Social media and narcissism at HASTAC

I just posted a response to Mark Bauerlein's latest blog post at Chronicle.com. The link is below.

Social media and narcissism

Twitter users in U.K. lose some SMS features

I think this issue has far more potential to be a Twitter-killer than downtime problems. One of Twitter’s distinctive features is its SMS capabilities. If those start going away, then what is the draw of the service?

European users of Twitter can no longer receive text message updates on their cell phones, in a temporary move designed to keep the start-up's telecom bills down.

Twitterers can still use its U.K. number, +44 762 480 1423, to send updates to the site. But that number will no longer deliver text-message updates back to users, and recommends that they use the Twitter mobile site or a third-party client like TwitterBerry, Twitterrific, TwitterMail, or Cellity.

Colonizing Web 2.0 apps

A while back, I posted a response to a panel I attended at the 2008 Computers and Writing Conference. The panel reported the work of a research group that was designing what amounts to a social network site based on writing. It is very rare to find someone in the field of rhetoric and writing who can program, and I thought it was a shame that this dedicated group of R&C programmers were trying to reinvent the social networking wheel. Generally, I think this situaiton is like the one Tim O’Reilly describes in this piece on the Yahoo-Microsoft merger.

I believe that we’re collectively working on an Internet Operating System, and that it will ultimately look more like Unix than it looks like Windows. That is, it will be an aggregate of best of breed tools produced by an army of independent actors, all playing by the same rules so that those tools work together to produce a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Fighting over search is a bit like the Free Software Foundation re-implementing cat, ls, sort, and all the other Unix utilities that were already available in the Berkeley distributions of Unix. The real problem was solved by someone outside the FSF, when Linux Torvalds wrote a kernel, a missing piece that became the gravitational center of Linux, the center around which all of the other projects could coalesce, which made them more valuable not by competing with them but by completing them.

I don’t think writing researchers should be spending time rebuilding features that already exist elsewhere for free.

I should reiterate here that I think it is fantastic that writing researchers are coding websites and building web services. This is a crucial writing skill that I think we as a field have neglected in favor of sexier forms of writing like audio and video. However, what we should be programming are innovative new services that fit into the already existing Web 2.0 space, not building our own versions of existing (or new but more popular, better-supported) services.

So here’s a thought: if rhetoric and composition instructors want to use social networking apps, and they want to avoid sites like Facebook (when I voiced my objections after the panel discussion, one response was that sites like Facebook don’t offer the security necessary for protecting students’ work and grades), why don’t they find an unpopular social networking site and populate it? Here’s a list of social networking sites and their membership on Wikipedia. Instructors could find a largely defunct site, colonize it, and use their collective power to get the site to add features and functionality that fit the interests of the field? Of course, this would only work if many instructors and students from many different schools started using the site. However, it could be a great way to get free programming from a dedicated source while also taking advantage of features geared towards the needs of writing instructors.

Finding classes via social media

Here’s an interesting post on how a prospective student found one of my classes.

Social Tech on Campus in Practice

Blogging Computers and Writing 2008: Building Social Networking from the Inside Out

Collin thinks that someone should live blog Computers & Writing, so here goes. Maybe I can send the conference promoters an invoice retroactively if they decide to adopt his reimbursement plan. :)

Panel chair Mike Palmquist of Colorado State started things off by introducing Writing Studio, a writing-based web portal hosted by CSU. According to Palmquist’s history, Writing Studio began as a hypercard-like program with multimedia features, but it migrated to the web in the late 1990s.

Recently, the site switched from supporting classes to supporting student writers. Jill Salahub, also of CSU, explained how the site had been modified to provide this support. After presenting some results from an internal study of the online Writing Studio—according to Salahub, an instructor’s teaching experience and prior use of CMS was related to adoption of the site, and students tended to copy the responses of their teachers towards the technology; if the instructor was enthusiastic of the technology, students tended to be enthusiastic as well—she described how students eventually became interested in using Writing Studio as a networking tool. To that end, the site’s managers have added user profile pages and places where students can find other people in their classes.

Lynda Haas of UC-Irvine, Carolyn Handa of the University of Alabama, and Will Hochman of Southern Connecticut State each discussed their use of Writing Studio at their home institutions. Haas repeated Salahub’s finding that prior experience with writing technology tended to lead to more positive adoption experiences by instructors, while Handa detailed her grad students’ use of Writing Studio as a shared knowledge depository. Finally, Hochman showed how he used his students’ responses to the classroom communication tools provided by Writing Studio as learning experiences

Haas also pointed out this hilarious Facebook group, which encourages students to write “THIS IS SPARTA!” somewhere on their AP Exam. The meme has caught on: it appears that people have been repeatedly vandalizing the Wikipedia AP Exam page with the phrase. I am usually involved in grading AP exams, but I had to skip this year; now I’m a little disappointed that I’m going to miss out on seeing how often this meme actually showed up on the tests.

I found Writing Studio to be a really interesting project because the researchers are coding the site themselves. It reminds me of some of the early work in the CWRL, when Fred Kemp and his colleagues were creating Daedalus. Now that the lab primarily uses open-source, off-the-shelf tools, it’s good to see that writing researchers are still creating software. However, I wonder about the worth of these programming projects. Like Daedalus, Writing Studio seems to be innovative, providing some interesting tools for networking and connectivity. However, its innovative features seem to have been eclipsed by sites like Facebook. This, I think, introduces the primary response to Writing Studio: why build a writing-specific social network when social networks that can support (or be tweaked to support) writing activities already exist?

Palmquist responded to this question by saying it was a metaphor issue: Facebook was created for socializing, while Blackboard and WebCT are created to support lecture classes. He argues that Writing Studio is specifically designed to support writing classes. Another attendee supported this claim, arguing that the Writing Studio created a protected space for students to share their writing.

I think these are fine arguments, but I remain unconvinced. To give an example from one social networking site, even though Facebook was created for socializing, there are emerging movements to adapt the site for business and productivity ends. I don’t see why this can’t be done for writing as well. Further, Facebook can be as protected as anyone wants it to be; one just has to learn how to change the privacy settings.

In short, while I think that Writing Studio is a great project—particularly because I believe writing researchers should be involved in programming—I doubt that the future of writing studies will be in creating writing-based versions of free tools like Facebook. Why can’t our innovation go in a new direction?

Review: Holland, ed. Remote Relationships in a Small World (2007)

I ran across Remote Relationships in a Small World a month or so ago in a publisher’s catalog, and I thought it looked pretty promising, seeing as my work is gravitating towards studies of social networks and mobile communication. The collection of essays are intended, according to editor Samantha Holland, to provide new research on social relationships conducted online. This, I assume, is the source of the title, which suggests that the digital age has both made the world smaller by allowing for instant communication across time and space, but at the same time that time and space is real and has a real effect on the relationships conducted online.

The three chapters that jumped out at me were Holland’s chapter (with Julie Harpin) on the use of MySpace by British teenagers, Janet Finlay and Lynette Willoughby’s study of the use of WebCT forums and blogs in online learning, and Simeon J. Yates and Eleanor Lockley’s study of male and female cell phone use. (The complete TOC can be found here.)

Holland and Harpin presented the results of a pilot study of teenage British MySpace users, following the usage habits of 12 teenagers. Their results seemed to confirm the work of boyd and Ellision (2007) in that the teenagers they studied tended to use MySpace to communicate with people they already knew socially. Additionally, the authors found that, unlike the typical stereotype of the digital loner, the social network was a “hive of sociability.”

Similarly, Finlay and Willoughby’s chatper didn’t break any new ground. They found that a minority of the (mostly male) students using their course forum and individual blogs would post offensive messages, and that this behavior tended to alienate other users. After their mostly textual case study, the authors concluded that for an online learning space to be a real community of practice there needed to be scaffolded interactions with the community so that users could become socialized to it, a feat which was not possible in their 12-week course.

Finally, Yates and Lockley examined the use of cell phones by men and women in a number of different contexts: at home, on the train, and in other public places like restaurants and coffee shops. They found that the men in their study tended to send shorter messages than the women, and that the longest messages were sent in conversations between two women. Like Holland and Harpin, the authors found that the participants in their study tended to not use their phones to contact or converse with strangers, but rather to keep in touch with people who were close to them, both physically (neighbors) and emotionally (friends and relatives).

I found this collection to be a bit of a mixed bag. While the studies I mentioned here were interesting, and had interesting conclusions, I found myself wishing they were a bit more rigorous. This was particularly the case with the Holland and Harpin and Finlay and Wiloughby chapters. While each was interesting, neither broke new ground, and both seemed to merely share the overall theme of the online texts they collected. Admittedly the Holland and Harpin study was a preliminary one, but, that being the case, I wonder why it was included in this collection.

The Yates and Lockley chapter suffered from the opposite problem. The authors used a large number of measures—surveys, observation, diary studies, focus groups—but the analysis and discussion of these measures seemed abrupt to me. I would have liked to have seen them choose some of the data to focus on with more depth and detail, rather than have them present this cornucopia of data.

That said, I found the book to be useful, not the least for the support, however tentative, that the studies included in it lend to the thesis that social communication is used more to keep in contact with people in existing social networks, rather than create new contacts. Somewhat ironically, these studies seem to suggest that our online relationships aren’t so “remote” after all.

Managing online identity

Lifehacker has posted a feature on why you should manage your online reputation and how to do it. According to the article

Anyone can create a web page that describes you inaccurately or criticizes your performance at a company. Web sites have emerged to trash bad dates and insult company representatives—and those pages are not what you want potential dates or employers to find when they Google you. If making a good name for yourself online is a priority, it's time to take a proactive approach to getting your name out there the way you want.

It’s a great introduction to a topic that most people probably aren’t even aware of, much less in control of.

Google’s Marks on the social graph

Google’s Kevin Marks made this presentation at the LIFT conference on the “Social Cloud.” I haven’t had a chance to watch it all yet, but when I do, I’ll post some thoughts.

via ReadWriteWeb

Related: Tim Berners Lee on “the Graph”

Delver: Social search

Delver, a search startup, uses social networks connections to personalize users’ search results. From TechCrunch:

Delver is attempting to solve two key search-related problems. The first is that current search engines do not take into account the identity of the searcher. For example, a teenager and a senior citizen performing the same query will get exactly the same results. The second is that current search engines do not allow users to search for information created and referenced by their own social graph. This is an important point because, let’s face it, social networking doesn’t offer much functional value beyond allowing people to connect with one another. The fact that you have 300 friends on Facebook, 200 on MySpace and 100 connections on LinkedIn doesn’t actually help you locate information. This is where Delver comes in. Search for “New York,” and the results that will pop up will be blog posts from people you know that mention or are about New York, or Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, and the like.

The technology, which has been in development since 2005, combines search technologies, semantics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Delver begins by crawling the Web in order to map users’ social connections. The information it finds on social networking profiles, blogs, bookmarks, photo and video-sharing sites is then cross-linked to the searcher’s social graph, which is built on-the-fly. Delver then prioritizes its results based upon the searcher’s social graph, thereby improving the relevancy of the results. Since every person’s social graph is unique—much like a fingerprint—the same Delver query will produce significantly different results for each person—as reflected through the collective experiences of each person’s contacts.

It will be interesting to see how this idea works out. Based on the description above it sounds something like search on Facebook, which defaults to the users network and friends (and which I find incredibly annoying). Based on my experience with Facebook, I wonder if this idea is going to be anything more than a niche solution for special searches. I’m not sure that I want all of my searches to be determined by my contacts; part of the purpose of search is to find results that are outside of a user’s normal social circle.

Instructors make “friends” on Facebook

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article last week on the difficulties academics face when using Facebook. While the article contained some good, commonsense advice about how instructors should interact with their students on the site, it also revealed how little understanding most instructors have of social networking culture.

Nancy Baym worries more about students’ expectations of her. A few weeks ago, a young man she did not know tried to friend her, says Ms. Baym, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. The same student e-mailed her the next day, asking to get into a class that had a waiting list. He must have thought, “If she’s my friend, then she’ll let me into the class,” she says.

Young, female faculty members already struggle to be seen as authority figures, says Ms. Baym. It was easy to imagine what might happen: “But how could you have given me a D? You’re my friend on Facebook!”

Now, lots of people use Facebook, for lots of different reasons; however, I think it is highly unlikely that the unknown student friended her in order to enact the social code that Baym suggests: “If she’s my friend, then she’ll let me into the class.” I would guess that it is much more likely that the student perceived the interaction as an introduction, analogous to the student introducing himself to Baym at her office.

In short, I think Baym is making the mistake of thinking that being someone’s “friend” on Facebook is equal to being his or her “friend” in some other social context. I would be surprised if the average Facebook user expected (or demanded) the same commitments from his or her online “friends” as from offline ones.

More by Berners-Lee on social networking

This time, its a video:

Video: Web pioneer discusses science of the Internet

Related: Tim Berners-Lee on “the Graph”

Tim Berners-Lee on “the Graph”

Web-god Tim Berners-Lee posted a theoretical blog on the social graph early last week.

He argued that networked computing has gone through three stages. First there was the net, the network infrastructure of the internet. Once users were free from having to physically connect individual machines that they wanted to network, they were able to ignore the network, or the cables, and focus on the computers themselves. According to Berners-Lee, when users could focus on the more important half of this binary, they were able to get more use from the net, and their ability was even more enhanced by enabling the reuse of underused or forgotten resources.

The next level of networking was the web. Because it combined the resources of different machines and connected them together seamlessly, the world wide web allowed users to focus not on the computers, but on the documents. The document of choice, of course, was the web page, which, like the computers of the net, became the focal point of web browsing.

At the third level, Berners-Lee points out that users began to realize that it is what the documents are about, not the documents themselves, that was important. This level is similar to the semantic web, and Berners-Lee calls it “the graph.” (Actually, he calls it the “Giant Global Graph,” riffing on the WWW.) As users are able to capitalize on the graph, he argues, they will be able to exercise more power from their computing tasks, just as the innovations of the net and the web made computing more powerful at those levels. However, to make optimal use of the graph, designers will have to allow for the information stored in their documents to be able to freely interact with the information on other pages.

Letting your data connect to other people's data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don't have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.

It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.

Berners-Lee suggests that this can happen if designers make use of available semantic web tools. He sums up his vision in this penultimate paragraph:

In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.

via Read/Write Web

Facebook’s Beacon ad platform: Criticism and censorship

Facebook has launched a new ad platform called “Project Beacon”:

the new program is threefold: advertisers can create branded pages, run targeted advertisements, and have access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site’s more than 50 million users. Partners can participate in all three components of Facebook Ads, or a combination of them. “When you put this all together, you get some pretty amazing things,” Zuckerberg said of the program, which he said took “four months or so” to develop.

Through the branded pages program, advertisers can design custom pages with information, content, and custom applications—“any application that was written for users on the Facebook Platform,” Zuckerberg explained. Facebook users can sign up as “fans” of that brand, install branded applications, and other activities that will all show up in their profiles’ “mini feeds” and on the “news feeds” that are broadcast to their friends lists.

“When people engage your page on Facebook, that’s going to spread information about your brand virally through the social graph,” Zuckerberg said. “It becomes a trusted referral.”

For MoveOn.org, this new program is going over about as well as news feeds did when they were launched. MoveOn’s Adam Green argues that the platform is “a ‘glaring violation of (Facebook’s) users’ privacy,’ and has launched a paid ad campaign on Facebook, a ‘protest group’ on the social-networking site, and an online petition to encourage the company to allow users to opt into the program at their own volition.” What bothers MoveOn is that Beacon captures online activity outside of Facebook, and then publishes that activity in the users News Feed. While it is possible to opt out of Beacon, the organization complains that the process is complicated, and has to be repeated at each Facebook partner site.

Facebook has responded to these charges, claiming that users’ privacy will not be invaded because News Feeds can only be seen by friends, and that MoveOn’s campaign has misrepresented the difficulties in opting out of the program. The sticking point here is what counts as privacy: Facebook claims that only publishing information to friends is private, while Green claims, somewhat hyperbolically, “If Facebook’s argument is that sharing private information with hundreds or thousands of someone’s closest ‘friends’ is not the same as making that information ‘public,’ that shows how weak Facebook's argument is.” On the one hand, I think Facebook is correct: it is easy to set the privacy features of the site so that the News Feed can only be seen by those you want. However, even though Green may be overstating the case with the numbers he quotes,—which seems somewhat typical of MoveOn’s emotional rhetoric, considering that their other major argument is that Facebook is ruining Christmas—I believe he is correct that users are going to be somewhat blindsided by this feature and will want to have the ability to opt out completely, at least until they get used to it.

I think this new program clearly illustrates the growing importance of Facebook as a networking tool. If people didn’t find Facebook necessary, they would abandon it, rather than try to reform it. Also, I think it suggests that Facebook needs to do some serious thinking about how it introduces new products. Between this issue and the news feed reaction, it seems obvious that the company needs to pay much more attention to how its users react to its new offerings.

Finally, there is another disturbing question related to this issue. In his post responding to MoveOn’s arguments, Josh Catone at Read/Write Web suggests that Facebook users aren’t nearly as outraged as MoveOn is making them out to be, citing as evidence the fact that he couldn’t find any Facebook groups protesting Beacon. However, Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch is suggesting that Facebook may be censoring anti-Beacon groups:

Naturally all the press on the issue led people to go to Facebook to find the group MoveOn set up to organize their opposition to Facebook’s current privacy policy on this issue.

The group, which now has over 12,000 members, could not be located via search. Yesterday a search in Facebook Groups for “Privacy” began to return an error message saying “search is currently unavailable.” But at the same time, searches for any other term yielded normal results.

If this is true, and Facebook did try to limit the spread of the group, then that should make users concerned about the role the company seems to be making for itself in the search and social networking fields.

Email is dead. Long live email!

So, it turns out that the youth of today no longer use email, preferring the IM and chat. Oh, wait; maybe that was the youth of five years ago. At any rate:

e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

However, there is some hope for email yet. Apparently Yahoo and Google are attempting to reanimate email’s rotting corpse as the backbone of their respective social networking strategies. Clearly, people still get worked up about email, but it is possible that, over time, email will morph into a primarily business communication tool, as the most formal—or, perhaps, the oldest and therefore least scary—of online communication methods.

Facebook/Microsoft v. Google

Alex Iskold at Read/Write Web says: Google is worried, but they shouldn’t be because social networking and search are different businesses.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch says: Google was scared off of the deal because it was too sweet for Facebook and the search company wasn’t interested in people-based search.

John Battelle says: Facebook wins because they took Microsoft’s money, but they might have a hard time living up to the $15bil. valuation.

Josh Catone at Read/Write Web says: Microsoft wins because Facebook will add a Microsoft search bar to the system, driving all their traffic to the boys in Redmond. This can only help MS, who are now the #3 search player.

In all of this news, to me the most interesting revelation is that Facebook is clearly making a play to take over the web-as-platform model. If they can make their site the home-base for not only social networking, but, with the Facebook Platform, web apps, widgets, and content, they are going to be trying to take down Yahoo as well. From that perspective, this looks like a really canny move by Microsoft.

Web 2.0 v. laziness

Seth Porges at CrunchGear is arguing that the Web 2.0 “bubble” is going to burst when people get too lazy to continue to supply the sweet, sweet collective intelligence it needs to survive. As Porges points out, “without your neighbor/classmate/sister/girlfriend’s tireless devotion to keeping her profile up-to-date, MySpace would merely be a place for FOX to promote its properties.”

This is an interesting argument, but I’m not sure the examples Porges gives are all that convincing. The test case is Porges’s own migration through the social networking sites: Friendster used to be cool, but soon after joining up, Porges ignored his account there and moved over to MySpace. Then, when he grew too old for the highschool-yearbook vibe at MySpace, he moved over to Facebook, the country club of social networking. According to him, this same wanderlust and ennui is going to hit Digg and Wikipedia soon, causing them to fold.

This may be all well and good for Porges, but it doesn’t seem to fit the facts. As of this post, MySpace is ranked 6th in internet traffic. Additionally, Wikipeida just added its 2,000,000th English article. While I think the argument might apply to social networking sites—they depend on a critical mass of users, and if that mass moves somewhere else, they fold—it doesn’t appear to be affecting MySpace; both it and Facebook are continuing to grow. Further, and more importantly, what people do on Wikipedia and Digg is extremely different from what they do on MySpace and Facebook. I’m not sure that even a competing internet encyclopedia would cause users to leave Wikipedia. Porges himself points out that social networking sites appeal to different crowds—even Friendster is seeing a resurgance in Asia. If a competing encyclopeida emerged, it would likely have a completely different user base and produce a different kind of product. In short, I don’t buy Porges’s argument. Laziness isn’t going to bring down Web 2.0.

Google Books adds social features

Google Books has added a couple new features that enhance the social networking capabilities of the service. The most interesting allows users to embed sections of public-domain books directly into their webpages. Below is an example from Thomas Hobbes’s translation of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric.

The tool is fairly simple to use. All you have to do is click on the in the toolbar, then highlight the area you want to embed. When you’re done, a popup window with the embed code will appear.



The second feature allows users to add books to an online library (see the Add to my library link beneath the ISBN). Although I haven’t fooled around with it much, this feature seems similar to services like LibraryThing. This can’t be good news for them. Not only is the Google feature going to have more users, but it’s free (LibraryThing charges users to add more than 200 books).

These two features have turned Google Books into the YouTube of reading. It won’t be long before people are embedding books in their MySpace and Facebook profiles. I bet that savvy publishers are going to allow new books to have portions embedded on sites, just like some music publishers allow their songs to be posted on people’s MySpace pages.