Category: Four pillars

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.

I enjoyed reading this Smart Mobs story (incidentally by Judy Breck, someone whose books and blog I enjoy reading). An article written in South Africa, referring to an Indian paper, quoting an English agency, with a story datelined Los Angeles, about a barbershop in Austin, Texas.

Particularly since I’m Indian, I live in England, my last two family holidays were in California and in South Africa, and I was en route Austin, Texas when I read the article. And that’s where I am writing this.

James McGovern:

Did you know that there are more folks practicing Hinduism in Vatican City than there are folks in the Enterprise Content Management community that blog?

Great stuff from James. Turkeys, kitchens and Christmas.

There have been a lot of comments about Facebook in the blogosphere, and I think some people are missing the point.  For some reason, all the talk is about the applications.

It’s not about the applications. It’s about the people.

Facebook is first and foremost a collection of people, a community. Many communities. Yet one community. What the core platform and the applications do is to extend and enrich the ties within that community. Within those communities.

The applications are just things that attract the people and bind them together. The applications enrich the relationships, not the other way around.

We have to start thinking of Facebook not as a “social operating system” but as a society. One representation of society. And it’s 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.

And this phenomenon, of a physical community being extended and enriched by electronic ties, is something that is a lot closer to real life, be it at university, within a residential areas, amongst a group sharing a common hobby.

Or being at work.

I’m looking forward to seeing how we see two things develop within the Facebook environment. Collaborative filtering. And prediction markets. Now both of these are really Wisdom-of-crowds plays, and need market liquidity, a critical mass of active and passionate users. Which Facebook have got. In spades.

This line of thought has some interesting consequences. One of which is this:

The success or failure of Facebook will not be measured by a rise or collapse in the number of applications on the platform. For sure we will see the number of applications rise. And crash. And consolidate. And when they consolidate, the final “stable” number may well be measured in the low thousands, because these apps will represent a long tail of usage. Amongst a couple of hundred million participants, this is to be expected.

So expect the doomsayers. The doomsayers who will look at a collapse in the rate of apps getting on the platform and claim it is the end of Facebook. The same effect will be seen in Groups. And whatever else.

It’s not about any of these things. It’s about the people.

The metrics that will continue to matter are: How much time does a Facebook participant stay online every day? What is the Just Joined rate? What is the Gone Dormant rate? How many groups does an average participant belong to?

Applications are important. The platform’s “openness” to new and changing applications is important. But let’s not make the same mistake that the IT profession has been making for decades. It’s not about the apps, it’s about the people.

Facebook is a community of people. All dressed up with everywhere to go. The world is their oyster. Or maybe I should now be saying “worlds are their oysters”…..

If you haven’t seen it already, it’s worth taking a look at this Maplecroft map of digital inclusion. Just for the fun of it, choose the indebtedness option (choose Debt under Maps Alphabetically on the upper left hand side). Isn’t it amazing that there is so much correlation between “extreme”  indebtedness and high digital inclusion? Then choose the corruption option (choose Corruption and Transparency under Maps Alphabetically). By now you should not be surprised at the high correlation between extreme corruption and low digital inclusion.

Maybe it’s just my perverse way of looking at things.

My thanks to Smart Mobs for the pointer to the article. Always a site worth visiting.