Social Media Research Blog

What is the Dunbar's Number for Social Networks?

Many folks are really excited about FriendFeed. Personally, I have found that there are a lot more comments when something gets posted on FriendFeed. Recently Yuval Atzmon's User21 blog released a list of most followed users on FriendFeed. Since I too had a crawl of FriendFeed running in much the same way as Yuval, I decided to look at the complementary question: "How many users do people follow on FriendFeed"? While the crawl is not yet complete (and complete statistics would have to wait), the numbers are really striking! Some users follow more than a 1000 "friends":

sthayden	3190
scobleizer	3087
juliomedina	2760
thomashawk	2557
jasoncalacanis	2447
theillife	2045
mrsth	1961
pookakoo	1814
czarphanguye	1736
brynyoungblut	1716
eposter	1562
susangrisantiguitarist	1550

I find this really amazing. Unlike Twitter, FriendFeed posts are accompanied with longer conversations so it can be more involved. I can barely keep up with all the information flying past me everywhere right now! I guess, 1500+ "friends" would be way too much for me!

Sociologists often talk about the Dunbar's Number which

is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships.

In human contact network the Dunbar's number is said to be around 150. It might as well be the case that social tools and especially, microblogging is pushing this limit further. Studies on Twitter, Livejournal and other social networking sites seem to support this observation. I wonder then: what would be the Dunbar's number on social networks? 300? 500??? Any guesses? Perhaps some comparison across all the published papers that have studied different social networks might have some clues.

[BTW, I am akshayjava on FriendFeed]

The Microblogging "Lucha libre"

OK, since the release of Google trends for websites I guess, this was a graph waiting to be posted ... and perhaps it already has been(?), somewhere. In any case, here is a graph of Microblogging "Lucha Libre" (free fight).

Interestingly, despite the frustrating downtimes Twitter has been facing lately, it still reigns supreme. Whats more, others are no where close! One thing to note is that for the last few weeks twitter's trend has been downwards. As much as I love Twitter, I am afraid that it may be losing its momentum, unless they turn around quickly. Personally, it seems like there are fewer conversations happening there right now.

What appeals me these days is FreindFeed. I find that there is a lot more to discover there than on Twitter. Plus the rooms feature is absolutely fantastic and the whole system is built around conversations. No downtime and a quick turn around time for development and new features makes the site exciting and fun. However, any social network is ofcourse only as attractive as the number of active friends you have on it. And despite its nifty toys, friendfeed still has a much smaller early adopter audience. Ditto with pownce and jaiku. Plurk seems like the new kid on the block.

The following graph shows the fight between all the other players, trying to dislodge Twitters dominating position.

FriendFeed looks like it is going strong! But, I guess only time will tell who will be the microblogging champion!

These Tweets are from Mars

I am really enjoying the tweets from @MarsPhoenix. Ofcourse this isn't the actual robot sending Twitter updates from millions of miles away, the researchers tweeting on it's behalf are definitely engaging in some interesting conversations. This is one fantastic example of how large organizations can engage in Social Media.

The thought that we are having a conversation with a tiny bot makes the whole experience rather exciting. It wouldn't have been half as much fun if it were for a human persona at the other end. This "bot persona" is more lovable, in part due to our collective imagination and desire of being able to have an intelligent conversation with machines -- our R2-D2s and WALL*Es.

This has been a fantastic experiment in social psychology as well as a superb publicity approach.  MarsPhoenix has about 20K followers  making it one of the most popular Twitter users. Accolades to JPL researcher Veronica McGregor, for this terrific idea and posting interesting updates.

I think that there is a lot more to this story. I imagine that soon we will have more devices that we can talk to directly on Twitter and IM. One idea I had recently was to rig up our lab's coffee machine, Mr. Capresso, with a temperature sensor so that he can automatically inform us when fresh coffee is brewed in the lab.

And at the cost of sounding much like Eliza, I think that for a limited domain, we might even have the capabilities to build Natural Language Generation tools that could automatically post Tweets. I am aware that there are many bots on Twitter. But the tools I would like to see are the ones that can do more than just post a message (like a new video on qik, etc) -- true interaction would come only from conversations. A really wacky (but simple) example would be a poetic bot (yep! people have researched on that too! ;-) )that would send intelligible rhymes in response to @ messages. Might be quite hilarious to follow it!!

"Personal Brand" Monitoring Tools

Dr. Finin pointed to this interesting post on "branding yourself with a blog":

“… Certainly personal branding isn’t a new concept, but the future of personal branding could be in at your fingertips—with a blog. One of the first steps in creating a brand for yourself is to make your blog visible. Post meaningful entries, comment on your industry’s top blogs, or simply gain a regular readership. “Visibility creates opportunities,” says Schawbel, a social media specialist at EMC Corporation. He believes that when you brand yourself, the competition becomes irrelevant. “The goal of personal branding is to be recruited based on your brand, not applying for jobs,” Schawbel says. …”

Many brand monitoring startups are helping big companies keep track of what their (potential) customers have to say about them or their products. While the space of corporate brand monitoring is  fiercely competed, one area that is overlooked is that of "personal branding" tools. Most of us are highly interested in knowing what is said about us online. As the TechCareers blog points out:

“You are the chief marketing officer for the brand called you, but what others say about your brand is more impactful than what you say about yourself,” says Schawbel.

Keeping an eye on what others have to say about you is not always easy. I started thinking about these issues and outlined how I try to keep up with this information. Here is my "Personal Brand Monitoring Toolbox":

1. Search Engines: The typical way for me to keep tabs on this is by setting up Google alerts for my name, projects, organization (University/workplace) etc. In addition, I frequently perform "ego searches" to forage for mentions of my name.
2. Statistics and Tools: One very interesting tool that I have found useful is Lijit. It provides you stats on who is searching for you, what keywords were used to reach your blog, etc. In addition I use Google Analytics to know more information about my visitors, most visited pages and time they spent on my site. If you are an academic like me, you would like to know who has cited your papers recently (Google Scholar) and the number of downloads, who has linked to your paper (Google link: search) and/or your blog posts (Technorati searches). Yessss! I admit! I have become a total statoholic! :-)
   
3. Comments and Scraps: Twitter is another important tool in our arsenal for personal branding and your replies say something interesting about you. Finally, the comments on my blog, Facebook messages, scraps and photos are all part of my "brand" and I take interest in replying to them just like I would to an email.

As our information spaces diversify, monitoring "your brand" becomes a part of the everyday online activity. I dont think we have exactly cracked the nut yet -- keeping track of your profile and "your brand " is a highly addictive activity and I think that the tool(s) that make it fun and exciting will enjoy a great deal of popularity.

The Bane of Fame

I was working on this post and read a timely piece by Erik at Techcrunch on the level of noise and our inability to keep up with the conversations online. Further comments by Alexander as well.

Clay Shirky, in his book "Here Comes Everybody" mentions how fame can come at a cost. The example he presents is that of a blogger with 10,000 strong audience, is interacting with each of his readers for 1 min; it amounts to almost a full-time job ~ 40 Hours/Week. Here the interaction can mean that someone has just created a link and you go check it out; someone has written a blog post in response; posted a video/podcast; just commented on your blog, sent a tweet in response to yours, posted a photo from the conference you attended or plain old fashioned email/phone conversations.

I tried to extrapolate this and see how it would work in a typical scenario. Lets say you are an average blogger who spends 30 Mins /post/day  and your audience created 1000 items for you to responding to. Perhaps on an average you spend 5 Mins per response (this might include reading the comment, tweet, post, email; thinking time; writing time etc.) Then one would pretty much spend about ~25 Hours / Week for about 1000 responses/month.

This is the bane of fame! As you get famous, and receive more attention in your social network -- you cant respond to everyone. I can hardly figure out how Scoble can keep up his pace on his blog and Twitter! I think Tech bloggers are slightly better at managing how they use technology to their advantage and can keep up with a much larger audience than most people. Still, Shirky's book is a great place to understand how the attention economy is changing our social interactions.

That also makes me wonder if someone has seen any research on email/usenet usage patterns? Somehow that is one area that shares similarities and I am certain that usability experts would have done some such studies already. How do you think this would compare with Facebook and Social Media in general? There are people for whom Facebook is their default -- everything from email/IM to SN -- So it does not feel like they are trying to respond to requests from many different networks! I wonder what is the cost of context switching from one network to another and perhaps that is the reason why FriendFeed seems like a neat way to manage multiple information streams?

Twitter + Google App Engine + Huddle Chat = Flash Mob

When Dave Winer beckons the crowd follows. I was looking at Huddle Chat the new demo for Google App Engine and wanted to play around a bit. But before I could even think of inviting someone to join my chat, I saw the Tweet from Dave Winer calling us all to his chat room on the "Armed Services Committee".

Within literally a matter of minutes there was a crowd gathered sharing pics, chat messages and just having a fun time testing the app. It was like the largest virtual Campfire that just got together in a matter of minutes. Sweet! This is the amazing thing about Twitter. Now you have a whole bunch of people you can talk to and almost have a flash mob effect.

Also check out Techcrunch's demo appengine. OK I'm off to chatting with my new campfire friends about the Google App Engine and discuss politics! :-)

Microblogging Spam?

Over at Mashable blog there is a nice post about the increase in number of "commercial" apps trying to gather friends on Twitter. Indeed, many of us would have noticed an increasing trend in the number of friend requests, thanks to a bunch of questionable tools out there. I had seen this problem come up in some of my previous analysis of Twitter data, but it didn't raise such a concern earlier. I felt that a user ultimately had the choice of reciprocating to a friend request. Most often, we may follow any new friend requests, unless it really look quite suspicious.

In any case, here is a graph of Number of Friends vs. Number of Posts (sampled from the public timeline over a period of a few months). Note that the data is almost a year old now so I am most likely not capturing the current situation. What you see is a few users in the upper left corner who might have very few friends but are oddly posting a very high number of posts. Some of these users are automated bots and folks running them might argue that that they are providing a 'service' -- but  the cool thing is on Twitter, it is ultimately the community of users that decides what is truly a useful service and what is just JUNK. The spammer is usually the guy who has no friends - metaphorically and on Twitter, in reality as well. 

Explaining Twitter to Your Mom

Well my Mom totally gets Twitter! But if I'd have to explain it to my grandpa this is a good video!