Author: JP

Why I still use Facebook, and other musings on social networks

I am sometimes bemused by life. Confused even.

Over the last few months it has become ever more fashionable to bash social networks in general, and Facebook in particular; the king is dead, long live the new king, blah blah. Just a few months ago, you couldn’t walk around without bumping into a Facebook conference, you couldn’t read around without bumping into a Facebook article, you couldn’t talk around without bumping into a Facebook conversation.

Such is life. I haven’t stopped using Facebook during all that; I haven’t stopped wanting to build a Facebook for the Enterprise, creating a Behind-The-Firewall set of functions and utilities that can extend Facebook functionality while coexisting with Facebook. And, as far as I can see, there are 60 million other people who haven’t stopped using it. People who largely don’t know any of the critics, people who have been using Facebook since it began. People like my daughter. She doesn’t know about much of the kerfuffle, and doesn’t care.

I can understand her.

You see, I didn’t use Facebook to be cool, to have something to say, to have something to blog about. I went into Facebook because I saw a set of utilities that would help me in my quest for Four Pillars in the Enterprise: Search, Syndication, Fulfilment and Conversation.

So when I saw the wave of pushback against Facebook, I had to ask myself why I continued to use it. And think hard about my answer. And it taught me something about how I felt about social networks. Which is this:

The information that flows through a social network exists in three dimensions. One dimension is time, past, present and future. A second dimension is number, one to many. A third is movement, static to dynamic. When I share my contact details with another person, I am providing static, present, one-to-one information.  When I share what I am intending to do with a whole community, I am providing dynamic, future, one-to-many information.

The motivation to provide information is, at least in part, driven by an expected value of the information coming out of Facebook. And one other thing: the comfort level of providing, to a community, what is essentially private information.

Generation M and their successors are comfortable with sharing their past actions, current state and their future intentions with the community they belong to; they’re comfortable with sharing changes to states and intentions as well. They do this because they believe new value will emerge from that sharing. Collaborative, communal value, shared value.

So why do I use continue to use Facebook?

It’s simple. Because it continues to give me more than the value I used to get from it. Because it continues to give me more than the value I expected when I started using it. Because I can see a way of deriving even more value from it. Particularly as I learn to use tools that augment the Facebook experience, tools like Twitter and Dopplr and even WordPress.

Nothing changed for me. Or my daughter. Or her friends.

That’s all.

I’m a Believer: Musings about cricket on the eve of the 3rd Test in Perth

…..Now I’m a believer

Not a trace

Of doubt

In my mind

I’m in love

I’m a believer

 

I’m a Believer. I love that song. Written by Neil Diamond (one of my favourite singer-songwriters, however unfashionable that statement may be) … I hope to see him live this summer, although it won’t rank with seeing Winwood and Clapton play together in New York next month (possibly for the first time since Blind Faith, I can’t remember another instance offhand). Performed by the Monkees.

I’m a believer. A song that got to Number 1 on 31st December 1966, and stayed there for seven weeks.

31st December 1966. The day I watched my first-ever day of Test cricket, and became a Believer. A Believer in the game of cricket.

I’m a Believer. And I’ve been a Believer from that day, even though my first taste of cricket was unusual, to say the least.

 

Let me start at the beginning. It was 30th December 1966, and my father offered to take me to the “net practice day” at Eden Gardens in Calcutta, the oldest cricket ground in India, and, in my opinion, the most beautiful in the world. But then I’m biased.

The West Indies were touring India, and the Second Test was due to start the next day, New Year’s Eve. And I’d never ever watched even a minute of cricket, so I jumped at the chance. I was a little over 9 years old.

It was a special day. I’d wanted to go to a test match for many years, and even though I was just being offered a “nets” day, that was special for me. To get the chance to see the magnificence of Sobers, the flair of Pataudi, the style of Kanhai, the menace of Hall and Griffith. The debut of Bishen Bedi, and the second-ever Test of Clive Lloyd (who’d just scored 160 runs while getting out only once in his previous Test).

It was a magic morning. And on the way back, I watched my father get lathi-charged. For some reason the crowd stampeded on the way back, and policemen on horseback decided to get us sorted out; which meant charging us while on horseback and wielding their thick batons (called lathis) while doing it. My father was hurt, albeit not very badly, we were tumbled into a ditch, and I was upset. I’d never seen anything like it, and it somehow took the gloss off what had been a fantastic day.

Sometimes clouds do have silver linings. In order to make up for the lathi-charge, my father offered to take me to the 1st day’s play. I went. And I was hooked. I became a lifelong lover of cricket.

This, despite what happened. On that day, 31st December, sometime in the afternoon, there was a riot at Eden Gardens. [Rumours abounded about the root cause, ranging from disputed umpiring decisions through to duels of honour, but I believe the reality was much more mundane: counterfeit tickets leading to overcrowding]. What is certain is that there was a riot. Which meant the usual thing. Chairs ripped up, bonfires made, stadium set on fire. I was forced to climb to the highest part of the stadium, away from the fire, and cajoled to jump into my father’s waiting arms at ground level. I have no idea of the height I jumped from, it felt like 40 feet, was probably half that.

The next day, New Year’s Day, the newspaper headlines read “Hell At Eden”. That I remember. So. Let me summarise:

My first experience of watching Test cricket was preceded by a lathi-charge; my first day of Test cricket was punctuated by a riot and the stadium was set on fire; I then had to jump a zillion feet and hope that my dad caught me; by then he wasn’t the world’s most athletic dad.

Oh yes, and the cricket. I was watching the world’s greatest player at the time, Gary Sobers, the world’s fastest bowlers, Hall and Griffiths, and the world’s suavest captain, The Nawab of Pataudi.

And India lost. Badly. An innings defeat. This, despite losing a day’s play to the aftermath of the riot.

That was my baptism into Test cricket. And it was going to be a long time before I saw India actually win a Test. But I loved my first taste of the game, and haven’t stopped loving it since. I wake up at strange times to listen to commentary, to watch it on television, even to “watch” the scores change on the web. In the past, I’ve even been known to “watch” the game on teletext!

I will go into watching the Third Test at Perth with the same fervour. Despite everything that has gone on in the Second Test. I hope that India does well. But.

This time around, I no longer really care who wins. As long as cricket wins.

That’s important. Cricket must win. So that there are more generations of Believers.

 

Digital Dunbar Numbers: An apology

Thank you very much for all your comments and queries. I realise from reading the comments that I haven’t been able to articulate the fundamental reason for my even beginning to look at this area.

And that is this:

The original Dunbar number was based on some understanding of the relationship between neocortical volume and group size for nonhuman primates.

Humans seemed to scale differently, and research suggested that from a group size viewpoint, the root cause for this difference was language.

The move from oral to written communication is also meant to have aided this process, as man learnt to store and retrieve observations and learnings about the group.

My contention is that anything that aids and improves group communications may also have the effect of raising the “theoretical” maximum for the size of group.

Maybe what I’m saying is that the Dunbar number is a constant, yes, but only in the context of a specific class of primates, a specific set of languages and linguistic abilities, and a specific set of communications processes and technologies.

Can you feel it coming?

Apologies to Phil Collins, and heartfelt thanks to LaughingSquid, someone I now read regularly.

We’re at the edge of the traditional mid-January reality-distortion field, traditional because it happens before every Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld. Not that Mr Jobs needs any help, but the distortion tends to be amplified by the rumour mill that precedes the event. This year, it’s been dominated by questions of what the “something in the air” could be.

Some of you may have felt that Fake Steve has the answer, with live blogging of his own speech. But, this time around, I think the prize goes to LaughingSquid for his predictions on the Flying Mac, and for the illustration below:

flying-macbook-pros

The heisenblag principle

An update on the recent xkcd.com cartoon, which I blogged about earlier today. As FND reminded me, and as reported here and earlier here, its very existence changed the context of the numbers it represented. Given it was Randall Munroe, I guess we should call that the Heisenblag Principle.