Understanding Social

Facebook Connect - Old and new!

Facebook Connect has recently been launched - this allows you to socially enable a website by creating a Facebook login on external sites that allows a website to leverage the social graph on Facebook. In fact this is nothing new.

As one of our experiments, we created Friendvox - which got lots of blog coverage (http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/10/02/friendvox-brings-im-to-facebook/) - as an IM for Facebook. In fact, we did this 9 months ago as you can see from the Techcrunch article! You can get to friendvox by going to http://www.friendvox.com/friendvox.

This is an Instant Messenger for Facebook that works completely outside Facebook. Just click the blue button and login using your Facebook credentials, and off you go. As you login, you can see all your friends and start a conversation with them if they are online, and send them a message if they are not (to join Friendvox and start chating). As a website owner you can show the logging in user the interest data of their friends, hence you can make the experience…on your own website…much more social

To demonstrate this, we added Top Movies, Top Music, Top Books, Top TV - this just goes through your friends interests and looks at what’s most popular.

I think that Facebook branding this is excellent - we’ve discussed this with lots of clients and traditional agencies and only a few have understood it. This branding and positioning could help explain things in ultra simple terms.

For us it’s simple though -

1. Why bother basing your marketing metrics on single user acquisition and CPA - when you can talk about acquiring whole communities in one go, by providing something that when a person logs into a “socially enabled” website using Friend Connect, they will want to share/engage and collaborate with their friends.

2. Increase conversion to registration by doing away with asking any questions apart from a login - a Facebook login.

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iPhone kicks off the Tactile Web in earnest

The iPhone has not only brought the web to mobile devices, it has heralded the Tactile Web as I like to refer to it. That is, finally people are “touching” and “moving” as part of the interface to the web to communicate, collaborate and interact with other people.

If anyone has seen the light saber or Carlsberg pint apps for the iPhone and waved the iPhone around at their friends would testify, this creates quite a viral effect that you can observe as you see people shake their iPhones at people doing the “iPhone shuffle”.

Expect these asynchronous and unconnected uses to be combined with synchronous and connected activity, where people will be using their iPhones to interact with other people in a social and human manner. I can imagine a light saber fight against my friend being replayed with avatars on a website - the iPhones linking up and relaying movement data that maps against someone. The iPhone is a connected Wii controller - I would expect Wii may add a phone to its controller to give the iPhone some competition.

Expect to see tactile web apps (not just for the iPhone) that add gestures to its interface. Currently Apple have the dominance and vision here with gestures on the latest MacBooks and iPhone, but expect this with Android and future laptops, combined with gesture standards starting to emerge.

To me this combination of touch is the next extension of web 2.0, augmenting its social nature and taking it to the next level. I’m really excited, and can’t wait to see what rubbish the “traditional” thinking advertising agencies come up with.

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Facebook, Bebo or MySpace? While platform is right for you?

There are three main social platforms available to developers: Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. But choosing the one right for you can be a bit difficult unless you spend hours doing the necessary research. I’ve compiled this quick and detailed comparison of the three platforms so you can make a decision quicker.

Facebook and Bebo’s developer platforms are essentially the same as Facebook helped Bebo develop their platform. The MySpace Developer Platform (or MDP) utilizes Google’s OpenSocial technology, and differs greatly compared to Facebook and Bebo. Of the three platforms, Facebook is most certainly the superior option offering many more features than the others and much better supported.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Here we go again! BBC’s Identity “at risk” on Facebook

Mainstream media is threatened by social media! And here’s another example of the “Internet is evil” story that’s been going on for the last 15 years. This year it’s social media, last year it was MySpace and Wikipedia (information not being correct, or of the correct style) and the fact that apparently social media made teenagers commit suicide!

The reason why journalists hate the Internet and Social Media so much is that it is allowing hobbyist journalists of all ages to get their views on subjects that they are passionate about to a global audience in minutes. They now have distribution techniques available to them, that was under the sole control of media companies. Come on you accountants, and lawyers, and hairdressers - you know you can write something engaging when it concerns something you’re so passionate about that you do it outside your profession! Journalists can’t compete with that.

One little throw away comment in the video is the key here: “Whilst these details would not be enough on their own to steal somebodies identity…”

Date of birth, hometown and name and whether you like Razorlight or the Hoosiers is not enough to steal somebody’s identity.

The other interesting fact was that somebody in the security industry - i.e. that preys off the fact that we are threatened by this, comments and unsurprisingly has a standard response.

The point is stealing an identity is much easier from within a bank or government department, or as has been proved from lurking outside people’s or businesses bins!

Additionally, the fact that you can get these details has nothing to do with whether you are on Facebook’s servers or not, and incidentally you can, on any social networking platform, ascertain the details people have marked as public, and those of their friends marked as public by other means and not just applications. If people mark information as public or don’t make it private, then by definition it is available.

Personally I would be more concerned with the information that big media companies (every competition you enter or subscription contains name, address, hometown, date of birth, credit card or payment details, and transaction fee), the government and banks hold on you, which are generally more relevant when coming to commit identity fraud.

Also check out this article by the British Computing Society on its warnings to the government about data.

Posted in Control, Identity Theft, Security, social networking | No Comments »

Back to the future

There are lots of people trying to make sense of social networks for a number of reasons: monetization, information collection, spotting trend data and surveys just to name a few!

My take is that it’s actually a process of going back in time to the really old days and combining observed behaviour from society then with some theories on human evolution. A bit of such consideration can clarify the phenomenal success of social networks, the roots and successes of user engagement in general on the Internet and point to the future, not just to the web, but of human behaviour.

I’ve been looking at a few areas: language, culture, environmental factors and demographic context, but in this post I’ll concentrate on group size and cognitive constraints and some interesting articles I’ve found (well I think they are interesting anyway!).

Most of you would have heard of the Dunbar number which is given to the number that Robin Dunbar proposed; being the “limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained”. This limit has been researched as being an amazingly round 150. Beyond 150 and the human brain must resort to other non empathic methods to understand people such as stereotyping, heirarchies and so on. In fact, it turns out that even sustaining 150 relationships is quite remarkable in evolutionary terms. Sociality needs a bigger brain and bigger brains in evolutionary terms are expensive. Brain size is constrained by metabolic cost, and 20% of our metabolic rate is used up simply keeping our brains going which compares with about 8% for chimps! For most species this is simply not worth it and it’s better being a bit less intelligent but more focused. Us humans obviously have not taken this approach, but there still seems to be a limit on number of relationships that can be maintained properly.

Prosociality is another interesting factor that humans exhibit i.e they cooperate. The puzzle here is how humans sustain cooperation between large numbers of individuals. Cooperation requires a degree of altruism, which benefit the group but are often personally costly. (The Puzzle of Prosociality)

Social exchange and determination of cheats within a group is also quite an interesting area. Experiments have been done to determine how we humans discriminate the differences between cheating and simple rule-breaking (Professor Leda Cosmides). Experiments show that only 25% of people can manage the logical reasoning which would enable them to detect rule-breakers. However 75% detect correctly when it comes to cheating in social exchanges in which the logic is the same. So humans must have specialised and highly tuned social and emotional mechanisms for detecting cheats in comparison with logical mechanisms!

So considering these different areas, it seems to me that social networks provide a means for humans to exceed the Dunbar number and manage relationships without resorting to non empathic methods we use to understand people such as stereotyping or forming hierarchies.

Social networks assist us in managing more relationships by:

1. Aggregating news about your friends into bite size chunks, saving us from spending brain energy from trying to get information about an increasingly large friend base.

3. Social networks provide assistance and transparency which induces cooperation rather than individual behavior.

4. Helping us with our finely tuned empathic cheat detection systems by being able to assist in identifying fraudsters outside a face-to-face environment. My hypothesis here is that our cheat detection systems fall apart when confronted by distance and volume (of people), and then our logical brain kicks in which has already been proved to be pretty bad in comparison.

Social networking, as far as our cunning genes are thinking, is actually allowing us to break through certain evolutionary limits, by providing assisted communications with social context and emotion, and points to the continuation and acceleration of the social web. It’s also important to note that the web itself is just an evolution in communication support, again driven by this need as humans to be social, and this will continue to be one of the driving forces behind our evolution and social change.

So, social networking could finally be the death of the horrible publishing and broadcast metaphor that people still apply to the web, and maybe the start of a “relationship focus” breakthrough with how we build “websites” and web apps - the social web. After all, we can’t fight our genes, and they want us to have lots of friends!

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