Category: Social Networking

Inside Facebook: Available Data Shows Facebook User Numbers Growing Quickly, or Slowly, or Falling

According to Inside Facebook available data shows Facebook user numbers possibly flattening in early-adopter countries like the Canada, UK and the US. This article follows on an article Facebook Sees Big Traffic Drops in US and Canada as It Nears 700 Million Users Worldwide that got a fair amount of press attention. What is going on? In the article about available data they say,

there do appear to be some overriding trends here. Canada, the United Kingdom and a few other early adopting countries have alternately shown gains and losses starting in 2010. Up until then, growth had generally been much steadier.

I doubt this means that Facebook is about disappear. It is still growing world wide. They may just be hitting a saturation point – something you would expect. We might ask if or how Facebook will change once its user base is not expanding. Are they dependent on a perception of growth and will they suffer once Facebook is no longer the hot growing thing? Will users migrate their social networking to the next big thing?

I would add a general reflection which is that there are now more social media sites than I can keep up with. There isn’t enough time to blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on. We now have choose that social media that suit our changing lives and where our friends are. My academic friends have migrated to Twitter (while I’m still stuck blogging.) Facebook is what my mother likes. The trick is to not feel one has to keep up with it all.

Etherpad

I have just discovered Etherpad which lets you write collaboratively in really real time. The original code came from a Google project that has been wound down. There are, however, a number of projects that let you create public pads like iEtherPad and there is the Etherpad Foundation that is committed to maintaining the code.

I heard about this as an alternative to Twitter for a conference backchannell. The idea is that you create a public pad and share it with participants who can then edit a large responsive document together. In principle it sounds like one would get a better transcript and response to an event.

‘Alone together?’ exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games – PARC, a Xerox company

My vote for the best article on computer games in a long time is ‘Alone together?’ exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games. Ducheneaut and colleagues at PARC have found a way to gather data from World of Warcraft (WOW) and analyze it for social data. The paper gives a nuanced view of the social aspects of WOW summarized by the phrase “alone together.” Unlike some other MMOGs the game doesn’t encourage socialization. In fact playing solo is more effective for leveling up (until you get to the very top levels.) The social aspect of WOW has more to do with being seen as having achieved. You may not be actively playing with others, but players like playing alone in a game where there is an audience for their achievements and the potential for social interaction.

Interestingly, what seems effective in the design of WOW is the steady leveling. There is always another level achievable with a bit more work.

Beware Social Media’s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO’s

Jeffrey R. Young has an article in the Technology section of The Chronicle of Higher Education enjoining us to Beware Social Media’s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO’s (March 20, 2011). The article is about a South by Southwest Interactive conference that brought together researchers and industry.

One of the big trends is using crowdsourcing or micropayments to get work done for free or very little. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor warned that this could be exploitative.

Mr. Zittrain began his argument against crowdsourcing with the story of the Mechanical Turk, a machine in the 18th century that was said to play chess as well as a human. But the contraption was a showy fraud; a man hidden inside moved the arms of a turban-wearing mannequin. Amazon, the online shopping giant, now offers a crowdsourcing service it calls Mechanical Turk, which lets anyone, for a fee, commission unseen hands to work on tasks like proofreading documents or identifying artists in musical recordings.

The similarity of crowdsourcing to a man shoved inside a box means the practice isn’t exactly worker-friendly, the professor argued. “In fact, it’s an actual digital sweatshop,” he said of the many sites that use the approach.

Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money.

I wonder if anyone has proposed a code of ethics for crowdsourcing? Thanks to Megan for sending this to me.

The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About

From Humanist a pointer to a great blog essay by Kent Anderson about The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About. The essay starts by talking about all arguments for an against the internet making us smarter or stupider. He quotes Adam Gopnick’s nice essay “The Information; How the Internet gets inside us” in the New Yorker that divides us into three groups,

. . . the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic. . . . The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that . . . books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others.

Kent then turns historical looking at both the infoglut trope over time and then, in an original move, he looks at what some of the originators of the Internet thought it would be. He ends by concluding that it is really about control,

We may argue again and again whether the Internet is changing our brains, elevating us, lowering us, making us smarter, or making us stupid. But at the end of the day, it seems the real argument is about control — who has it, who shares it, and who wants it.

Cultivated Play: Farmville | MediaCommons

Thanks to Erik (again) I was pointed to this essay on Cultivated Play: Farmville by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz in MediaCommons.

The essay starts by asking why Farmville (a plug-in game for Facebook) is so popular. Why is harvesting virtual pumpkins (lots of clicks) fun for Facebook users? Patrick argues that Farmville is popular because we are polite people who want to be good to each other,

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

Liszkiewicz goes on to argue that Farmville resembles work, but it is Zynga (and Facebook) that benefit. This game takes advantage of our natural civility and sense of neighborly obligation to exploit us. He ends up calling ita “sociopathic application” because it exploits our sociability to control us.

As someone who quit Facebook in a huff over how they were exploiting my information I can’t play Farmville and therefore I’m not sure that it has no redeeming qualities. I do, however, agree that we must examine what we are doing and quit those social sites that exploit us.

Glass

Thanks to Erik I have discovered an interesting web annotation feature called Glass. At the moment they are in beta and you have to get an invitation code to get an account, but they aren’t that hard to get.

Glass lets you add glass slides to web pages that you can invite other Glass users to see. These slides can hold conversations about a web site. You could use it to discuss an interface with a graphic designer. There might be educational uses too.

The interface of Glass is clean and it seems to nicely meet a need. Now … can we make a game with it? Can we do with it what PMOG (now called the Nethernet) was doing?

Transcribe Bentham

The Transcribe Bentham is an interesting crowdsourcing project in the humanities that has built an environment to involve people in the transcription of some 60,000 papers of Jeremy Bentham. The project is supported by University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities.

I’m impressed by how they have adapted tools to develop the participatory environment rather than developing from scratch. The transcription environment is MediaWiki which has been adapted so that you can manipulate a manuscript using Zoomify. They have changed the WYSIWYG editor so that the toolbar available while transcribing corresponds to the tagging they want users to use. Using a wiki gives them the basics of user accounts, versioning, and editing. They also use WordPress for the site about the project and they have added discussion forums to the MediaWiki. There is a nice feature Random Page that takes you directly to a random page in need of editing.

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism

Malcolm Gladwell has a nice essay in the New Yorker titled Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted (October 4, 2010.) He argues that social media are not well suited for sustained activism despite the stories told about Twitter and Tehran. He argues that activist movements tend to be discplined, strategic, hierarchical and built on strong ties. Social media, by contrast, support weak ties where lots of people do just a little (at no risk to themselves.) Social media are not likely to provide the strong social ties that gets people out to a sit-in. Social media don’t support the sort of strategic planning and hierarchical division of labor needed for activism. Finally, social media don’t support the discipline needed by, for example, non-violent tactics. You can’t train all your volunteers over Twitter. He concludes:

It (social media) makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.