A great series of articles on the path to OS X Leopard on the Apple Insider Blog.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/10/road_to_mac_os_x_leopard_dock_1_6.html
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/11/road_to_mac_os_x_leopard_spaces.html
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/12/road_to_mac_os_x_leopard_time_machine.html
I have been looking at the language around Facebook and other social networking and media sites. Here are a few of the definitions I am finding:
Chris Anderson: By “social networking” I’m not including basic “chat amongst yourself” stuff like comments, wikis and voting. Instead, social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful.
Time Magazine on Facebook: It’s a website, but in a sense, it’s another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that’s everything the larger Net is not. Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it–a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you’re a dog.
Wikipedia on social media: Social media uses the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including message boards, weblogs,wikis, podcasts,pictures, and video. Technologies such as blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, group creation, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), iTunes (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), and Flickr (photo sharing).
Technology in Transition defines social media as: Social media describes a new set of internet tools that enable shared community experiences, both online and in person. A community, in this context, is a group of people with common interests who connect with one another to learn, play, work, organize and socialize. Communities can be large or small, local or global. They can be public or restricted to members. Social media allows people with basic computer skills to tell their stories using publishing tools such as blogs, video logs, photo sharing, podcasting (audio stories broadcast from the web or downloaded to a computer) and wikis (collaboratively edited web pages). They can also help us filter and organize the overwhelming amount of information on the web. Social media tools make it easier to create and distribute content and discuss the things we care about.
PCmag.com defines social networking site as: A Web site that provides a virtual community for people interested in a particular subject or just to “hang out” together. Members communicate by voice, chat, instant message, videoconference and blogs, and the service typically provides a way for members to contact friends of other members. Such sites may also serve as a vehicle for meeting in person. The “social networking site” is the 21st century term for “virtual community,” a group of people who use the Internet to communicate with each other about anything and everything.
Danah Boyd defines a social network as: A “social network site” is a category of websites with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile.
Are you as confused as I am? Of all of the definitions I’ve collected here, I think that Chris Anderson’s comes closest to my understanding of the value of social networking and social media sites:
“the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful.”
In my next post, I want to explore the relationship between social networks and online communities. Are they one in the same? And how will we manage our online identities in these sites going forward? Will we join many micro-communities (as in the Ning model); or will we manage our relationships in these networks through one social network that is integrated with these communities (the emerging Facebook model)?
Michael Hirschhorn has a very good overview why Facebook is winning the race for users in social media and may become a new standard for how we use the web.
Hirschorn is “completely entranced by the new, turbo-charged Facebook. It’s the best mousetrap I’ve seen since I first laid eyes on eBay.”
He has a good definition of social media:
The catchall term social media encompasses Web applications that allow individuals to create their own pages—filled with postings, photos, video, and portable applications generally called “widgets”—and interact with other users. The theory is that these networks will create a virtual environment in which like-minded people can find one another
Facebook gets it right because it convenes micro-communities of people who already know each other. Unlike MySpace, nobody gets into your circle unless you give them permission. And as Hirschorn explains, “you have to give information to get information.”
Because Facebook is more restrictive, it is largely free of spam and cannot be spidered by Google. Facebook networks are contained to people who share the same email address. You cannot join the Stanford network unless you have a Stanford address (only given to students and alumni).
Hirschorn goes on to look a the phenomenon of Facebook apps and concludes:
In opening up to outside applications, Facebook could become a transformational brand, altering the Webisphere around it rather than simply being a site du jour. It could become the way the majority of us (i.e., non-teens) project our identity online: the “Google of people,” as BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis put it. With its enforced limits and formal and aesthetic rigor, it calls to mind nothing so much as the iPod/iTunes system, a similarly elegant solution that defied the prevailing free-form logic of the digital era and reshaped the music business to its own ends.
Facebook’s strategy of being a walled garden could become its downfall. You can do everything you can do on Facebook with a set of open source tools for blogging, email, Twitter, and Google reader. I use all of these tools, yet I agree with Hirschorn’s conclusion that Facebook’s limits and fine grained privacy controls may win over the messy openness of the world wide web.
I don’t plan to use Facebook exclusively. I will still maintain my blog which is freely published on the web and use an RSS aggregator (Blogbridge) for combing the open web for useful information. But for a more intimate presentation of my self and my activities, I like Facebook. It only reveals this stuff to my circle. And while 85 percent of college users are on Facebook, over 50 percent of the total population of Facebook is beyond college. My circle of “friends” is filled with my early adopter professional colleagues, and we use Facebook to track one another’s paths through the garden of knowledge. I find this very useful and will look forward to applications that expand this functionality. I don’t want to know what everyone is reading. But I do want to know what my circle of friends is reading and what conferences they are planning to attend and where they are traveling and what restaurants they like. Even though I think Twitter is pretty silly, I am interested in the status reports of my circle through Facebook. My pal and colleague Tim Halle just joined and set up the group “So stupid it’s cool” with a mission of:
‘ At what point does something or someone cease to be stupid and become cool. Where does the stupidity delineator line (SDL) lie ? What has achieved true coolness and what will forever remain at “Absolute stupid” ?
And he suggests www.lordi.fi as “perched on the stupidity delineator line.” (See for yourself if this is true.)
Now this example completely contradicts my use of Facebook for professional stuff. But it is too good not to share, which is really what Facebook is all about.
The compete blog has an analysis of how Facebook users spend their time:
Not surprisingly people spend the most time browsing profiles. but people are also joining groups and interacting with applications.
TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook is changing its group structure:
So Facebook will finally allow users to group friends and control information flow based on friend type. For guys like Robert Scoble, who have 5,000 friends (the limit), this may be a way to finally sort through the real friends from the fans. It’s a much needed feature that people have been requesting for a long time.
It also shows the steady maturity of Facebook from a college network to a full on world network, where friendships, business contacts, family and other types of relationships need to be more fully described. And this is also as much about privacy as it is about organization - users will be able to limit the information that certain friend groups receive.
This is good news for us as we plan to integrate the Facebook group structure into Swift.
