m not really sure why slide shows should be shared, especially if they don’t have an audio track. This strikes me as a corruption. Slides were meant to enhance (not replace) talks. Now we have the slides without the talks they support. Tufte described the problems with shoehorning ideas into slides in The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. If slides are a crutch, SlideShare is a pilgrimage spot where you can see the crutches left by others.

Of course, there are uses for SlideShare. I guess you can put you slides up there so you can access them for a presentation. And trading decks of slides has become a way of proving you know something.