Feeding the Social Media

01Mar10

Since Facebook was launched in the US in 2004 (and globally in 2006) we have seen a rise in online social networking sites around the globe. The fact that social networking sites seem so pervasive is what commentators find so concerning and sensational. But as with everything on this module it’s worth looking at the history of the phenomenon to try and work out how and why it developed in the way it did.

Tagging & Folksonomies
Before I get onto Social Networks (and perhaps not intuitively) I want to begin with tagging and folksonomies as they underpin the way we feed the social media.

Tagging is a key participation method by which users can enrich information in Web 2.0 applications. Tags, and their mass visual representation, tag lists or tag clouds, can be effective tools and they can also enhance the look and feel of an interface. When you first get going with tags you start to look more closely at other people’s and soon you will be checking people’s tag lists/clouds in del.icio.us or on their blogs to get inspiration or just to discover great Web finds.

For a good example of tags, see Flickr’s tag page to see their tag cloud of the 150 most popular picture tags.

In Rashmi Sinha’s – A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging she explains that it’s:

the lower cognitive cost of tagging that makes it popular

No, that doesn’t mean that even thick people can do it – but it does mean that the rather tedious opposite of “higher cognitive cost techniques” such as categorisation, force the user to reduce or pick just one bin in which they place a piece of information.

Sinha points to the reduction in “post-activation analysis paralysis”, or fear of making the wrong decision that is reduced when using an open-ended tagging process. It’s actually a rather technical and thorough write-up that ends with the observation that tagging is ultimately a success because “it taps into cognitive processes without adding much cognitive cost.”

Personally I don’t buy the whole ‘fear of making the wrong decision’ thing. I think tagging is a success simply because the user can create his/her own taxonomy. Just as XML has so much power because XML tags can be written that have a direct meaning to the user – so social tags work in the same way. We can ascribe our own meaning to the content we are uploading that directly feeds into our peer group social network and ultimately our community, and users feel they feel they own the technology. If you want to read up on tags and ontology then chapter six in Unleashing Web 2.0 is for you.

All this hints at something very special about tagging – something that suggests there is in fact some form of wisdom in crowds.

Collective tagging is the process of creating folksonomies. Folksonomies are basically the ‘informality surrounding tagging’  – the free and social nature of the tagging process which Wikipedia defines as the:

practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords

The bottom line is that Web 2.0 apps generally seem to benefit by providing tagging as a user participation and enrichment mechanism. This is one of the central elements of Web 2.0 – value is added continuously through participation and enhances the experience and helps to evolve the machine itself – this tagging is evident in all manner of social networking, video and photosharing sites as well as retail sites/blogs/forums etc.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

The Early Years: Nerds get social
In the 1970s BBSes, short for Bulletin Board System, were the only online meeting places. Users communicated via a central system where they could download files or games and post messages to other users. Accessed over telephone lines BBSes were run by enthusiasts who nurtured interest-specific topics – almost always technology-related. Long distance calling rates meant that many Bulletin Boards were local – and this lead to local gatherings of people interested in the same things. Some services linked numerous BBSes together into worldwide computer networks.

CompuServe also began life in the 1970s as a business-oriented communication platform that expanded into the public domain in the late 1980s and allowed members to share files and access news and events. It also offered true interaction via a newfangled technology dubbed “e-mail”. You could also join any of CompuServe’s thousands of discussion forums which paved the way for the modern social networking sites we know today.

AOL (America Online) was, and is, a bunch of member-created communities (complete with searchable “Member Profiles” – the precursor to the profiling system we see today.

By the mid-1990s the real Internet was catching up. Yahoo set up shop and Amazon began selling books – social networking was about to move out into the mainstream.

The teenage years
Classmates.com in the US and Friends Reunited in the UK were the first social networking successes. Although users could not create profiles, they could locate long-lost school friends and teachers.

However the same success didn’t arrive for SixDegrees.com which came online in 1997. It was one of the very first to allow its users to ‘create profiles, invite friends, organize groups, and surf other user profiles’ but it encouraged members to bring more people into the fold – and this “encouragement” proved unpopular. The site folded after the turn of the millennium.

The failure of sixdegrees seems to suggest that members want to be left to make their own connections rather than be pushed in to forging connections.

Other sites for niche social network markets include:

• AsianAvenue.com – founded in 1997
• BlackPlanet.com
• MiGente.com.

All three have survived to this day.

Adulthood

Friendster – 2002 used a degree of separation concept and refined it to a concept called Circle of Friends where pathways connecting two people are displayed. A year later – 2003, LinkedIn took a more serious approach – a networking resource for businesspeople looking to connect with other professionals. LinkedIn has more than 30 million members today. MySpace, also launched in 2003 – (90 million members). But the social networking crown belongs to Facebook.

Although MySpace remains the favourite in the USA it is Facebook that dominates the global social networking market. Launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site it remained this way for two years before opening to the general public in 2006. By that time, Facebook was already big business, with tens of millions of dollars already invested.

The news feed
The news feed (which was not a feature of FB when it was originally launched) is arguably the most compelling feature of Facebook – the fact that without visiting member profiles you can see on your home page what your ‘friends’ are doing without even having to digitally interact with them is the secret of its success and one that has been taken up in the noughties by another online success story – Twitter.

The newsfeed generation is parodied in several funny online iterations – Fake Facebook profiles, Facebook songs, Facebook stalking and hacking – all these sideways looks at how we use or regale social networks are evidence of the celebration and unease we feel about these sites in equal measure.

Funniest Facebook Profiles
Facebook lawsuits
Facebook Murders (?)

The Future

Are we really networking in a social sense, or are we just hiding behind our keyboards and building lists of virtual friends rather than getting out there in the real world?

Twitter has come under criticism for taking the “staying in touch” thing too far. Are we really that interested in the excruciating minutiae of everyone’s day?

Twitter clone Jaiku, has already gone int the wrong direction with the announcement that Google is cutting support for the service. Is it the end of Jaiku? Will others follow? Or will social networks get back to the micro level with subject specific social networking that can be set up by the user with sites like Ning?

In the final part of the Virtual Revolution on BBC2 – Aleks Krotoski set about testing the Dunbar number of social connections animals and humans routinely make (150) and even with thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook friends it turns out that few people actively connect with more than that number.

Bibliography

Vossen, Gottfried, Hagemann, Stephan (2007): Unleashing Web 2.0: From Concepts to Creativity, pp:58-68 pp: 328-334 Morgan Kaufmann

Nickson, Christopher (2009): The History of Social Networking

Sinha, Rashmi (2005): A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging

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