Day: 7 August 2007

On Fake Steve and DRM and stuff like that

Remember Fake Steve? If you haven’t read his blog, it’s an absolute must. Sadly, it looks like he’s finally been outed. Hope he carries on regardless.

Makes you think that MSM has a chance of survival after all. Which is what I was thinking when I saw this article in Information Week. Cory Doctorow on How DRM becomes law. I wasn’t surprised that the article was written by Cory, he is his usual excellent and articulate self. What surprised me was that Information Week carried it. Not a place I would normally expect to see such stuff. How things change.

And talking about DRM, there’s a quiet little site called Life’s Not Read Only which is worth a look. Particularly the recent July update. Whoever Olivier is, I like the way he thinks. I may not agree with everything he says, but I do like the way he thinks.

Musings about social networks

Alan Patrick, in a comment on a recent post of mine, asks “JP, why do you think F/B communities will be any more likely to be see each other socially more than previous Social Nets?”. What I had said was the following:

[Facebook] is different from other cyber-communities in a very real way.

How come? My guess is that Facebook friends see each other a lot more often than was the case in other communities. It is rooted in physical relationship rather than just electronic. The interactions are therefore a lot richer.

Let me try and answer as best I can. The summarised answer is simple. Because things like LinkedIn and Plaxo were networks but not really social networks. At least that’s my contention. Talking about contention…..

At the outset, please recognise that there is no scientific basis for what I am saying, just some very unscientific observations. Call it a hunch if you will.

Observation 1: The world seemed to be divided into three groups of people. (a) Those who used stuff like Bebo and MySpace and Cyworld (b) Those who used stuff like Plaxo and LinkedIn and Xing (c) Those who did neither.

Observation 2: These three groups of people were mutually exclusive, often age-bound and displaying quite different “interaction” tendencies. The MySpace people interacted with each other regularly, often more than once a day. The LinkedIn people only got in touch with each other in time of need, usually job-related. And the Neither people kept themselves to themselves and didn’t approve of such goings-on anyway.

Observation 3:  You couldn’t really call things like LinkedIn “social networks”. Yes they were networks, but they weren’t “social”. There was something fundamentally different about the way people used MySpace or Bebo, in comparison to LinkedIn or Plaxo. Nobody in their right mind would call a Rolodex a social network. A collection of names and addresses, yes, but not much more. Very useful in keeping names and addresses and contact details up to date, but not much else. A heavy user of LinkedIn was probably called a “networker” and avoided like the plague by his friends. I’m sure you’ve been there.

Observation 4: When Facebook opened its doors to all and sundry, something strange happened. People who belonged to the LinkedIn group suddenly had somewhere to go. Somewhere “to be social”. The great coffee shop in the sky. Now the groups began to move around.
All this made me think. Why was Facebook different? The people that connected to me were different. LinkedIn was all professional, whereas Facebook was all and sundry. The e-mail content was different. LinkedIn was primarily three types of mail: Introductions, Looking for Work, Looking to Hire. A job market. Whereas Facebook was truly social. The richness of interactions was different. The number of interactions per day was different. There were times when I would not log on to LinkedIn for a few months, this never happened with Facebook.

I then looked deeper into my Facebook interactions, as well as those of people around me; my family, my co-workers, my friends, my community, whatever. It was then that I realised that the Facebook community was different, that Facebook people tended to connect with each other differently.

Facebook was, in effect, MySpace for the LinkedIn generation.

Now LinkedIn users seemed to be from a fairly narrow socio-economic grouping. Which would suggest that we’re also going to see a plethora of studies on the population of Facebook, deriving what could be startling socio-economic grouping and exclusion statistics. There is a birds-of-a-feather effect which, in its most extreme forms, will lead to tribalism. We need to watch this carefully. As an example, I would expect to see very high correlation between Netvibes  users and Facebook over-25 users.