Category: social software

On Facebook, identity, and control

,or, The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Identity

I am a little late on this topic, but feel it is important to add my 2 cents. Fred and Terrell have already laid the groundwork for what I am going to say by focusing the conversation away from privacy to identity. While much of this repeats what they have already said, I believe my point is a little different. This post will first examine what could have been done differently and then look at the underlying causes of this issue. Lastly, I will examine what this experience teaches us about how we should implement Library 2.0 services.

It has been interesting to see students’ reactions to the “new” Facebook. It appears to me that Facebook’s biggest mistake was rolling it out as an automatic opt-in feature. Chances are that if they quietly added it in the background, it would have spread virally without a peep.

For example, lets say Facebook added a little link somewhere on the page that says, “Want to make it easier for your friends to stay updated on what you are doing, try the new Facebook feeds?” A few students would notice this and think, “Cool now I can use this new feature that no one else knows about.” When one of their friends visited their page next, they would see the feeds complete with the notification that their friend had begun using the feeds. In this way most students would have first been introduced to the service by invading their friend’s privacy and not their friends invading theirs.

The final ingredient for a successful implementation strategy would have been to give students control over what aspects of their Facebook lives they want to share through the feeds. By turning all the feeds on automatically, students were shocked to see something they thought was private broadcast to their networks. For example, many students might be glad to share new groups they joined or friends they have made, but some students might not want all of their comments immediately apparent. To summarize:

  1. Bait early-adopters. There were students waiting for this to happen who would have chosen to turn the feature on immediately and then pressured their friends to do so.
  2. Let students choose to turn the service on based off their experiences with the profiles of early-adopters.
  3. Let students choose what aspects of their life they want to highlight and which they would rather slide under the radar.

This brings us back to the title of this post. When it comes to our identities, we like having control over how we present ourselves to the world. That is one of the reasons that social networking sites are so useful to college students. It is a way to mold your identity so that you can determine who your friends are to be. Social networking profiles and interactions present us as we wish to be seen. Given this, students were using Facebook to present different versions of themselves to different friends. When this illusion was broken, they in effect lost control of their identities. I would thus argue that the underlying concern of most students is not a loss of their privacy, but a loss of their identity. Students don’t mind sharing their personal information with the world, but want to have control over when and how it is shared.

However, if this experience gets students to think more about how they present themselves in their virtual communities, it is a good thing. So far, this experience seems to have done more to drill home the reality of online life than either university instruction or the press.


So what does this mean for Library 2.0?

First, we might want to change Rory Litwin’s primary problem of Library 2.0 from privacy to identity. This might be a better way to explain these principles to a group of students who are accustomed to sharing their data. Privacy is how we think of these issues, but is it how our users think of them?

Second, we can use this as a guiding principle when developing Library 2.0 systems. What people are researching and reading for pleasure presents a remarkable amount about their identity. We need to design systems that allow users to have control over how they present their identity. If a user wants to appear as though they read Joyce and not Grisham, then we need to allow them this choice. We also need to create ways that users can mask their identities or create multiple identities. For example, this blog is a central part of my professional identity and my MySpace account is a central part of my (online) social identity. While I have chosen to attach my real name to both, it is comforting to know that I could have chosen to present one or the other anonymously.

Third, it shows that we have a long way to go in integrating content creation skills into our information literacy programs. However, we now have an excellent example to use when discussing responsible content creation. In my previous response to Rory’s privacy post, I highlighted three information literacy skills that I felt we needed to teach as a result of an increasingly read/write world. Given this movement in understanding from privacy to identity, the three skills we need to teach would now be:

  1. Identity
  2. Ownership
  3. Security

To gain a further understanding of why I feel these are the three primary principles, I encourage you to read my original response to Rory.

Technorati tags: facebook identity privacy socialnetworking web20 library20

Notes from BarCampRdu,Part 3, Social networking, Social browsing, and Microformats

For sessions 3 and 4, I attended sessions focusing on social software. From the wiki, session 3 was:

Social Networks – Fred Stutzman. We’ll spend a session talking about Social Networking Websites, such as Myspace, Facebook and Linked In. We’ll look at them, figure out why people use them, and share ideas about how businesses can leverage social networks.

It was attended by what seemed like half campers. Unfortunately, I didn’t really take very many notes during Fred’s session because I was already familiar with his main ideas. There are three main aspects of his thought that he discussed:

  1. His Facebook research (It really is fascinating)
  2. Situational Relevance:
    Situational Relevance in Social Networking Website
    Situational Relevance and Facebook’s Summer Traffic
  3. The Network Effect Multiplier, or, Metcalfe’s Flaw

Most of the discussion focused on situational relevance and the network effect multiplier. to get a good idea of the discussion, you might want to check out the discussion on those posts. I would also encourage you to check out my recent responses to Fred’s thought:

Session 4 was on social bookmarking and was moderated by Chris Messina.Chris got the discussion rolling with by explaining his idea of the future of web browsing and his original vision for Flock. He also made arguments for why the future of browsing is currently being developed with Webkit applications.

However, the discussion quickly turned to a discussion of microformats. Fred Stutzman and Terrell Russell or ClaimID (identity management) discussed their implementation of OpenID (universal distributed url login). hCards (like vCards) were also discussed. I had not really understood the idea of XFN before the discussion.

XFN is a simply way to define relationships between people. For example, this is implemented in WordPress when one adds a friend. A typical blogroll implementing XFN could look like this:

<a xhref="http://jane-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://jane-blog.example.org/" rel="sweetheart date met">Jane</a> <a xhref="http://dave-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://dave-blog.example.org/" rel="friend met">Dave</a> <a xhref="http://darryl-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://darryl-blog.example.org/" rel="friend met">Darryl</a> <a xhref="http://www.metafilter.com/" mce_href="http://www.metafilter.com/" >MetaFilter</a> <a xhref="http://james-blog.example.com/" mce_href="http://james-blog.example.com/" rel="met">James Expert</a>

(example from XFN: Introduction and Examples)

It seems like a pretty straightforward evolution of social interaction through the web. It made me wonder why Facebook doesn’t implement this with all of the relationship data they hold. While it might be of limited value in their closed network, the future will (hopefully) allow exporting of data.

We discussed how all of these standards ought to interact in the future. If relationships and identity information were stored as microformats on an OpenID enabled server, it would become possible to export data from your OpenID server to a new service. This advance would make navigating between multiple social applications easier. It would also prevent the need to disclose uneccessary amounts of personal information by uploading ones address book to a new service. This move would both empower the user to take more control of their privacy while automating the more painful parts of joining a new network. My notes for this discussion read:

XFN + OpenID = portable network
XFN + hCard + Jabber + OpenID = ad hoc (open standards) social networks

These formulae certainly stay true to what Chris Messina began by describing as an “Architecture for Collaboration”.

I believe that we closed with a discussion of the privacy implications related to social browsing and microformats.

Technorati tags: barcamprdu microformats

On libraries and social bookmarking sites

Amanda at blogwithoutalibrary.net has posted about libraries using del.icio.us. I have been thinking about this a lot recently and am now going to share some of the random thoughts I have been having.

I am surprised more libraries aren’t integrating social bookmarking into their websites. I wonder how many have opened accounts to their patrons? How many allow patron tagging? Do any libraries offer classes in how to use social bookmarking applications? Is there anyway libraries could get their patrons working together to rank and order bookmarks related to local interests? Maybe a library could work with local newspapers to develop such a system. Maybe a library could work with local schools to help students collaborate on research projects using social bookmarking applications. I wonder if any teachers or school librarians have experimented with anything like this.

It is cool that San Matteo uses Dewey, but isn’t that making a simple concept overly complicated? Dewey was designed for classification of physical objects where each item could only be located in one spot. Tagging allows digital objects to exist in many places at once.

I need to look more closely at what libraries are already doing with social bookmarking sites. I also need to look more closely at what libraries are doing with Flickr and social photosharing sites. I will share more ideas on this later.

Social networking site usage: An explanation for Facebook

Social Networking Traffic Chart Fred Wilson created this chart to display the traffic of some of the major social networking sites. Fred Stutzman has posted an argument as to why the Facebook numbers might be misleading. While I am not sure I agree fully with Fred’s explanation, I agree with him that Facebook has a winning model.

The chart shows increase in users. MySpace has shown a dramatic increase in users. However, its general nature makes it hard to determine whether users will be loyal, or if they will turn to the next big thing. On the other hand, Facebook has one primary audience, college students, and a number of secondary audiences, everyone else. As Fred’s research and theories demonstrate, Facebook is an extremely valuable tool for college students. His data shows that in both 2005 and 2006, virtually 100% of UNC-Chapel Hill freshman chose to participate in the Facebook. Furthermore, there is plenty of reason to believe that this is not unique to UNC. This would mean that the Facebook has already maxed out on new users in their primary target market. While this might impede growth at the rate MySpace has shown, this is excellent as it means that Facebook cycles through new primary user groups every four years. Furthermore, given their complete market dominance over college students, it would be very difficult for a competitor to take take their primary business away.

The one place that I feel Facebook is vulnerable to competition is on the Academic side of their services. If course management software either integrated better with how students study and work, or integrated better with other datasets and resources on campus, then students would come to rely on them more. I will be discussing this idea further in my Master’s paper.

technorati tags: facebook myspace social networking

Comments on “The Network Effect Multiplier, or, Metcalfe’s Flaw”

Yesterday Fred Stutzman posted about a social networking theory that he is developing. I am just going to address the central theory and then outline a couple of ideas that came to mind while reading.

Therefore, the fundamental flaw in applying Metcalfe to social technology is its inherent lack of nuance and granularity. When people join the network, they are given more options than simply connecting; the network is worth the sum of associations and actions that are allowed in the network. We must instead think of network value in terms of a network effect multiplier, as the actual value a network adds to an application is under the direct control of the application designers.

The above paragraph introduces Fred’s theory. Essentially, Metcalfe’s law applied wonderfully for binary networks, but fails to take into account the multifaceted nature of modern social networks. One of the examples Fred uses is MySpace. He points out that value is not limited to how many connections a user has but is also enhanced by the various types of interactions and actions enabled by the system.

Lately I have spent time in MySpace connecting with old friends. In so doing, I have come to appreciate the customization of MySpace over sites such as Friendster and Facebook. While this customization leads to much bad design, it also enables users to add third party flash widgets to their profiles. By adding third party services, a user can in effect build in value beyond what the sites designers intended. For example, the new service txtdrop.com allows users to build text messaging capability into their MySpace profiles. In fact, this ability to mashup applications and services is one of the key features of Web 2.0. If mashups continue to be the norm and social networking sites such as MySpace begin to offer open API’s , then any new participant could bring in or develop third party value beyond the control of the designers.

Fred’s piece also made me think of other types of networks such as Wikipedia. A user’s contribution to this service can be measured in intellectual contributions as well as through interactions and actions. I really don’t have any conclusions as to how Fred’s theory applies to these networks, but am interested to see how he applies or expands his theory accordingly.

I was also thinking about how different users of web networks often have different capabilities from one another according to their administrative privileges or user type. Might it be possible to apply Fred’s theory to how many or how few privileges users should receive?

Lastly, I though of the “paradox of choice“. At what point do added features or interactivity begin to detract from the value of a network by overwhelming the users? What is the proper balance between the number of users and the complexity of the service they are participating in? I wonder if these extremes are inversely proportional so that a massive network like MySpace could be clogged if it had both too many features and too many users, but a small network of experts might benefit from a highly complex feature set. Fred’s theory might be a good starting place to explore these questions.

I am now going to read over Fred’s theory a few more times to make sure my comments are on track. If not, these are still ideas inspired by his paper.

Technorati tags: web2.0 socialnetworking networks networktheory