Today’s Doonesbury comic has a great reference to flash mobs:

For those interested in hearing talks in the Bay Area, here’s another one perhaps of interest:

Social Networking: Is there Really a Business Model? (sponsored by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab). Reid Hoffman (Linked In) will be speaking and the panel includes Jonathan Abrams (Friendster), Andrew Ankar, Ross Mayfield (Socialtext) and Cynthia Typaldos with Tony Perkins as moderator.

Should be fun!

When anthropologist Robin Dunbar wrote about a 150-person cap in one’s social network, he was not referring to 150 people in one’s lifetime. He was saying that people can maintain up to 150 weak ties at any given point in time. [And that tie maintenance is directly related to gossip upkeep and brain size, just as monkey tie maintenance is directly related to grooming and brain size.]

When i have 200+ friends on a site like Friendster, i’m not a social networks anomaly. What is actually being revealed is that my articulated network goes beyond the relationships that i currently maintain. While a high percentage of my friends and associates are on Friendster, not all of them are. There are quite a few relationships that i currently maintain that are not represented there. Additionally, many of the relations represented are outdated or on hiatus, not because i don’t love or appreciate those people, but because we are not geographically colocated or our personal situations have created a situation where time to connect is limited. This doesn’t mean that i don’t love and appreciate those people, just that they’re not part of my current situation.

I say all of this because it’s another factor of why an articulated representation is not equivalent to the network that one is actually maintaining. By suggesting that those ties are valid and relevant, we’re suggesting that we can call on those, regardless of our upkeep. This is a bit problematic.

For example, last nite, i needed to call someone who i could guarantee would be online in order to ask them to look something up for me. This is not a heavy favor, but in choosing who to call, i made certain conscious choices. My cell phone represents one form of an articulated network. As i browsed through the people, i chose not to call certain people for various reasons.

I eliminated some people because i doubted they would be online. I eliminated others from the potential pool because i felt as though the favor would be too inappropriate given our relationship. (For example, i didn’t call my advisor because it would seem an odd request.) But the most cringeful reason that i failed to call a group of people who would likely be online was because i owed them a conversational call (social upkeep) and to call to ask a menial favor when i didn’t have time to do the upkeep was totally out of line.

Now, the limiting factor was, of course, that the task was menial. Had i been in a desperate situation that truly felt magnificent in nature, i would’ve called any one of the people in my cell phone. I knew them all. I loved them all. But the support i requested was contextualized because of the value and whether or not i’d been good about social upkeep.

This is important to realize in the realm of an articulated network. When people go through me to connect with other friends of mine, there can be quite a bit of social awkwardness when i failed to maintain that relationship. When i, as the bridge, have the ability to control when those connections are to be made, i have the opportunity to repair the upkeep gap before asking a favor. For example, when i get a phone call from an old colleague asking to write a recommendation, the conversation inevitably starts with a lot of social upkeep before the favor is requested. Otherwise, it would seem odd.

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Fernanda Viegas and i wrote a paper for HICSS called Digital Artifacts for Remembering and Storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments and the draft was accepted. This means that we now need to edit it based on the reviewers’ comments and resubmit for publication.

I’m quite excited about this because i think that we’re getting at some interesting points in that paper. Basically, we stepped back from the two email visualization projects and reflected on their value. We realized that we have all of this social interaction in digital spaces without meaningful artifacts for remembering. Photographs are such valuable tools for sharing events in real life, but those same elements don’t exist online. When we created SNF and PostHistory, we realized that they ended up providing that opportunity accidentally. This is interesting because it makes us reflect on the value of such artifacts for social interaction. While digital communication allows us to have all of the archives of our experience, it doesn’t give us the quick coarse snapshops that let us reflect in a meaningful manner.

One of the things that i love about submitting to HICSS is that the reviews are always so meaningfully critical. Needless to say, all of the reviewers commented on our failure to evaluate our tools. And they are right: we didn’t. Of course, i still think that the value in what we built was more in the thought element than in any suggestion that this is a meaningful tool for distribution. Or maybe that’s just my excuse for not having had time to evaluate. But i really am not sure what a meaningful evaluation for SNF would’ve been. I certainly don’t think that it is a distributable tool (even if people keep asking to download it). Another common thread in the reviews was that they didn’t understand why anyone would want to use this tool continuously. This makes me think that we didn’t make our arguments strong enough. Just as people don’t use photographs regularly, they wouldn’t want to use any such tool as a means of information retrieval. Instead, these are artifacts to bring out during times of sharing or curiousity, not as a daily ritual. Aside from these two common threads, everything else in the reviews was inconsistent. Some reviewers loved our writing; others despised it. Some thought we were on to something; others thought the tools were pointless. Still, the various perspectives were quite valuable and certainly motivate me to want to publish there more often, even if attending the conference is a *huge* dent in the pocket.

While i was away, someone pointed me to a paper called Warhol Worms: The Potential for Very Fast Internet Plagues. The paper documents how a worm gets distributed through the Internet and how its exponential growth caps out at around 1,000,000 people. I was encouraged to read this because one question that’s been on my mind is how long Friendster growth will continue and whether or not it will just cap out. For a while, it was growing at 10% per week, but this hasn’t been maintained all summer.

While i don’t have the data about signup dates, i did trapse back and look at join dates for a variety of numbers, just to get a sense of when certain numbers were hit. Unfortunately, this isn’t as valuable as the actual dates, but it’s interesting none-the-less:

User 101 (Jonathan) signed on in April 2002.
User 175 signed on in May 2002.
User 250 signed on in June 2002.
User 375 signed on in July 2002.
User 500 signed on in August 2002.
User 1000 signed on in September 2002.
User 1250 signed on in October 2002.
User 1500 signed on in November 2002.
User 2500 signed on in December 2002.
User 5000 signed on in January 2003.
User 10,000 signed on in February 2003.
User 25,000 signed on in February 2003.
User 50,000 signed on in March 2003.
User 100,000 signed on in April 2003.
User 250,000 signed on in May 2003.
User 500,000 signed on in June 2003.
User 750,000 signed on in June 2003.
User 1,000,000 signed on in July 2003.
User 1,250,000 signed on in July 2003.
User 1,500,000 signed on in August 2003.
User 1,750,000 signed on in August 2003.

[As of August 31, there are 1,853,799 User accounts]

Needless to say, Friendster is well beyond the 1M marker, but it’s hard to tell how much beyond. While there are close to 2M accounts, i have no sense of how many of them are fake or invalid. Plus, i keep running into people who have multiple accounts (same information, same name, all “real”). I can’t tell if this is because they forgot their login or because they want to separate different friend groups.

Also, so many of the account seem to be inactive. I still hypothesize that people have an interest span of around 2 months from when the last group of friends joined. ::sigh:: Of course, without the data, it’s hard to test my hypotheses.

Mark Granovetter will be speaking on Social Networks for the Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy in Palo Alto.

I’m back from the desert. It was a completely intense experience, as always, and i’m still processing. Bits of what i learned will slowly leak out here and updates will begin again.

I’m about to embark on my first no-email vacation in 5 years. I will not be blogging, emailing, phoning or otherwise staying connected with anything other than the playa. Of course, that’s always a fascinating opportunity to watch as urban tribes come together in reality, build a community and tear it down. Somehow, i’m sure i’m going to learn more about social networks watching folks in the desert than i would sitting here behind my screen.

Anyhow, have a fantastic end of August and i’ll see you in September!

Note: when i return, i will be back in school officially. So, if you have the urge to email me, realize that i’m not prepared for my email overload and will probably take at least a month to make up for 2 weeks away.

I’m about to embark on my first no-email vacation in 5 years. I will not be blogging, emailing, phoning or otherwise staying connected with anything other than the playa. I love you all and i’ll see you in September!

When i return, i will be back in school officially. So, if you have the urge to email me, realize that i’m not prepared for my email overload and will probably take a month to make up for 2 weeks away.

Whenever i read about or hear about the Friendster/Fakester Revolution, i can’t help but think back to Kate Bornstein’s “Nearly Roadkill”.

For those who haven’t read it, it’s the story of a point in time where the Internet is controlled by corporations who serve the needs of the government. Outraged at having to constantly identify themselves online, a group of netizens gather to revolt. Of course, this is all told through a fun erotic story between two characters who refuse to reveal their gender, instigating an FBI search.