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!

"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.

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! :-)

Notes from Brad Fitzpatrick's Invited Talk at ICWSM

Brad Fitzpatrick was over at ICWSM and gave a keynote on "Decentralization and Social Graphs". Following are some notes from the talk. Please note these are from rush transcription during the talk and from my recollection of what was presented. Please feel free to comment if I have missed something or if you feel something is incorrect.

Brad talks about Social graph and highlights some of the problems with traditional forms of communication. Email for example, lacks sender authentication or verification which lead to spam. Phone traditionally did not have any sender authentication and later these services were bolted on to the original infrastructure. Instant Messenger services don't always offer interoperability. Brad says that the  future of IM is Jabber/XMPP, which offers a decentralized system protocol. Gtalk, Livejournal both use Jabber and this makes it easily interoperable. In general the his talk highlights the importance of decentralization. Other things that are decentralized are email, wikis, ethernet, bittorrent etc.

Blogs are pretty much decentralized and interoperate using ATOM/RSS, but the difficult thing is commenting. Social Network sites are still "walled gardens" and basically need to re-invent everything -- sign up process, profile etc.... just to be able to provide one "cool feature". So as of now many of them dont work with each other. This is bound to change.

Brad says that the "glimmers of hope" are the following:

• XMPP Gtalk uses XMPP and in fact I have played around with it a bit and it is really a simple and neat way to communicate with instant Messengers.

• RSS/ATOM Ofcourse blog readers have relied on RSS/ATOM. From David Sifry's talk I recollect that ATOM is the preferred form of syndication for Technorati, since it avoids having to crawl the entire HTML content to be sure that partially syndicated feeds are handled correctly.

• OpenID This eases signups/logins. Already many of the providers and sites have adopted the OpenID standard.

• OAuth This provides an easy way for authorization... Often we are faced with a situation where some new random site says "hey why dont you gimme your password?". However, can you trust it with your password? OAuth is an alternative way for one website to request action on another.

• XFN/Microformat/FOAF Machine Readable format of the social graph. While there is a good amount of FOAF data online, it is hardly enough to cover the entire social graph. Apparently XFN is more popular and is also used by Twitter.

• OpenSocial This is a standard way for containers (social network sites) to host social apps. Same app works on Orkut, Myspace, Hi5 and .... now also Yahoo. This is a big leap towards interoperability.

• XRDS (Yardis) provides a discovery mechanism on a URL... suppose a site needs to ask another "where is your OpenID server" ... "Where is your calendar" etc.

• Social Graph API This is Brad's very own pet project. It finds and parses XFN, FOAF, me links. Provides an API for the social graph. A nice way to find missing friends. This solves the problem of not knowing all the alternative userids for my friends.

So to summarize the talk : use OpenID to log in to the site..... Site reuses public profile..... it can ask for pvt stuff using OAuth..... container app uses OpenSocial and Social Graph finds friends. And we all live happily ever after in our nice little online worlds :-) and all sites talk to each other and we are all F.R.I.E.N.D.S! :-)

The talk also highlighted some missing pieces:

    - messaging URLs

    - URL - email interop

    - XMPP/JID binding

    - Reputation server

    - promoting or documenting.

Some startups that are currently using open protocols twitter, dopplr, plaxo, pownce.

Brad says that users expect things to interoperate ... and decentralized is more robust. Social networks are broken today but are getting better.

Overall, it was a very interesting talk but I felt that it was kind of short and it would have also been fun to see more details.

Crowdvine: The Facebook for conferences

I just got back from ICWSM yesterday. I am still absorbing all the wonderful paper presentations, posters, ideas and discussions we had at this conference. There were some amazing invited speakers, paper presentations and engaging audience.  Kudos to the organizers (  Matthew Hurst,   Eytan Adar,   Natalie Glance,   Nicolas Nicolov, Belle Tseng and Tim Finin) for the fabulous arrangements and for bringing us together.

I have been thinking of what made this conference so different from others that I have attended in the past.  Firstly, this is a crowd that totally "gets" social media and loves to be a part of this exciting new research area. But as importantly, we are also people who "eat our own dog food", so to say.  One tool that really brought us together  even before the conference actually started was  crowdvine. It is what I would like to describe as the "Facebook for conferences". I think ICWSM would surely have made a record of some sort for the "fewest business cards exchanged". Not that there was any less networking -- its just that people already had a connection established before they met. I had found some of my ICWSM friends on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin already, so there wasnt any real need to request for a business card.

Secondly, the conversations started before the event and they continued, even after it ended. For example, before the event, I had already exchanged a few references on my blog and via email. With some of the members I had met at the previous event in Boulder, I had been sharing feeds, Twitter messages and Facebook wall-to-wall posts. Unlike in other conferences where we meet people after a year with little context for discussion, I felt that I already knew some of my colleagues as online friends.  (When I met William Cohen, we talked about his cool blues video, for example). In words of Lisa Reichelt such connections are all about ambient intimacy and this made the people I interacted with at ICWSM closer than those at other venues.

After the conference the discussions moved to Twitter. A funny meme was around my absent-mindedness in forgetting my laptop after an amazing scifi experience, just hours before my flight. Fortunately, I did manage to recover it. :-)

I found Crowdvine to be a great tool and think that it should be used in every event. A couple of things that would really improve it though:
a) A way for me to add my Crowdvine friends to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. I know there is a way to "import" but most often i meet new people at a conference so what I would like is an "export" functionality.
b) Conferences are about sharing ideas, academic papers and research. What Crowdvine currently lacks is a way to engage its members in discussions around the main focus of the conference -- the papers and presentations themselves.

I think that there is a great value proposition in Crowdvine and it has started with implementing a few things but doing it really really well. As more conferences start using it, I am certain that it is only going to get even better.

 

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!