Social Networks Follow Us
We join a “#social network” and then the networked within start to follow us. We also add new “friends” but don’t much differentiate amongst our choices. We have true friends, special friends, acquaintances, strangers with similar passions, strangers with ulterior motives, causes, game systems, and many other categories of #groupings and #microcrowds, but we fail to automate the connections in an actionable manner. We might as well be “friending” the whole world if we don’t differentiate our interactions. Without flavors of “friends” we lose our context, our ability to use our relationships in a way that builds a stronger lifestyle rather than engendering attraction to the shallowness of our current situation when highly entwined in online social interaction.
It currently takes too much effort to stay well connected, with our collective engagement fractured to an extent that has never been seen before in human history. We interact with and are distracted by highly attractive but subjective information spurts, forced into our attention window by our environments. We gain much in this interaction, but I believe many people on the edge of the adoption curve can foresee a tipping point and the glut of “attention grabbers” will reach a level of personal exhaustion. When we receive the next invitation for anything that grabs our attention we might simply shut down and stop processing, even at the shallow processing level that we’re at today.
What might help >> Open identity systems. Cross site collaborative widgets. API’s. Yes, and…
I know who I am. I know who my friends are. I know how I would classify all the other breeds of contacts that I have. Give me a method, manner, protocol, process, schema or dogma that works to keep my life automated, my contacts pleasant and my lifestyle interesting.
Filed under Integrity, Microcrowds, SNAP | Comments (2)Your Twitter Wake & Bow Wave
As you pass through the Twitterverse you create a bow wave and a lifestream wake.
The larger your Twitter follower network is, the longer and more powerful your Twitter wake shall be.
Your bow-wave is represented by your incoming followers. You get noticed through the public timeline and by the downstream of your followers, then others start to “follow” you, forming the bow.
Your wake is the ripple of tweets and new followers that may fractal off of your own individual tweets.
Filed under Microcrowds, Web 2.0 | Comment (1)It’s a Me, Me, Me, Meme World
The “me, me, me, meme.” What is it?
Cool tech geeks start something online. We jump on the bandwagon. Our friends see what’s going on. A crowd forms, asks questions, then follows our lead. Lifestreams form.
In the video game Final Fantasy VII, the Lifestream is a river of Mako energy coursing through the Planet. The Lifestream is considered the blood of the Planet, which in turn is considered a collective conscience similar to the Oversoul of transcendentalist philosophy, but not quite the same as the type of entity proposed in the Gaia theory.
Our own personal lifestreams, or “public timeline’s” if you prefer, are slightly more mundane that the one from Final Fantasy, however it can still be pondered in an analogous manner. Our lifestream threads together everything that we are. Where we go, what we say, who we interact with, how we express ourselves, concepts inside artwork that we create, symbolism that we identify. All can be considered “us” or “me” in some, hopefully non-banal, way.
We say “me” a lot in our lifestreams. Not always directly. Indirectly also. Off the top of our heads. Well thought out over hours of writing and editing. At the snap of the shutter on our iPhone. While visiting at parties and gatherings. By connecting/friending/following through social nets. Generating our APML wake and bow waves through the public timestream. We are the social seed for our downstream online and offline, everyone has a built-in personal wetware network and many people let this stream filter back online, forming a personal lifestream wake.
When we say “me” we say “we” a lot as well. The “we” message is buried in context of the “me” and provides the rich matrices upon which our lifestreams thrive. “ Frank is watching the Chicago Bears and blogging <link> - #twitter” tells me what Frank Gruber is up to, but the link was meant for his followers -”we”.
When Dave Winer snaps an iPhone photo in the Palo Alto Apple store, I see his Twitter/image post and also note, based on her earlier Tweet, that @StephAgresta is in the store at the same time. @SamHarrelson then notices that Dave might have captured @StephAgresta in his iPhone shot of the Apple store. I then see Stephanie twitter about a happenstance meeting in the Apple store with Dave, Robert Scoble and son. I know all these people, but am I watching a personal version of my own external life unfolding in a Twitter stream? Am I watching Dave’s? Robert’s & Patrick’s? Sam’s? Stephanie’s? Later on I notice (from his Twitter wake) that Robert and wife had their new baby and he might have been in the Apple store in connection with that wonderful event!
Now imagine a person walking up to you, whom you may not recognize immediately, saying “hi Dave/Steph, I just noticed from your twitter stream that you were in the PA Apple store and wanted to say ‘hi’ because we were in the same place at the same time. Our twitter streams crossed in time.”
Wow, new types of meetings are happening in today’s silicon valley technology stores … a new dimension to social meshing is occurring based on bridges being created between online and offline lifestreams.
Me. I’m in this place. I’m in this photo. I’m live video streaming you at this moment. I’m playing pool. I’m waiting at the airport. I’m on AirforceOne. I’m pondering my navel. I invented a new drug. I’m at a funeral. I participated in a Senate hearing. I’m blogging. When saying “me” we don’t like saying it into a vacuum, but that’s the way all lifestreams begin. Erupting from a birth-point in time. The spot upon which we first create a social persona and declare “I am me, and you shall learn more”, like some holy writ dug from the sands of ancient lands. In a world of 6 Billion people we are standing up to say “hello world - I am an individual.”
Now lot’s of folks are saying, “ya, but what about ‘them’, all of you ‘me’ focused people. “Them” - those outside our personal sphere, our socio-economic plateau, our comfort zone. “When you focus so much on yourself you ignore all those people around you.” It seems that if you place your thoughts out into the public consciousness one can be labeled “narcissistic” Who knew this would be the response from people who don’t do it, so can’t “get it?” Duh.
I say create a Twitter wake - drop your social seed and watch it sprout. “Me” “We” “Them” will intermingle. This is the power of connected networks of people.
Of course the solution to the “starting in a vacuum” problem above is simply to participate in life offline as well as online. The wetware networks feed your online social existence. Groupings, micro-crowds, followers, friends, whatever you want to call it, the systems of social interaction which we participate in will subsume our individuality to a greater good if we give at least as much as we receive. However, perhaps when we network in person, face-to-face we can talk about something other than “me” or “we”, I’m so tired of hearing “so, what do you ‘do’?”, perhaps we might re-focus a bit and put ourselves into the shoes of “them” and see what that feels like as a community after the “them” concepts we discuss filter back into our online “we” stream.
Filed under Diatribe, Geo-temporal, Microcrowds, Tagclouds, Web Marketing | Comments (7)Emergency Social-Repeater System
Since I first posed the question in April “Has a Twitter emergency alert system been built yet?”, I’ve noted that several other people have pondered the same concept. Some examples are here, here and here.
It has already been substantiated that when an emergency occurs almost anywhere in the world, the first notification of the event occurs online among socially connected individuals using systems like Twitter.
Social groups of loosely aggregated individuals with similar interests, microcrowds as I’ve been calling them, or groupings as Stowe Boyd calls them, seem like an ideal communication channel for use in emergency situations. Microcrowds overlap and each have “pack leaders” or “social seeds” with deep downstream social connections in the form of followers or friends. The leaders in these groups are generally highly connected through the use of communication hardware like WAP phones and laptops with EVDO connections so highly important information can flow through the #microcrowd channel in near real-time.
If Chris Messina’s concept of #hashmarks as an impromptu channel creation methodology is adopted in Twitter, then perhaps this can also be used to create a repeater system that binds together the alpha leaders of the largest social groupings and emergency response teams, thereby using the massive redundancy of social nets to ensure that important messages are broadcast far and wide.
Adding geo-context to the emergency message would be an important aspect to consider. Temporal-context would also need to be applied so that as the message ages, additional information and updates can be properly contextualized along the timeline of the disaster.
As our dated analog systems fall further behind the power and immediacy of social communication perhaps it’s time to propose an emergency social-repeater system, where emergency information can not only flow quickly, but flow to the people and systems which can possibly affect the speed of response teams and mitigate the negative effects of any disaster.
Filed under Geo-temporal, Mashups, Microcrowds | Comments (8)Rights to First Contact or When Does “Social” Become Spam?
First Contact
When does a “friend” have the right to make first contact with you online?
If I want to contact you in a social network like Pownce, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, should I be required to already know you? If I’m restricted from contacting you before you recognize me, how can I get your attention? On Twitter I can follow you like a stalker without you even acknowledging me. On Pownce anyone can contact me with an initial ping.
What Gives You the Right?
This is not a “pick on Pownce” post, I think the team has created a great system, as has team Twitter. In fact I think Pownce is a far more beautiful site than Twitter… and… there are significant differences between the two sites “first contact” user experiences. These differences spawned a question in my mind. I asked myself, “when does another person have the ‘right of first contact’ with me?”
Social Spam
Recently I received an email based ping sent through Pownce from someone on mySpace, asking me to follow their band on mySpace. I didn’t know them. I’d never heard of their band, yet there they were in my EMAIL inbox. That’s right, Pownce let’s people email me with band spam before I know who they are. But wait, Twitter allows people to contact me before I know them also, what’s the difference? On Twitter I don’t need to do anything, except delete an email from my new follower. Due to the highly specific nature of the Twitter service I know immediately what the email is for, it’s either a “new follower notification” or a direct message meant for my eyes only.
On the other hand the email from my example Pownce user was not even a request for friendship, someone simply sent me band spam under the guise of inviting me to an “event”. I then had to mentally process the email and make a decision about what to do with the request. I had to visit Pownce before I even realized that the request was truly spam and I received absolutely no personal gain from the effort. At least with unsolicited “follower” emails from Twitter I receive value because my personal brand (such as it is) may be expanded with a new follower, even if I choose not to follow the other person in return. Pownce has a similar “follower” feature, but again upon receipt of an email request I’m required to visit Pownce to see if I know the person, or care about interacting with them. For some reason I get many more “junk” requests through Pownce. For each one I need to make a choice about it. I physically need to click a button in Pownce, where in Twitter I can simply ignore the request if I choose to. Pownce requires me to mentally and physically process each new request.
But Wait, We Can Control Our Interactions, Can’t We?
Yes we can turn email notifications on and off for the various networks we participate in. But I believe part of the point of social networking should be that we can interact with one another in a low touch manner. We should be required to put as little effort into the act/methodology of interacting as possible in order to focus on the context and content of the communication. Especially since there are hundreds of social sites we can now use, with more launching every day. I’ve heard more than one person complain about tying to keep up with their current networks, so we need to work on making things easier, not more difficult. The rules of interaction and first contact should not be uniquely obtuse to each network.
On my old school business network, LinkedIn, the method for first contact has been well thought out and has served them well for many years. I must first know the email address for a person I want to contact, or I must go through a trusted third party who serves as a quality filter for my inbound contact request. Before I can bother someone with my email in their inbox I need to establish my authority, my right to make first contact. Due to the nature of the LinkedIn network, social pressures influence me to not spam people who I don’t know with unreasonable requests to connect within the network.
On Jigsaw the right of first contact has been taken to an opposite extreme. I can BUY your contact details before you know who I am. I pay for the right to gain access to your phone, email and mailing address details. Now Jigsaw isn’t a social network, but the point is that my first contact rights are being sold to people who I don’t know. This puts me at a disadvantage should the purchaser of my contact details decide to use my information in the wrong way. Yes I can request to be taken out of the Jigsaw database, but again this requires effort on my part to opt-out of the process.
Today I logged into InviteShare in order to add myself to a list and try to get an invite to dznr.org. To my surprise I actually had mail waiting for me in my account. Hmm, that’s odd…. upon reading the “mail” that term is really the wrong word to use. The better term is “invite spam”. The note reads:
Hi XXXX…I’m looking for some invites, I have…
August 21st, 2007
from sonicxboom
Hi xxxx…I have got an excellent (if not the best) under-ground site for you…
- Every & any tune from new to old…rare to popular, ( all free, of course ).
- Millions of p2p users with full D/L speeds…always!
- 10,000s of users to choose from to get your tracks / albums.
- Simple search bar user-interface to find all tunes.
- Pure p2p…No Ads…all shareware, no fees…( just donations, if any ).If you’re interested…I woule like to trade you the details of this site for any invites…like:
Supertorrents… Oink… TL… or HDBits…if you’re interested.
This site only does Music and I mostly download series, films & Pc games.
I always keep the best ratios i can 1:1 +
Please message me if you want more details…Many thanks & kindest regards,
Sonic x Boom.
Do We Need a CAN-SPAM act for Social Interaction Permissions?
in my mind the question over “rights of first contact” in social networking is exactly the same debate that we had several years ago regarding opt-in and opt-out for email lists. At that time the debate was somewhat resolved with the CAN-SPAM act.
Do we need to legislate the right of first contact or can our industry solve this burgeoning problem of social spam before it gets to the point where lawmakers take notice?
Filed under Microcrowds, Scams, Web 2.0, social spam | Comments (4)Captology and Microcrowd Influence
I learned a new word the other day, Captology, and it helps me define an area of thought of particular interest (thanks to my buddy Crosby!) I was talking with him about some of my recent posts covering geo-temporal and microcrowd concepts and he suggested that I check out a particular Stanford University website. According to the description on the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab website, the definition of Captology:
Captology is the study of computers as persuasive technologies. This includes the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors.
And they have a nifty Venn diagram that I’ve borrowed so you can visualize the concept.
At the moment I’m thinking of how captology interacts with microcrowds. Specifically microcrowds on Websites, Mobile Devices (iPhone), the desktop, in Virtual Reality (SL), and where this crosses over into in-person interactions with geo-temporal implications.
Definition of Microcrowd (s): noun. A group of people in which members are passive, active or aggressive participants. A Microcrowd member may influence other members with their participation.
Example: When I saw my acquaintance Justin Kan during a Citizen Agency party the other day, our discussion led me to consider some new thoughts about geo-temporal tracking. Justin has no idea, but the conversation and my active participation within a specific microcrowd of people altered some of my evolving thoughts around this type of tracking.
In addition to interacting with this example group in person, I also interact with many specific members online. Twitter, chat, email, blog comments and many more points of distributed contact form my networks within the microcrowds that I interact with. Blackberry and MacBook Pro are my primary connection tools, but within email the browser and other applications I also connect with asynchronous video (live: justin.tv recorded:viddler.com) and more.
I might log into the justin.tv website in order to “watch the content”, but because he lives in my city I might log in to see where he is, or to see if the party I’m going to is worth getting into a cab for (Justin tends to hit the same party scene I do so I can “preview reality”.) This seems like the ultimate in technology impacting me, influencing my decisions, yet this decision is also influenced by the wisdom of the microcrowds because if I didn’t travel a similar SF party circuit as Justin and could not “preview the party” then my party-going decision making would be influenced by other microcrowds. If I find out that the Extra Action Marching Band will be at the party, my passive participation in the microcrowd centered on this band would tip me towards attending the party, even without a “reality preview” through Justin.tv, because I love watching this band. Knowledge of their attendance tipped me into going. Once I’ve made this decision, I might Twitter or email about the party to get friends from my other microcrowds to attend. And so it spreads.
At the Citizen Agency party I might have learned something that changes important parts of my life, or I might learn somebody had a birthday. At a Giants baseball game I might be influenced to care more that someone had just hit a homerun, or I may learn that someone that I know had a heart attack. The information conveyed is not important to this particular post as I’m focused on how information waves spread through and among microcrowds. How the information is relayed and the influence applied from within the community and the technology that is in the hands of community members during the conveyance of the message is important, impacting persuasion and human behavior.
I’m participating in many microcrowds in many different ways; in blogs, with family, on social websites, at parties and general assembly events, on handheld devices, in school, on music and video players. Each touch point that I have with the technology tools or in face-to-face meetings will generally influence what I think about and how I perceive “it”.
This appears to be like memes moving virally towards a tipping point, but I believe it’s also analogous to neuron pathway development, influenced by the volume and type of connectivity and communication of participation.
This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for some time, so rather than sit on it longer, or draw any conclusions, I’m just going to put it out there for discussion … hopefully this spurs some new ideas for you.
Filed under Mashups, Microcrowds, Online Advertising, Tagclouds, Web 2.0, Web Marketing | Comments (2)
