Collab-Or-Ate

The general upset about Google Buzz is interesting to me. One of the objections I’ve read is that email is always private and status messages are always public and never the two shall meet. It is wrong to mix these two types of communication.

What I find really interesting about this argument is that there are no fundamental truths about how online communication must happen. Why is email private? Because it has been since the 70’s? Why are status message public? Because that is twitter’s default setting? Status messages can be private (e.g. protected tweets) and emails could be public (maybe that’s what blogs are). These private/public distinctions are pretty arbitrary in my mind. Sure, I assume that the email I send today is private because that is how my email software behaves today, but I can imagine email environments that don’t operate this way.

Google also has enough market share and influence that the way they design their applications can fundamentally change how we think about email and status messages. If Buzz takes off, we may look back a few years from now and have trouble remembering that there used to be a clear distinction between emails and status messages. It is all just communication with our network after all.

Since I know my blog readers are sophisticated social media users and don’t need advice on this topic, this is only of marginal interest, but I’m quoted in this article on How to Decline Facebook Friends Without Offence.

Due to the arrival of a certain Baby DiMicco on Oct 6th, I now only get things done if they take me less than 5 minutes to complete. During one of my five minutes today I was able to skim the Most Emailed Stories on the NYTimes, and now I’m trying to use another one of my five minutes to share the links with you. We will see how long this takes me to write!

• 5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook Impression management guide for Facebook hits the NYTimes. “When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we’ve got a problem.” Uh, yes! Glad this is now considered a mainstream problem.
  
  
• Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers Consumers = Producers! Of the next feature set! This is also not news for a Twitter user, but I like it.
  
  
• And since I still have a few minutes, apparently, here’s some self-promotion: I was interviewed by the Financial Times about Beehive (now called “Social Blue”) and the podcast is available. On the Financial Times’ podcast page, it is the Oct 20th podcast.

The WSJ article “Genes and the Friends you Make” reports that genetics play a factor in the structure of your social network, specifically the in-degree, transitivity, and the centrality of your network:

The scientists looked at how many students in the longitudinal study named a given student as a friend, which it termed “in-degree” affinity; how many students a given student named as friends (out-degree affinity); what the odds were of a given student’s friends knowing each other (transitivity); and how central or peripheral to a network a given student might be (centrality).

The researchers found that in-degree, transitivity and centrality are “significantly heritable.” This means that your genetic background may help determine not only how many people count you as a friend, but also how many of your friends are friends among themselves. This sheds light on the kind of social network you inhabit, and whether your presence is central to it, or not.

There are related studies that find that levels of innovation, obesity, smoking and depression can be linked to who you are friends with. If we break apart the causal link between genetics and innovation/obesity/smoking/depression research outcomes, we might find that it isn’t your genes, but rather your genetically pre-determined set of friends that are influencing the course of your life. Better break the genetic determinism by stepping up that Facebook friending!

Glad to hear at least one company that doesn’t make money yet is able to get venture funding! Twitter, which turned down an offer from Facebook, is getting more venture funding, according to this Washington Post article. The article is little more than a rumor, but interesting. Apparently, Twitter has passed Digg in number of weekly visits.

I maintain that because Twitter’s earliest adopters were adults, not teenagers or college kids, it is in a much better position to find a profitable business model compared to other social network services. Not only are Twitter’s core users in the business of web 2.0, they are using Twitter to support their work. It is only a matter of time before Twitter figures out how to make money off of that.

While off in our ivory tower this week, we missed the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Some interesting stories that came out of it:

• Ross Mayfield says SocialText will be a better sell in this economy than IBM and Microsoft’s solutions because SocialText is cheaper. I don’t know the prices, but this sounds pretty logical.
• Facebook and Twitter don’t plan to become profitable any time soon. I think this is a good sign that the fun isn’t over yet.
• LinkedIn has released some “all work, no play” applications. Will be very interesting to see where this takes LinkedIn.

Last weekend, NPR’s On the Media had a story called “Reading Between the Lines” on CNN’s squiggly lines that run underneath the debating presidential candidates. The movement of the lines are driven by knobs turned by uncommitted Ohio voters, sitting in CNN’s studio during the debate.

As you watch the debates, even though CNN has told you that these uncommitted Ohioans are not a statistically representative sample, you are influenced by their knob turning. Just like you can be influenced by your friends’ laughter and comments in a face-to-face group setting, as you watch those lines moving up and down, you are convinced that McCain is angry and Obama is presidential. There is lots of experimental evidence of this from previous elections (read the OTM transcript).

My PhD thesis focused on this exact issue: real-time visualizations of social behavior and how this information changes the dynamics and your perceptions of an interaction. For my project, Second Messenger, I focused on small, face-to-face groups receiving feedback about their group dynamics, but the phenomenon is universal and extends beyond social visualization. Behavioral economists refer to it as framing.

Besides being interesting to think about, it is important to consider the influence of the squiggly lines. First, CNN should be aware of its power to influence viewers. Second, viewers should be aware that their attitudes can be manipulated by this relatively simple and unrepresentative data point. They discussed this a bit on OTM:

BOB GARFIELD (interviewer): We have established that the squiggly lines do not represent any statistically significant data. And … we’ve established that people are influenced by the squiggly lines. Does that not mean that it is journalistically irresponsible to put them on the TV? I mean, is CNN doing the right thing in adding this feature to its coverage?

SAM SCHECHNER: We’re social animals. We process information in the context of the people around us. We do watch our debates with friends or at a bar or in some sort of group environment, frequently, in part because we want to hear the reactions of other people. That’s in part why … you and I can’t stop looking at that CNN line on the bottom of the screen.

I think it’s hard to argue, necessarily, that it’s a bad thing. In fact, the people who do it – the professors at SMU – see it as a way of shifting some of the balance of influence from pundits, who have been shown to be able to have a pretty strong effect with their pre- and post-debate spin and how they set expectations and frame the debates to actual voters.

I’m not sure I agree that uncommitted Ohio voters are the antidote to polarizing pundits, but something to think about.

More information on the report:

WSJ, 10/10/08: “When Your Political Opinion Isn’t Yours Alone” Broadcasts of Political Debates That Include Live Audience Feedback Can Influence What You’re Thinking

More on my research:

Joan Morris DiMicco, Kate J Hollenbach, Anna Pandolfo, Walter Bender. (2007) “The Impact of Increased Awareness while Face-to-Face.” Special Issue on Awareness Systems Design, Human-Computer Interaction. Volume 22 (2007), Number 1.

The NYTimes has an interesting article about the promotion side of invention: If No One Sees It, Is It an Invention?. It is the story of Johnny Chung Lee, an HCI PhD student at CMU, who posted his research ideas on YouTube. If Lee had only pursued the traditional avenue of sharing his HCI inventions by publishing and presenting at CHI, the premier HCI conference, he would not have had nearly the impact. For example, Bill Gates probably wouldn’t know his name.

If you create the coolest widget, it can’t have impact unless people see it, use it, experience it. I guess that is basically Marketing 1.0. But something computer scientists aren’t always so savvy to.

Ok, time to go review CHI papers for publication. It would be so much more fun to be reviewing YouTube videos…

Last week, Irene Greif (the head of CUE, the group I work in) announced that IBM is opening new Center for Social Software in Cambridge, MA. There is some press about it here and here.

The focus of the center will be on a style of research we are calling “Venture Research.”

Venture Research can be distinguished from other types of technology research by two major features. First, a venture project involves a large-scale deployment of a research project “in the wild,” for example, on the web. Typically the reason for doing a deployment to a large population is to test hypotheses about interactions between thousands of people and to allow for appropriation of the technology for unanticipated purposes.

Second, at a practical level, recruiting thousands of participants for a project means that the venture project’s application must provide a tangible value to its users. As a result, they are typically long-lasting projects and users often expect that the services will be available consistently and indefinitely. This is where the practical funding issues arise. While you can build a Web 2.0 app relatively quickly, maintaining a community of thousands, over extended periods of time takes funding that is separate and on top of base funding that supported the initial research idea’s formulation. In this way, the projects require funding more akin to venture capital — high risk, but high reward.

The reason IBM is interested in doing this style of research is that we see this scale of user interaction more the norm than the exception. As IBM is in the business of building solutions for companies, the new Center’s intention is to lead the field towards understanding how companies will communicate, interact, collaborate, and exchange at these scales of interaction.

• You can guess I subscribe to the WSJ because half the news on this blog is from there. Apparently this week they launched “some new nifty features for business owners to connect in the Web 2.0 world.” (WSJ blog post.) Using the word “nifty” does not help build the case that they know what they are talking about. ComputerWorld has a very nice summary of why they went about it all wrong: Amid market meltdown, Wall Street Journal goes Web 2.0. I will continue to go old-school and read the print edition.




• A few months ago, there were lots of articles about how company recruiters check out the Facebook profiles of job applicants. This week it is reported that college admissions offices are doing the same. According to the WSJ, “A new survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social-networking sites to evaluate applicants. Of those colleges making use of the online information, 38% said that what they saw ‘negatively affected’ their views of the applicant.”

  This is no joke: Identity management needs to be taught early and often!




• Did you hear, Google is moving into nation building? Literally, building their own nation, in the ocean! The Register reports on a patent application filed by Google: “The search giant, cum world power, seeks exclusive rights to what it calls a ‘water-based data center’. “This modular collection of processing, storage, and network resources would sit on a ship anchored somewhere offshore, using the crashing waves for both power and cooling.”




• And most amusing of all, Microsoft launched and then pulled an oddly unfunny ad campaign. The story is here, but it is much better to watch the ad. To recover from your confusion, watch the free pizza and I banish you Mac ads. If you are part of the Steve Jobs cult, you’ll also enjoy this ad shown at the WWDC 2007.

I was reading How to Create a Successful Web Site For Nothing (or Almost Nothing) in today’s WSJ, and my jaw dropped at this paragraph:

There’s one more free and easy way to improve the design of your site — using HTML programming code. Fortunately, you don’t need to have programming skills to use HTML. All you need to know is that a block of HTML — essentially, a bunch of gobbledygook words and symbols — can add extra features to your site.

I guess they didn’t have room for the 3 sentences it would take to explain what HTML is, but dismissing it as “gobbledygook” seems a little extreme. The section in the article about how to get your website found by search engines was actually kind of useful. No gobbledygook required.

Last week there was an interesting article on CNET about Why Facebook left ‘Scrabulous’ alone that comments on Hasbro filing a copyright and trademark infringement claim against the creators of Facebook’s Scrabulous.

The CNET article points out that “Facebook’s insistence on being a ‘neutral platform provider’ in the situation” is a little odd, “because, to state the matter bluntly, it isn’t.”

“[Facebook] has a history of tightly policing activity on its developer platform, banning “Secret Crush” over a spyware claim, locking down applications believed to be spamming users, and occasionally raising developer ire with some of its more stringent regulations. The site even temporarily blocked Top Friends, a creation of widget powerhouse Slide, when a security hole was discovered…

“Facebook wanted to keep Scrabulous around. In claiming a ‘neutral’ stance, the company was actually taking the activist route.”

So it makes me wonder, is it possible for a community site or social network site to remain neutral about its content? When you build a site, and especially when you are also studying the behavior of the users of the site, you do not want to be the police, monitoring and deleting content deemed inappropriate. But, as this situation on Facebook reveals, by doing nothing, you can’t claim neutrality because you are implicitly endorsing the content. It could be argued that it is only because Facebook removed some content that they can’t claim neutrality. But what if they did nothing about illegal content such as child pornography? Do they need to comply with laws? Copyright laws? If yes, then that means they have to be the police, a role no web2.0 community developer wants. It is a tough situation.

Luis Suarez, an IBM employee and one of our earliest and most enthusiastic Beehive users, has an article in the New York Times this week where he shares his amazing story: I freed myself from email’s grip. Luis has replaced his regular use of business email with phone calls, instant messaging, his wikis, his blog, and Beehive. There an interesting set of comments in response to his article on Lifehacker.

It is exciting that Luis sees our social network site Beehive as part of his set of critical business communication tools. Part of his reason for this is that Beehive is a public forum where he can answer things once, rather than many individual times.

My primary hypothesis as to why Luis and other employees are excited about checking their Beehive profile page and dread their email inboxes is that while the email inbox is one huge, enormous, always-growing to-do list, a social networking site is by definition social and there is a much lower level of obligation to reply or do anything in response to messages on the site. In many cases, there is no expectation to reply to that “friend request” or that friendly comment on your family photo. You are free to enjoy the environment and contribute content and comments when the mood strikes, and that is it. Who wouldn’t want to hang out there, as compared to within their piles of email?

If someone asks you something within Beehive that is 100% about work, it is similar to when a colleague asks you about the project while you are on your way to get coffee. You are available and willing to hear the question. You can defer the question or even ignore it, but in all likelihood your colleague is likely to get a response from you because you are in a context of being social, open and friendly.

So, can, should, or will social networking sites replace email? They can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t because they aren’t task-oriented inboxes. Employees crave an obligation-free communication environment, which is why they flock (buzz) to Beehive. And while they are there, sharing with each other, there many instances where the topics turn to business and real work gets done. But if social networking sites replace email, they wouldn’t be any fun any more!

With the election season is in full swing, I’m reminded of this interesting experiment run by Bailenson, et al, at Stanford just before the 2004 presidential election:

One week before the 2004 presidential election, participants completed a survey of their attitudes concerning George Bush and John Kerry while viewing photographs of both candidates side by side (See Figure 1). For a random one-third of the subjects, their own faces were morphed with Kerry while unfamiliar faces were morphed with Bush. For a different one-third, their own faces were morphed with Bush while unfamiliar faces were morphed with Kerry. The remaining one-third of the sample viewed un-morphed pictures of the candidates.

Post-experiment interviews demonstrated that not a single person detected that his or her image had been morphed into the photograph of the candidate. Participants were more likely to vote for the candidate morphed with their own face than the candidate morphed with an unfamiliar face. The effects of facial identity capture on candidate support were concentrated among weak partisans and independents; for ‘card carrying’ members of the Democratic and Republican parties, the manipulation made little difference. [more]

We have more affinity for people we perceive to be more like us and subtle changes to a person’s picture have the power to make us like someone more or less. So be a critical consumer of not just the words but also the images of the candidates! Resist the temptation to vote based on gut feelings about affinity and similarity, because these factors can be easily manipulated.

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