Complexity and Social Networks Blog

This past week I was at a workshop held at GDI on "The Social Data Revolution" with a number of executives from industry as well as entrepreneurs from around the world. The group had been explicitly chosen to gather a unique group of people to discuss and formulate key issues around the explosion of social data from online sources as well as data traces from phones and other sensors.

While the workshop was very engaging and had some interesting discussion, for me what was one of the most fascinating things was actually a discussion I had with a few of the participants over dinner.

I brought up the point that while on the face of it this group of people at the workshop seemed to be fairly diverse, with people from Asia, the US, and various countries around Europe participating, we were actually part of a very closed network and coming at the issues of the workshop from very similar perspectives. Most of us had graduated from top universities and had strong connections to academia (particularly around social media for this group), and most of us were heavily involved in the technology sector. Of the invited speakers, about of half us knew each other, and naturally the executives from the participating companies knew the other executives in their company.

This begs the question exactly how many unique perspectives were actually being brought to the table. We can think about this as sort of a more unconstrained version of groupthink, and one sharpened by the fairly flawed assumption that respected academics and executives are smarter than everyone else.

When bringing up this point at dinner, there was wide agreement that this was an important problem, and many of us have found ways to break out of these closed off communities. For example every week I take a Brazilian Ju Jitsu class where I interact with many people who come from a completely different part of society. There are electricians, construction workers, immigrants, as well as graduate students from local universities and biotech researchers.

Then a German researcher at the table talked about how they actually had a public bus driver's license, and once a month they would actually drive a public bus around their city to get that interaction with other groups of people. This prompted a long stare from a Swiss academic at the table, who murmured "I also drive a public bus a few times a year."

This was so incredible that everyone at the table burst out laughing. We were such a homogeneous group that we even mirror the obscure ways that we try to break out of this group! It's not like in Europe it's common practice for people to have bus driver's licenses on the side. This just really drove home for me the importance of branching out from your core network in many facets of your life, since we're actually so like the people that we know that we will probably attempt to branch out in very similar ways.

Of course now I wonder if all of the bus drivers on my ride to work actually moonlight as academics...

Posted by Ben Waber at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At the 2010 International Sunbelt Social Networks Conference, to take place at Riva del Garda, Trento, Italy, from June 29 to July 4, 2010, we intend to organize a session on Twitter networks. We are looking for papers with empirical evidence using the social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter.com. Twitter has become one of the most prominent publishing channels of short messages during the last year and caught our attention as network researchers. We would like to initiate a session on how network researchers use the public conversations observed on Twitter and how they capture, analyze and interpret Twitter networks.

Potential contributors should also note that at the Sunbelt conferences series, final (written) papers are not requested to be submitted: just abstracts suffice. However, all submitted abstracts of the proposed papers will be reviewed by the INSNA organizers (and not by the session organizers), who may also decide on the format of the paper presentation (as lectures of 20 minutes or posters of 60 minutes). In any case, since we would like to coordinate the Twitter networks session, potential contributors in this session are free to contact us before the end of November 2009, as the deadline for submission of abstracts of contributed papers is December 1, 2009. Nonetheless, the abstract submission should be done by the contributors themselves who should complete the Submission Form here. Since the name of the session "Twitter networks" is not listed in the Session field of this Form, applicants should insert it in the "New Session" field.

Session initiators:
Ines Mergel, Maxwell School at Syracuse University, NY
Moses Boudourides, Department of Mathematics, University of Patras, Greece
Lothar Krempel, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Germany
Marc Smith, Connected Action Consulting, Belmont, CA

Posted by Ines Mergel at 7:59 AM | Permalink

Readers of this blog will know that last week I summarized an NSF and Harvard funded report on which I was lead author on online townhalls. Our findings included: if a Member of Congress reaches out to constituents in an online forum, it will reach people who tend not to participate in politics, and especially individuals who are frustrated with the political system, it will affect those constituents' views of the Member and increase their policy knowledge and political engagement. Well, this was picked up on by Senator Tom Coburn (who is trying to defund the Political Science program in NSF) last Wednesday who hammered the report as a waste of taxpayer money. A flyer his staff passed out at a briefing we conducted to Congressional staff on Friday captures the spirit of the critique:

(would be interested in the provenance of the picture, in case any readers know)

At the moment I will not address the merits of the criticisms, but focus instead on the interesting diffusion process that followed from the initial criticism from Coburn. Each day it was picked up by another few blogs. A quote from John Stossel provides a sense of the tone of the postings: "This summer's town hall meetings made many congressmen and senators uncomfortable. No worries. The sycophants they fund have used your tax money to fund a study that advises politicians how they can avoid seeing you altogether." Initially, I would infer, the first few blogs must have been on some distribution list from Coburn's office (i.e., they weren't just watching his website) because there were quotations from materials from Coburn that were not on his website. Thereafter you could see how different blogs picked up on the story, typically quoting or copying from another blog. So what one sees is a signal propagation process through the blogs. And as the signal propagates it evolves. Thus, for example, Stossel quotes from the Heritage blog, but then adds his distinct emphasis. The link and copying structure reflects the attention each blogger is paying to other blogs, however one would guess that each blog has a different but overlapping audience. Here is a picture of the diffusion process to date:

Node colors correspond to dates (28: white, 29: light gray, 30: dark gray). Time flows left to right, where the variations within each day reflect publication time of day, but only in an "eyeballing" sense. Link weights are encoded white: explicit mention, black: shared text, grey: both. Arrows point from destination node to source

What one cannot see, but is certainly reflected here somehow is that there is an interpersonal network among these bloggers (and relevant nonbloggers). However, this micro case study does suggest ways that one might disentangle the informational ecosystem among blogs, by looking at shared text, link structure, and to look at it dynamically and by content. If you know of interesting papers along these lines, please feel free to post in comments. One relevant, freshly minted paper, is:

Carter Butts and B. Remy Cross, "Change and External Events in Computer-Mediated Citation Networks: English Language Weblogs and the 2004 U.S. Electoral Cycle", Journal of Social Structure 10, 2009.

Posted by David Lazer at 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

You Lie 2.0: How disrespect can get you thousands of new friends and a million dollars

At first, Congressman Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's health-care address looked like a career killer. Members of both parties blasted him for his dramatic breech of decorum, and most Americans, regardless of ideology, reacted with disgust.

But the South Carolina Republican used the incident to build a massive audience that has helped him raise more than a million dollars in new campaign funds. He's arguably more influential than ever before.

Welcome to Twitter-era politics, where a moment of fame -- even one as inglorious as Wilson's -- can translate into political power.

The night Wilson shouted "you lie" at the President of the United States, he hired a new-media strategist, who went to work immediately.

Within 24 hours, the Congressman's Twitter account had sent out 50 new messages, and his followers had increased by an unprecedented 500 percent to over 10,000.

Without any sincere apology to the American people or to his fellow Members of Congress, Wilson managed to create friends or, in Web 2.0 lingo, "picked up people" wherever they were -- on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

He replicated the Campaign 2.0 success of his political foe, President Obama, and increased his fans on his congressional Facebook fanpage to more than 11,000.

At the same time, he also equipped his Facebook campaign page with a donation option and added the following pitch:

"Washington Democrats and their liberal allies want to divert attention away from the concerns about the massive government takeover of health care. In fact, they have made me their Number One target -- already raising millions of dollars for my opponent. But I will not give up and I will not back down from our fight. We will not be muzzled. Will you please make a donation to help me fight back against these unwavering attacks? Thank you for standing with me in this fight.".

The result of the Congressman's breach of protocol and subsequent social-media broadcasts: Enormously enhanced name recognition and more than $1.5 million dollars in donations in the week following his outburst (and as of today $2.7 million).

What is most interesting here is how a whole new kind of message spin has emerged -- one that specifically focuses on targeting new media channels and is directed by a whole new kind of PR expert.

It's not just about talk radio and the Internet anymore. In the old days, Wilson's best course of action would have been to sincerely and thoughtfully apologize and then hope that his constituents would forgive him. Not any more: Today's messages are not about damage control but about turning a wrong into a right.

In other contexts, such misbehavior is not acceptable to anyone: Kanye West was shunned by his celebrity colleagues for jumping on stage at the VMA awards during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech; Serena Williams lost her match and received a fine of $10,500 dollars for insulting a line judge during the US Open finals on the same weekend.

Both found themselves in the dog house, both apologized profoundly, not only directly to the person they harmed, but also to the public. Their standings were arguably hurt by their behavior, while Wilson's appears to have been enhanced among those who share his views.

In a recent tweet, he says, "I will not back down from speaking the truth. Please stand with me.".

In Wilson's world, shouting at the president during an address to Congress is now called "speaking the truth." And by being able to communicate with thousands of followers directly on social networks, he can have his own version on the truth, unfiltered by journalists, academics, or pundits. He can directly spin the public, and doesn't need to worry nearly as much about spinning what we normally think of as the "opinion makers."

Democracy may well be better off as a result of the Internet's ability to build audience and supply that audience with direct, unfiltered communication. But as Wilson has shown, it is also a challenge for civil society, loosening norms of public behavior, and giving those who wish to cater to the extremes powerful new tools.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

A few weeks ago a really fantastic study got a lot of press about how researchers found that 90% of US bills have trace amounts of cocaine on them. This got me thinking about some of the other interesting currency studies that have been done.

Where is George? comes to mind as another brilliantly designed study. Researchers stamped thousands of bills with a URL where people who received the bill could go and enter its current location. The researchers got a huge number of responses, allowing them to use bill mobility patterns to approximate human mobility patterns. Of course with the recent availability of high quality cell phone and sensor data this may not be the best data collection method in the future, but at the very least it's a great study design.

But the cocaine study got me thinking: what else can we learn about people's habits from chemical traces on bills? Of course the reason cocaine can be detected is that it binds to the green dye in money, but a large number of other compounds would likely also bind to this dye. Can you learn about fast food consumption from bill traces? Could you gauge the "stress level" of the country by measuring the amount of certain sweat compounds?

You can potentially get this data from other sources, but often it's hard to get a large enough cross section of society to get a broad enough picture. By combining analysis of these physical traces with digital traces, we can get closer to having a complete view of how our society is behaving.

Posted by Ben Waber at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In line with David Gibson's recent post I would like to recommend watching the following video from a talk of Clay Shirky (NYU) at the U.S. Department of State on June 17th. Its a great summary for government and enterprise executives to better understand the issue and impact of the Internet, social media and the emerging networking society on their organizations/work.

There is a follow up interview with Shirky on the emerging events in Iran and the role of social media.

Source: World Bank

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yet again, social networking platforms seem to be playing a critical role in enabling social unrest--now in Iran. Some of us in the network analysis community are probably ambivalent, given all the trouble we go to in reminding people that there were social networks before the internet. Yet it seems that technology is making all the difference. Also troubling--someone tell me if I'm wrong--is the fact that network position, as traditionally conceived, doesn't seem so important when anyone at all can subscribe to an online information source, and when information that fails to reach you through one channel will probably find its way to you through another.

One can study online networking incrementally, by asking how people use the internet to service social ties and perhaps expand their number and reach. But the case of Iran, and before that Moldava, suggests that our baseline assumption, that people are not tied unless we find strong evidence to the contrary (e.g., socializing), might have to be turned on its head. It's not obvious to me that traditional social network analysis will take us very far in understanding such situations, and social movement perspectives might do only slightly better. At the risk of seeming too excitable, we might be witnessing a social discontinuity comparable to the Industrial Revolution, and equally demanding of new theories. That should be exciting to social scientists, but given that we're still puzzling through the French Revolution one wonders how long it'll take us to get our act together.

Posted by David Gibson at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski

Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter's purpose. Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?

We examined the activity of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to find out how people are using the service. We then compared our findings to activity on other social networks and online content production venues. Our findings are very surprising.

Of our sample (300,542 users, collected in May 2009), 80% are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks' members had at least one friend (when these networks were at a similar level of development). This suggests that actual users (as opposed to the media at large) understand how Twitter works.

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This "follower split" suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we cross-referenced users' "real names" against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names.

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.

These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women. We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).

Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Bill Heil is a graduating MBA student at Harvard Business School, and will start at Adobe Systems as a Product Manager in the fall. Mikolaj Jan Piskorski is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at HBS who teaches a Second Year elective entitled Competing with Social Networks. Bill undertook research for parts of this article in the context of that class.

i Piskorski, Mikolaj Jan. "Networks as covers: Evidence from an on-line social network." Working Paper, Harvard Business School.
ii Piskorski, Mikolaj Jan and Andreea Gorbatai, "Social structure of collaboration on Wikipedia." Working Paper, Harvard Business School.

Crosspost. Original version published as "New Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets" on 6/1/09 @ (c) Harvard Business Publishing

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 3:06 PM | Permalink

Btw, example of CDC posting, as linked to by Twitter.

Update on School (K - 12) and Childcare Facilities: Interim CDC Guidance in Response to Human Infections with the Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus

May 5, 2009, 6:45 PM EDT
Background

Photo of school busThis document provides updated interim guidance for schools and childcare facilities regarding the prevention of the spread of novel influenza A (H1N1) virus.

Initial cases of novel influenza A (H1N1) in the United States included school-aged students and were associated with travel to Mexico and school-based outbreaks. Early information from Mexico indicated that many previously healthy young adults were hospitalized with rapidly progressive pneumonia, frequently resulting in respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation and death.

Based on this initial information, CDC recommended consideration of school closure as an option to lessen the risk of infection with this novel influenza virus in order to protect students, staff, parents and other caregivers from a potentially severe disease as well as limit spread into the community.

New information on disease severity and the extent of community spread warrant revision of the school closure guidance. As of May 4, 2009, more than 1000 confirmed or probable cases of novel influenza A (H1N1) have been reported from 44 states, with numerous disease clusters, indicating spread within communities that makes individual school closure less effective as a control measure. Most U.S. cases have not been severe and are comparable in severity to seasonal influenza. CDC and local and state health officials will continue to closely monitor the severity and spread of this novel H1N1 influenza outbreak.

At this time, CDC recommends the primary means to reduce spread of influenza in schools is to focus on early identification of ill students and staff, staying home when ill, and good cough and hand hygiene etiquette. Decisions about school closure should be at the discretion of local authorities based on local considerations, including public concern and the impact of school absenteeism and staffing shortages.
Recommendations

* School closure is not advised for a suspected or confirmed case of novel influenza A (H1N1) and, in general, is not advised unless there is a magnitude of faculty or student absenteeism that interferes with the school's ability to function.
* Schools that were closed based on previous interim CDC guidance related to this outbreak may reopen.
* Students, faculty or staff with influenza-like illness (fever with a cough or sore throat) should stay home and not attend school or go into the community except to seek medical care for at least 7 days even if symptoms resolve sooner.
* Students, faculty and staff who are still sick 7 days after they become ill should continue to stay home from school until at least 24 hours after symptoms have resolved.
* Students, faculty and staff who appear to have an influenza-like illness at arrival or become ill during the school day should be isolated promptly in a room separate from other students and sent home.
* Parents and guardians should monitor their school-aged children, and faculty and staff should self-monitor every morning for symptoms of influenza-like illness.
* Ill students should not attend alternative child care or congregate in settings other than school.
* School administrators should communicate regularly with local public health officials to obtain guidance about reporting of influenza-like illnesses in the school.
* Schools can help serve as a focus for educational activities aimed at promoting ways to reduce the spread of influenza, including hand hygiene and cough etiquette.
* Students, faculty and staff should stringently follow sanitary measures to reduce the spread of influenza, including covering their nose and mouth with a tissue when coughing or sneezing (or coughing or sneezing into their sleeve if a tissue isn't available), frequently washing hands with soap and water, or using hand sanitizer if hand washing with soap and water is not possible.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:09 PM | Permalink

EDIT: I changed the embedded video since the old trailer was taken down

Some of you may have already seen the fan-film The Hunt for Gollum, an original prequel of sorts to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Fan fiction is by no means new. There are plenty of Star Trek stories written by fans, super hero home movies, and others all produced simply because the fans wanted to continue the story, all with no financial gain for themselves. Normally this is branded "fair use" and the companies that own the rights ignore the efforts of these amateur writers and filmmakers.

And then a movie like The Hunt for Gollum comes along. Watching the trailer for the first time, you believe you're watching the trailer for the next Hollywood blockbuster. There are drooling orcs, sweeping shots of spectacular mountains, and incredible special effects. But this movie was written, filmed, and produced for $4500 by a group of about 150 UK Lord of the Rings fans for free distribution on the web.

Watching the finished product is inspiring. While it isn't the best movie I've ever seen (it lasts about half an hour), the fact that I would even compare it to multi-million dollar movies staffed by thousands of professionals is incredible. Certainly this is due in no small part to the dedication of the group that created this movie, and by no means would this amount of dedication be the same for every potential amateur project. After all, this still took years to make. Potentially this could be viewed as a threat to professional filmmakers, as discussed in an NPR article.

One could even wonder if this model could extend to other industries. Could cars be designed and manufactured by weekend enthusiasts? With GM phasing out their Pontiac brand, could die hard fans create their own Pontiac and start rolling out a new line of cars on a limited scale for no profit? When rapid prototyping and 3D printing tools become more widespread, this seems like a possibility.

This might be some of what Prof. Tom Malone discussed in his book The Future of Work, a completely new kind of organization. But interestingly The Hunt for Gollum was a much more physically based production than what he had envisioned. Certainly remote collaboration tools helped the group put this film together, but what really elevated this project was the close knit face-to-face collaboration that was employed to make this movie work. It seems that while new technological tools can push us to new heights, old fashioned teamwork is still crucial for success.

Posted by Ben Waber at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

What is the motivation behind Facebook and other forms of online self-presentation, such as, say, blogging? I posed this question (with respect to Facebook) to my undergraduates. Their answers included a desire for social contact and curiosity about other people (for which, perhaps, self-disclosure is the medium of exchange). Here are some other possibilities:

1. According to Cooley, we see ourselves through the eyes of others, or at least we try hard to. But what others? Whomever we come into contact with, I suppose, for those are the people whose reactions we can gauge. But then online self-presentation poses a challenge, for this is presenting ourselves to people we might not otherwise encounter, and whom we might not ever encounter in person. I conjecture--and perhaps Cooley anticipated this--that we see ourselves through the eyes of whomever we've received responses from in the recent past. Then once a blogger has, perhaps under pressure from a former colleague, presented himself to the blogosphere once and received some responses, he sees himself through the (imagined) eyes of those same people (or at least some typification of that sort of person), and feels answerable to them.

2. Once one has a taste of externalizing one's thoughts and imagining that others care to ponder them, thinking that is not externalized seems kind of pointless, perhaps like singing in the shower after performing in front of a large audience. I've had this experience after reviewing books for journals, of feeling deflated upon then reading a book for no one's benefit but my own. (It passes, unless one feeds the habit by writing Amazon reviews.)

3. Consistent with (2), one acquires the cognitive habit of thinking and experiencing on behalf of an audience, and perhaps of formulating a blog entry as the experience unfolds, so that half the work is done by the time the experience is complete. Whether this diminishes the intensity of the original experience, I won't conjecture. Obviously Twitter takes this to a new extreme.

4. When my students talk about maintaining social contact, I assume they mean contact with high school and college friends, and that a precondition for friendship is, at least in some circles, continuous self-accounting and monitoring of the self-accounts of others. This should probably be distinguished from blogging (or Facebooking) to combat genuine isolation, of the sort that my students are at little risk of but that probably besets folks stranded in the suburbs and beyond. The problem with this formulation is that it portrays online interaction as a last act of desperation, akin to talking to a Wilson soccer ball, whereas it seems that a genuine, if virtual, community readily pops into existence for anyone looking for one. And then who's to say that it's less "real" than a clutch of friends chatting at the coffee shop? As I tell my students: no moral evaluations. No, not even in the footnotes.

Posted by David Gibson at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There were a couple of interesting articles in the last week that highlight the way in which modern communication technologies dissolve socially and institutionally derived boundaries. One story, Growing Up on Facebook, which David Gibson alluded to, discusses how Facebook and related technologies dissolve temporal boundaries. In particular, the article discusses how in yesteryear (say 5 or more years ago) that the move from high school to college (and beyond) was an opportunity to rewrite ones identity. A relevant excerpt:

Six of my nieces will head off to college over the next several years. Some have been Facebooking since middle school. Even as they leave home, then, they will hang onto that "home" button. That's hard for me to imagine. As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

A few days later there appeared in the NYT an article, As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up:

Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based on only the facts the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system's complex rules of evidence. They can also tell their friends what is happening in the jury room, though they are supposed to keep their opinions and deliberations secret.

A juror on a lunch or bathroom break can find out many details about a case. Wikipedia can help explain the technology underlying a patent claim or medical condition, Google Maps can show how long it might take to drive from Point A to Point B, and news sites can write about a criminal defendant, his lawyers or expert witnesses.

These two stories highlight an issue that I have discussed on occasion from time to time in the blog--the rewriting of boundaries in our society, because of the advent of new technologies. The development and use of these technologies, of course, reflect the desire of people to communicate, to share, to gather information. The dissolution of these boundaries, intrinsically, is neither a good nor bad thing. And it's not a monotonic process, as technologies and institutions develop mechanisms to guard those boundaries. One can see that counter movement in everything from the development of devices that, with the push of a button, allow you to zap that loud cell phone conversation in the bus or train, to the efforts of China to control its Internet.

But these two examples reflect a cascade of (sometimes) unanticipated consequences of the advent of the Internet and associated ICTs. This includes everything from the emergence of Abu Ghraib as a story (fueled by photographs taken and sent by mobile phones), to sleep deprived teens e-mailing each other late at night, to the defeat of a sitting Senator because of a poorly chosen word that in another era would have just faded into the night. Arguably, none of these events would have occurred just a decade ago.

I am not sure what the broader narrative here is, or whether there is a broader narrative. However, what is clear is that there is a broad transformation of all of the basic building blocs of society. This blog offers examples from the family, the educational institutions, and the military. I can see when I ask my students to list who they have communicated with in the last 24 hours--for almost all of them the majority of the people they have communicated with is electronically mediated, and most had communicated internationally in that period of time. This would not have been the case when I started teaching at Harvard.

This is not to say that boundaries do not matter any more. People, collectively, are as adept at constructing boundaries as destroying them (as my recent posting on "long tables" versus "round tables" highlights). But it is clear that boundaries are vastly more malleable than they have been. And, these two examples highlight the ambiguous effects on the balance between individual autonomy and collective control-- the first case highlighting the tilt toward collective control (because it is increasingly difficult to compartmentalize ones life), and the second toward individual autonomy (because it is increasingly difficult to isolate individuals).

Posted by David Lazer at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Facebook statistics recently provided by Alexander Schellong--such as that the site adds an astonishing 600,000 users per day--are worthy of serious contemplation by social scientists still playing catch-up when it comes to this and other forms of online communication. But at the risk of seeming curmudgeonly (I imagine my undergrads, Facebook devotees all, rolling their eyes), I want to make a prediction. Social scientists are very fond of "capital," which is a type of resource with a plausible connection to some desired outcome. These include economic capital (money), human capital (skills), cultural capital (powers of discernment vis-a-vis cultural objects), conversational capital (interesting things to talk about) and social capital (social connections). To this list I predict that we will eventually want to add something that I am tempted to call anti-social capital, which is a snarky (and imprecise) term for the absence of ties of a certain type, namely those whose main consequence is that you spend a lot of time online communicating with people who, like you, have a lot of time to spend socializing online. It's not hard to foresee why someone without such connections would fare better at school, in the workplace, and in their family relations than someone with them, other things being equal.

Of course, the problem is not merely time diverted from more serious pursuits--exercise, learning, thinking long and hard about life's problems, interacting with those with whom one shares microbes--but also the disclosure of personal and potentially damaging information. That might point to yet another kind of capital, which I'll call non-self-disclosure capital, which is the state of not having made public (especially online) information about yourself that could result in a serious loss of face, life prospects, and possibly safety if the information gets circulated beyond its intended audience.

Posted by David Gibson at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Many of us have been at the Sunbelt conference for the past two days, and there have been some extremely interesting talks on new research.

Some particularly interesting work is coming out of the United States Military Academy Network Science Center. One of their current projects involves giving out BlackBerries to 35 cadets and continuously logging their location with GPS, e-mail, phone calls, and other data. They are also collecting all other e-mail data and giving these cadets weekly surveys on their networks, so this is shaping up to be a very interesting data set.

Jamie Olsen from the Carnegie Mellon CASOS group also presented some fascinating work looking at shipping traffic patterns using GPS-like sensors and identifying areas of importance using clustering techniques and network measures.

I'm really encouraged to see this uptick in sensor-related research in the social network community, and the great receptions that these and similar presentations received signals the increasing appeal of the reality mining technique.

Posted by Ben Waber at 3:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ines post on the recent Facebook controversy on its Terms of Use got me thinking. Will Facebook be burdened by its user data 50+ years from now? Storage space, of course, keeps on growing, making it possible to store more data per server--or whatever we might call a place to store digital data 40 years from now-- nevertheless, server farms are a major cost factor for social networking companies. Facebook is no exemption. Just in May 2008 Facebook raised $ 100 million to buy 50.000 additional servers. A recent note on Facebook's engineering blog underlines the immense data growth that is happening everyday day:

- 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day (more than 700 Mio photos uploaded monthly)
- FB has over one petabyte of photo storage
- Some more stats: here

Using the latest statistics provided by Facebook (FB)...

- FB has 175 million users (currently current growth: 600.000 users per day)
- the fastes growing demographic is 30+ years old

...lets assume the following
- 2009-2023 (600.000 users a day, 300 days a year)
- 2024-2038 (300.000 users a day , 300 days a year)
- 2038-2060 (100.000 user a days, 300 days a year)
- Users might not always be new users, but users who reregister with a different eMail and the like
- FB does not change its ToU so that only a minority of profiles gets deleted
- one user profile needs at least 1 MB of space
- 2.5 terrabyte of content is uploaded at 300 days a year (I slightly altered the number of people doing uploads)

By end of 2060 FB would have gathered:
- approx. 5.5 billion user profiles (5.2 Petabytes of profile data)
- approx. 19.5 Petabytes of content
- Total of 25-30 Petabytes of data

By 2060 FB's formerly young generation would be old. What would happen to the data? (Virtual)immortality at last? Would FB need to put a lot of effort into maintaining the data? No one can tell whether FB will exist 50 years from now. The above numbers are based on rough/quick assumptions and could certainly be calculated in a more accurate way. However, my goal was to offer food for thought for our readers out there. On that end I am looking forward to your comments or more precise calculations.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The changes of Facebook's Terms of Use were quickly followed by massive protests of thousands of users requesting to abandon those changes. The Consumerist Blog was one of the first to ask their readers to boycott Facebook and look for alternative ways to connect with friends.

About a week after the change, Facebook made the decision to revert back to their original TOS (from Sepember 2008) and now works with their lawyers and legal specialists to come up with an improved version.

For researchers the TOS are critical: not just for understanding how Facebook will use our own data, but we also need to understand how we can use network data to analyze emergent social structures and the way users create, maintain, or abandon their online ties. The current TOS leave us in limbo - not knowing what is allowed and to what extent.

To understand this better and to collect the wisdom of the social network analyst crowd, I recently started a discussion on this topic on the SocNet listserver. I am trying to find arguments that will help to explain my research interests to an Institutional Review Board. The discussion is still going on. A few highlights are:

• Facebook does not allow research (or anyone) to store data more than 24 hours, which makes it difficult to clean, analyze and of course at the end publish the data
• Data needs to be anonymous (especially in SNA network data cannot be anonymous - we need to know what kind of actors are nominating other actors and longitudinal data analysis seems to be impossible)
• So far I have identified three different ways to collect/use Facebook data, although at this point it is unclear how people can comply to the first two bullet points.

1. Bernie Hogan at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK, has created a Facebook application available on iTunesU to analyze Facebook data (open iTunes -> iTunes -> Oxford University).

2. Dataverse project at Harvard's Berkman Center has made available Facebook data.

3. Create an application or a group on Facebook where you can find a way to have people give their consent to collect data on their online behavior and contacts.

We have set up an informal meeting at the annual INSNA (International Network of Social Network Analysis) conference in San Diego to exchange some of the ideas and information available. In case you are interested in joining us - please email me at ines_mergel(at)yahoo.com. I will post an update after the conference in March.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 9:26 AM | Permalink

One of the key themes of this blog has been that social science will/should undergo a transformation over the next generation, driven by the availability of new data sources, as well as the computational power to analyze those data. I, along with many collaborators, address these issues in a paper coming out tomorrow in Science on "Computational social science" (the original title-- Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science-- was more evocative but too wordy). In any case, while I cannot post the final version of the paper, I can post the version we submitted:

Computational social science

David Lazer (Harvard University), Alex (Sandy) Pentland (MIT), Lada Adamic (University of Michigan), Sinan Aral (NYU), Albert Laszlo Barabási (Northeastern University), Devon Brewer (Interdisciplinary Scientific Research), Nicholas Christakis (Harvard University), Noshir Contractor (Northwestern University), James Fowler (UCSD), Myron Gutmann (University of Michigan), Tony Jebara (Columbia University), Gary King (Harvard University), Michael Macy (Cornell University), Deb Roy (MIT), Marshall Van Alstyne
(Boston University)

We live life in the network. When we wake up in the morning, we check our e-mail, make a quick phone call, walk outside (our movements captured by a high definition video camera), get on the bus (swiping our RFID mass transit cards) or drive (using a transponder to zip through the tolls). We arrive at the airport, making sure to purchase a sandwich with a credit card before boarding the plane, and check our BlackBerries shortly before takeoff. Or we visit the doctor or the car mechanic, generating digital records of what our medical or automotive problems are. We post blog entries confiding to the world our thoughts and feelings, or maintain personal social network profiles revealing our friendships and our tastes. Each of these transactions leaves digital breadcrumbs which, when pulled together, offer increasingly comprehensive pictures of both individuals and groups, with the potential of transforming our understanding of our lives, organizations, and societies in a fashion that was barely conceivable just a few years ago.

The capacity to collect and analyze massive amounts of data has unambiguously transformed such fields as biology and physics. The emergence of such a data-driven "computational social science" has been much slower, largely spearheaded by a few intrepid computer scientists, physicists, and social scientists. If one were to look at the leading disciplinary journals in economics, sociology, and political science, there would be minimal evidence of an emerging computational social science engaged in quantitative modeling of these new kinds of digital traces. However, computational social science is occurring, and on a large scale, in places like Google, Yahoo, and the National Security Agency. Computational social science could easily become the almost exclusive domain of private companies and government agencies. Alternatively, there might emerge a "Dead Sea Scrolls" model, with a privileged set of academic researchers sitting on private data from which they produce papers that cannot be critiqued or replicated. Neither scenario will serve the long-term public interest in the accumulation, verification, and dissemination of knowledge.

What potential value might a computational social science, based in an open academic environment, offer society, through an enhanced understanding of individuals and collectives? What are the obstacles that stand in the way of a computational social science?

From individuals to societies

To date the vast majority of existing research on human interactions has relied on one-shot self-reported data on relationships. New technologies, such as video surveillance, e-mail, and 'smart' name badges offer a remarkable, second-by-second picture of interactions over extended periods of time, providing information about both the structure and content of relationships. Consider examples of data collection in this area and of the questions they might address:

Video recording and analysis of the first two years of a child's life (1): Precisely what kind of interactions with others underlies the development of language? What might be early indicators of autism?

Examination of group interactions through e-mail data: What are the temporal dynamics of human communications--that is, do work groups reach a stasis with little change, or do they dramatically change over time (2 , 3)? What interaction patterns predict highly productive groups and individuals? Can the diversity of news and content we receive predict our power or performance (4)?

Examination of face-to-face group interactions over time using sociometers: Small electronics packages ('sociometers') worn like a standard ID badge can capture physical proximity, location, movement, and other facets of individual behavior and collective interactions. What are patterns of proximity and communication within an organization, and what flow patterns are associated with high performance at the individual and group levels (5)?

Macro communication patterns: Phone companies have records of call patterns among their customers extending over multiple years, and e-Commerce portals such as Google and Yahoo collect instant messaging data on global communication. Do these data paint a comprehensive picture of societal-level communication patterns? What does the "macro" social network of society look like (6), and how does it evolve over time? In what ways do these interactions affect economic productivity or public health?

Tracking movement: With GPS and related technologies, it is increasingly easy to track the movements of people (7, 8). Mobile phones, in particular, allow the large scale tracing of people's movements and physical proximities over time (9), where it may be possible to infer even cognitive relationships, such as friendship, from observed behavior (10). How might a pathogen, such as influenza, driven by physical proximity, spread through a population (11)?

Internet: The Internet offers an entirely different channel for understanding what people are saying, and how they are connecting (12). Consider, for example, in this political season, tracing the spread of arguments/rumors/positions in the blogosphere (13), as well as the behavior of individuals surfing the Internet (14), where the concerns of an electorate become visible in the searches they conduct. Virtual worlds, by their nature capturing a complete record of individual behavior, offer ample opportunities for research, for example, experimentation that would be impossible or unacceptable (15). Similarly, social network websites offer an unprecedented opportunity to understand the impact of a person's structural position on everything from their tastes to their moods to their health (16), while Natural Language Processing offers increased capacity to organize and analyze the vast amounts of text from the Internet and other sources (17).

In short, a computational social science is emerging that leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale. Substantial barriers, however, might limit progress. Existing ways of conceiving human behavior were developed without access to terabytes of data describing their minute-by-minute interactions and locations of entire populations of individuals. For example, what does existing sociological network theory, built mostly on a foundation of one-time 'snapshot' data, typically with only dozens of people, tell us about massively longitudinal datasets of millions of people, including location, financial transactions, and communications? The answer is clearly "something," but, as with the blind men feeling parts of the elephant, limited perspectives provide only limited insights. These emerging data sets surely must offer some qualitatively new perspectives on collective human behavior.

There are significant barriers to the advancement of a computational social science both in approach and in infrastructure. In terms of approach, the subjects of inquiry in physics and biology present different challenges to observation and intervention. Quarks and cells neither mind when we discover their secrets nor protest if we alter their environments during the discovery process (although, as discussed below, biological research involving humans offers some similar concerns regarding privacy). In terms of infrastructure, the leap from social science to a computational social science is larger than from, say, biology to a computational biology, in large part due to the requirements of distributed monitoring, permission seeking, and encryption. The resources available in the social sciences are significantly smaller, and even the physical (and administrative) distance between social science departments and engineering or computer science departments tends to be greater than for the other sciences. The availability of easy-to-use programs and techniques would greatly magnify the presence of a computational social science. Just as mass-market CAD software revolutionized the engineering world decades ago, common computational social science analysis tools and the sharing of data will lead to significant advances. The development of these tools can, in part, piggyback on those developed in biology, physics and other fields, but also requires substantial investments in applications customized to social science needs.

Perhaps the thorniest challenges exist on the data side, with respect to access and privacy. Many, though not all, of these data are proprietary (e.g., mobile phone and financial transactional data). The debacle following AOL's public release of "anonymized" search records of many of its customers highlights the potential risk to individuals and corporations in the sharing of personal data by private companies (18). Robust models of collaboration and data sharing between industry and the academy need to be developed that safeguard the privacy of consumers and provide liability protection for corporations.

More generally, properly managing privacy issues is essential. As the recent NRC report on GIS data highlights, it is often possible to pull individual profiles out of even carefully anonymized data (19). To take a non-social science example: this past Summer NIH and the Wellcome Trust abruptly removed a number of genetic databases from online access (20). These databases were seemingly anonymized, simply reporting the aggregate frequency of particular genetic markers. However, research revealed the potential for de-anonymization, based on the statistical power of the sheer quantity of data collected from each individual in the database (21).

A single dramatic incident involving a breach of privacy could produce a set of statutes, rules, and prohibitions that could strangle the nascent field of computational social science in its crib. What is necessary, now, is to produce a self-regulatory regime of procedures, technologies, and rules that reduce this risk but preserve most of the research potential. As a cornerstone of such a self-regulatory regime, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) must increase their technical knowledge enormously to understand the potential for intrusion and individual harm because new possibilities do not fit their current paradigms for harm. For example, many IRBs today would be poorly equipped to evaluate the possibility that complex data could be de-anonymized. Further, it may be necessary for IRBs to oversee the creation of a secure, centralized data infrastructure. Certainly, the status quo is a recipe for disaster, where existing data sets are scattered among many different groups, with uneven skills and understanding of data security, with widely varying protocols.

Researchers themselves must tackle the privacy issue head on by developing technologies that protect privacy while preserving data essential for research (22). These systems, in turn, may prove useful for industry in managing privacy of customers and security of their proprietary data.

Finally, the emergence of a computational social science shares with other nascent interdisciplinary fields (e.g., sustainability science) the need to develop a paradigm for training new scholars. A key requirement for the emergence of an interdisciplinary area of study is the development of complementary and synergistic explanations spanning different fields and scales. Tenure committees and editorial boards need to understand and reward the effort to publish across disciplines (23). Certainly, in the short run, computational social science needs to be the work of teams of social and computer scientists. In the longer run, the question will be: should academia be building computational social scientists, or teams of computationally literate social scientists and socially literate computer scientists?

The emergence of cognitive science in the 1960s and 1970s offers a powerful model for the development of a computational social science. Cognitive science emerged out of the power of the computational metaphor of the human mind. It has involved fields ranging from neurobiology to philosophy to computer science. It attracted the investment of substantial resources to establish a common field, and it has created enormous progress for public good in the last generation. We would argue that a computational social science has a similar potential, and is worthy of similar investments.

References:

1. D. Roy, R. Patel, P. DeCamp, R. Kubat, M. Fleischman, B. Roy, N. Mavridis, S. Tellex, A. Salata, J. Guiness, M. Levit, P. Gorniak. 2006. "The Human Speechome Project," Twenty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
2. JP Eckmann, E. Moses, D. SergI. 2004. "Entropy of dialogues creates coherent structures in e-mail traffic," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101: 14333-14337.
3. Kossinets, G. & D. Watts. 2006. "Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network." Science (311:5757): 88-90.
4. S. Aral, M. Van Alstyne. 2007. "Network Structure & Information Advantage" Proceedings of the Academy of Management Conference, Philadelphia, PA.
5. Pentland. A. 2008. Honest Signals: how they shape our world, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
6. J.-P. Onnela, J. Saramäki, J. Hyvönen, G. Szabó, D. Lazer, K. Kaskil, J. Kertész, A.-L. Barabási. 2007. "Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
7. B. Shaw, T. Jebara. 2007. "Minimum Volume Embedding," Proceedings of the Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics.
8. T. Jebara, Y. Song, K. Thadani. 2007. "Spectral Clustering and Embedding with Hidden Markov Models", Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning".
9. M. C. González, C. A. Hidalgo, A.-L. Barabási. 2008. Understanding individual human mobility patterns Nature 453: 779-782.
10. N. Eagle, A. Pentland, D. Lazer. 2008. "Inferring friendships from behavioral data," HKS working paper.
11. V. Colizza, A.Barrat, M. Barthelemy, and A. Vespignani. 2006. "Prediction and predictability of global epidemics: the role of the airline transportation network," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103: 2015-2020.
12. D. Watts. Connections A twenty-first century science, Nature 445: 489.
13. L. Adamic, N. Glance. 2005. The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election Divided They Blog, LinkKDD-2005, Chicago, IL.
14. J. Teevan. 2008. "How People Recall, Recognize and Re-Use Search Results," To appear in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) special issue on Keeping, Re-finding, and Sharing Personal Information.
15. W. Bainbridge. 2007. "The scientific research potential of virtual worlds," Science 317. no. 5837: 472 - 476.
16. K. Lewis, J. Kaufman, M. Gonzalez, A. Wimmer, and N. Christakis. 2009. "Tastes, Ties, and Time: A New (Cultural, Multiplex, and Longitudinal) Social Network Dataset Using Facebook.com." Social Networks, in press.
17. C. Gardie, J. Wilkerson. 2008. Text annotation for political science research, Journal of Information Technology and Politics 5: 1-6.
18. M. Barbarao, T. Zeller Jr. 2006. "A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749, New York Times, (August 9).
19. National Research Council. 2007. Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data. Ed. Myron P. Gutmann and Paul Stern. Washington: National Academy Press.
20. J. Felch. August 29, 2008. DNA databases blocked from the public. LA Times.
21. N Homer, S Szelinger, M Redman, D Duggan, W Tembe. 2008. "Resolving Individuals Contributing Trace Amounts of DNA to Highly Complex Mixtures Using High-Density SNP Genotyping Microarrays," PLoS Genetics 4(8): e1000167. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000167
22. L. Backstrom, C. Dwork, J. Kleinberg. 2007. Wherefore Art Thou R3579X? Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography. Proc. 16th Intl. World Wide Web Conference.
23. M. Van Alstyne, E. Brynjolfsson. 1996. "Could the Internet Balkanize Science?" Science. 274: 1479-1480.

------------------------------------------------
Full reference for this paper: David Lazer, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, Noshir Contractor, James Fowler, Myron Gutmann, Tony Jebara, Gary King, Michael Macy, Deb Roy, and Marshall Van Alstyne, "Computational Social Science," Science 6 February 2009: 721-723.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:56 PM | Permalink

Speaking of contagion, there was an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor on the spread of viruses in social media, such as Facebook. Interestingly, this problem apparently increased substantially in 2008.

Let me make a short suggestion that there is an opportunity, with the social media, to better understand the epidemiology of computer viruses. In particular, environments such as Facebook are self contained, and have a great deal of information on the strength of relationships among individuals. Further, it should be possible, after the fact, to trace exactly when and where the virus was passed from one individual to another (difficult to do with viruses that affect humans). It should therefore be possible to link topology to spread in a fashion that is generally impossible. There is, in short, an opportunity to greatly advance understanding of contagion with data that companies like Facebook, Bebo, etc, have-- if anyone from these companies is reading, consider this a short research proposal ; - ).

Posted by David Lazer at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There was an interesting article in today's New York Times on Google books. Google books is a massive effort to scan, essentially, all print media, going back centuries. (Also see effort by Open Content Alliance.) Partially putting aside the important issues around control of the data, the digitization of texts creates the capacity to access, organize, and analyze much of what humanity has "thought" in recent history. From the perspective of a social scientist, the exciting prospect is to view this corpus as, perhaps the most extraordinary data set ever assembled (especially when combined with recent developments in natural language processing). Can we see the rise and fall of social movements? Of ways of thinking about the world, linking these constructs to space and time? This is part of a broader movement, as I have written before, toward a "computational social science."

The one aspect of control that this does raise is what access will there be to the entire Google books corpus for researchers? Indeed, part of the concern that has driven the Open Content Alliance (as I understand it) are the issues around public access to the corpus, where, for example, libraries will need to pay subscription fees for access to what could be a Google monopoly. There are similar concerns, as I see it, regarding access to those who wish to do research on these data. For those readers of the blog who have insight on this, please post comments.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It has been a remarkable thing watching the effects of the financial crisis spread to every corner of the economy. Certainly, in my lifetime, there has not been anything quite so systemic. Internationally, we see Iceland, essentially, going bankrupt, and Mongolia bailing its banking system out. The machine tools sector in Germany is suffering mightily because China's imports in this area have collapsed, because US demand for products from Chinese factories are way down. Domestically, it has struck me how much shorter are lines at security checkpoints in airports; taxi drivers tell me that business is way down, and a friend who is a physical therapist tells me that she no longer has a waiting list (people live with their aches and pains in a down economy, I suppose).

All of this can be seen as contagion (see my earlier posting on the madness of crowds), through a wide array of mechanisms of interdependence. Real estate took a dive, and because of the increase in dependence of the financial sector on real estate (amplified by leverage in various ways), the financial sector took an even bigger hit. The financial sector, arguably, is at the center of the global economy, and this has resulted in a transmission to many, many other economic actors. And there are, of course, various other mechanisms of transmission--e.g., the very headlines about the economy creates contraction in demand, as do the conversations amongst people about hardships in their particular corner of the economy.

The two questions now are: (1) how, now, to create a positive contagion, and (2) how to reduce the probability of such an event again. On the first, as one looks to the lessons of the Great Depression, the issue is whether our responses will help or hurt (clearly, they hurt in the 1930s). Certainly, the received wisdom (especially where I stand) is that our understanding of the economy is vastly better than 70 years ago. But I wonder if this is hubris, whether the complex interdependencies of the international economy, the messiness of mixing levels of analysis and phenomena that cross disciplines--e.g., individual psychological versus governmental response-- have actually outstripped our analysis. After all, our theories of the world become embedded within our institutions and policies. That is, if we truly understood the world so well, we wouldn't be in the mess we are currently.

On the second, a metaphor that has always been evocative to me is the building code in San Francisco. There are certain spaces mandated between buildings in SF. Typically, these spaces are quite tiny, but the rationale is that they prevent chain collapses when there are earthquakes. One does not (I would guess) need a rich theory of architecture to justify such a policy, nor is such a policy difficult to enforce. The question is whether there are equivalent economic policies . Clearly, yes--indeed, much of banking regulation is designed to reduce contagion (e.g., bank runs)--but, equally clearly, some work needs to be done in this department. And it is not clear to me that the current analytic foci of economics are well suited for understanding contagion in a networked economy.

Oh yes, and happy new year.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I previously blogged about how environmental sensors could transform how we think about architecture and how this data could be combined with wearable sensors. At the Media Lab's Awareness event, held last Thursday, myself and other Media Lab researchers explored this in more detail. At this event, over 150 sponsors, students, and faculty wore Sociometric Badges for the entire day so that we could show how interactions and behavior varied across different areas of the lab during different parts of the day, as well as give people insights into how different companies behaved: do people from Hitachi and Canon have similar behavior patterns? Do they see the same demos? We gave participants real time feedback on displays scattered around the lab. Here's a screenshot, but a video is coming:

This shows the activity in the different areas. Each circle represents a person, and circles grow as people stay in an area for longer. The solid portion of each circle indicates how much people are talking, and the color indicates how engaged that person is in talking (dark green implies not engaged, bright green is very engaged), which we extract in real time from the microphone on the badges. The circles also move around based on accelerometer activity, so the position information is only based on what basestation people were close to, giving us what room they were in.
Our badges interacted with Ubiquitous Sensor Portals created by the Responsive Environments group, which allowed people to browse video feeds of the building in real time. Eventually this system will enable interaction between the virtual world (i.e. Second Life) and the real world by allowing for voice communication through the portals to other portals or virtual partners in Second Life. Here's a picture of the portals:

At the end of the day we also gave participants feedback about their company's activity and companies that were similar to them. By using the badges to figure out who talked to whom, we grouped companies and people together that saw similar demos, met the same people, had similar behavioral patterns, etc. It was amazing that companies often had more in common with companies outside their industry than with those within it. We actually generated a network of interest similarity, which (not surprisingly) showed the Media Lab at the center with many other companies tapping in to a core of sponsors with many diverse interests, which were not always the companies with the most attendants. The personalized feedback was also very interesting, since we showed people who you may be interested in meeting based on the same features we used for companies. This appeared to work extremely well, since two other people in my research group appeared in my feedback even though I never interacted with them that day. While this information is not useful in and of itself, it did convince me of the system's effectiveness, which for users would help them trust other recommendations.

The point of all of this was not to show how this technology can impact a one-day event. After all, there's not much time for real-time reflection in one day. Instead we aimed to spark discussion about how continuous deployments of these systems could fundamentally change businesses and public spaces in general. Imagine continuous feedback on behavior, personally customized by you to help increase your productivity and effectiveness. Imagine spaces where the line between virtual and physical is blurred to the point where you can just as easily have a conversation with the person next to you as with the person next to you in the virtual representation of your building in Second Life. The Sensor Portals will continue to be active at the Media Lab, allowing us to continually tailor this system to be the most beneficial to users and further research.

We are also nearing deployment of our Sensible Organization tools in the laboratory of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies as well as in the call center of a major financial firm. We hope to measure through these interventions whether or not we can raise productivity and enhance community within organizations, as well as answer deep theoretical questions on networks and behavior. In social network theory there is the frequent claim that central individuals tend to be more productive because they have access to more diverse information, but the causality issue has not been thoroughly studied. Maybe more productive people simply tend to be more central, so we should instead try to detect behavioral and psychological characteristics to create feedback systems. By creating recommendation systems that actually make individuals more central (see my paper describing this system), enabling us to give empirical support to theoretical arguments.

This technology will fundamentally change organizations and management as a whole, and this deployment is the first step in this direction. Over the next few months through longer term experiments we'll begin to learn exactly what this means, and how management practices can change to take advantage of this data while at the same time using it to empower employees to make the right decisions. Stay tuned.

Posted by Ben Waber at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Are you in favour of more efficient and effective government? Of course you are. If one counted the reasons given most often for any type of government reform, these two would score the highest marks.

It is widely recognised that the characteristics of information and communication technologies (ICT) have strong impact on both. Government was thus among the first to utilise ICT. In the early days, punch-card machines were used for the census, and electronic databases replaced large amounts of data stored in non-digital form (for example, in files) throughout government once the technology was available.

Because information drawn from data is at the core of everything government does - analysis, decision-making or verifying eligibility for access to public services, to name just a few - the proliferation of databases, data mining and ICT in general is unsurprising. However, it is this increase in databases, the kind of data being gathered, the way that data is protected (or rather the opposite) and the way it is used internally and externally, that has come under increased scrutiny and been criticised by many civil libertarians.

But the criticisms are not just about civil liberties. When governments implement ICT, outcomes vary. Large-scale projects such as the FBI's Virtual Case File, the UK's C-NOMIS or Germany's FISKUS either failed completely or largely exceeded their estimated budgets, wasting billions of taxpayers' money. There are, of course, also successful projects but, by and large, the expected impact of eGovernment in moving into a brave new world of efficient, effective and citizen-focused government administration has not happened.

The power of ICT
ICT has characteristics that need to be understood before carrying out any impact assessment. These characteristics underline why digital data and databases will continue to grow in the future, and why it is necessary to find balanced governance mechanisms for ICT, for the organisations they are embedded in, and for us - the individuals using them.

ICT allows information processing, coordination and flows to be structured without the common boundaries of roles, organisational relationships and operating procedures found in government. As a consequence, the relationship between information and the physical factors of organisational size, distance, time and costs are altered.

Digital information makes geographical dispersion irrelevant, allowing for new forms of collaboration and networks. Information technologies facilitate the speed of communication and more selectively control access to, and participation in, information exchange.

Interestingly, the standardisation, routinisation and formalisation of information sharing are not only technical requirements for shared databases to be effective; they are also typical traits of bureaucracies.

Organisational memory that was once hidden in non-digital forms or an individual's memory can be stored, managed and analysed in digital form to improve knowledge or facilitate decision-making - helped by the fact that information storage, provision and search costs are virtually zero once information is digitised. Moreover, the human constraints of processing large quantities of information are reduced (for example, through the use of search engines), and software applications make it possible to combine and reconfigure data so as to provide new information.

This has been spurred by the rise of Web 2.0 applications such as social networking sites, mash-ups, tagging, and wikis, with the underlying philosophy that comes with it - i.e. mass collaboration and data sharing - further facilitating the growth of data.

The public has followed this trend on a scale that no one imagined. Younger people in particular store and share data about their activities, location, buying behaviour or personal lives like no other generation before, and periodical incidents of security breaches, identity theft and fraud have not reversed this trend.

Often, this behaviour is based on a conscious decision: millions of users joined corporate loyalty programmes (offered by, for example, airlines, hotels or shops) in return for personalised services, rebates or points that can be used in various ways. People may also just be following an intrinsic desire to share and connect. Wikipedia is one of the prominent examples of the powerful force of collaborative peer production.

Data is also gathered and stored by companies in ways which customers are unaware of, but while the public has less control over the activities of companies, there is generally greater concern when government is engaging in these types of activities.

The rise of government databases
The counter argument is that governments do not gather more data; they are just gathering and combining data in new ways (for example, databases, biometrics, face-recognition software, remotely readable chips (RFID)).

They do so for good reasons: national security, accountability, to provide better public services and to bridge organisational silos. Yet, since 9/11, more data is being sought indiscriminately rather than selectively, meaning that innocent people's data is included through law-enforcement agencies' screening processes.

Indeed, studies have shown that bigger DNA databases produce better results. This may argue in favour of creating a comprehensive DNA database containing information on all citizens and not just those convicted of crimes, as this may actually help to exclude suspects, save investigative resources and have a deterrent effect overall.

The automatic transfer of data about passengers flying from Europe to the US sheds light on another important aspect of the discussion on databases and data sharing. In a globalised world, should countries grant access to their domestic databases and how can they protect personal data beyond their national borders?

Incidents such as the day in November 2007 when the UK government managed to lose two CDs with unencrypted data of more than 25 million citizens underline four key issues relating to government databases.

First, the government has a mandate to protect the public's data. Second, data security is not only about technology. Thirdly, government needs strategies to manage digital trust. Finally, the characteristics that make ICT so valuable (for example, the ease with which it can be transferred) mean there are increasing vulnerabilities and risks: that data will be shared when it should not be, or that it will be lost, stolen or misused. At the same time, there is a risk that data will not be available when it should be.

Paradoxically, calls for new government databases and better interoperability do arise when the system of government fails. Accordingly, new databases to track and monitor individuals and institutions, or links between formerly separate databases, are built.

Moreover, many ideas for creating pro-active, multi-channel, one-stop and joined-up government simply do not work without databases. The volume of data to be collected will grow constantly in the near future as more government transactions are digitised, and cases of data being cross-referenced ('mined') will also grow as the relevant software improves.

Even if a government body decides to discard data, it faces many difficulties.

First, because data storage costs are continuously decreasing, governmental organisations prefer to keep everything, creating 'data cemeteries'. The expansion in the volume and kinds of data maintained by agencies have made it almost impossible to maintain an inventory of resources.

Second, interim systems sometimes bridge the incompatibilities between the old and the new system, thus keeping the legacy system alive and increasing its overall complexity. For example, the US' Internal Revenue Service launched a new software application to support a total quality management initiative, but never shut it down after the initiative ended. The amount of work it would take to resolve issues relating to data exchange with other systems were considered too high.

Moreover, these 'electronic mounds' accumulate massive quantities of rules that conflict with changes to other systems. For example, to control user access, user behavior or make sure different software applications can work together. The possibilities of storing and searching electronic information may also justify the development of large sets of these rules, so ICT does not always cut red tape. This is why some have proposed a combination of laws and technology to require and make it easier for data to be deleted - and thus "revive our society's capacity to forget".

Policy options
The expansion of databases puts greater burdens on the political-administrative-ethical calculus to strike the right balance between innovation and regulatory regimes. The following questions should be considered by policy-makers in the planning stages of initiatives that include setting up databases:

• What type of data should be collected and why?
• Who collects, maintains and owns the data?
• How is the data collected?
• How long should the data be stored?
• Should the data be shared and why?
• Who will be affected by making data more widely available?
• What impact will the data have on different stakeholder groups?
• Is the data aggregated?
• Is there a minimum opt-out provision for those who provide the data directly or indirectly?
• What security measures and policies are in place to protect the data?
• How to can the data be accessed and changed by those who provide it directly or indirectly?
• How can accuracy of the data be ensured?
• How can the data be reviewed and disclosed?
• Do third parties who provide or use the data have the same security standards and privacy policies?

Policy-makers should also consider educating the public better on issues such as privacy and identity self-management - a process which may need to begin as early as in elementary school. They also need to understand how trust and the perception of security in digital government is created.

In any case, there will be many alternatives for government, businesses and the public to choose from when incorporating ICT into their lives. The perception of what is right and wrong will evolve alongside the values they are measured against, and the databases and techniques they are applied to.

(a longer version will appear in the European Policy Centre's "Challenge Europe - Is Big Brother watching you - and who is watching Big Brother" publication)

References:
D. Lazer (Ed) (2004) DNA and the Criminal Justice System, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

V. Mayer-Schoenberger (2007) 'Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing', RWP07-22, Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA: John F. Kennedy School of Government.

National Research Council (2008) Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment, Washington, D.C: National Academies Press

A. Schellong (2008) Citizen Relationship Management, Brussels: Peter Lang Publishing.

D. Tappscott; A. D. Williams (2007) Wikinomics, New York: Portfolio Hardcover.

The Economist 'Data Mining, 27 September 2008.

The Economist 'Privacy in Britain, 28 January, 2008.

The Economist Big, bigger, biggest', 28 February 2008

The Economist 'Identity parade, 14 February 2008.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the last year motion sensors have been deployed at a leading academic research laboratory to study how people use space. This study has been using sensors similar to those developed by MERL, which detect when an object moves under a sensor, which are mounted to the ceiling. This does enable for limited tracking capabilities, although the sensors are placed only in "public" spaces in the lab. Naturally this is rich area for research and this study also provides a platform for studying privacy systems.

While these sensors can be used to study how people use buildings in their current state, to me the most interesting question that these sensors can fundamentally change architecture. For example, if certain room types are found to be more effective for fostering interaction, could rooms automatically alter themselves (unfurling walls, moving lights, adding chairs) to try to elicit desired behaviors? Of course this could be done manually by having someone navigate an interface, but allowing the organization itself to specify architectural parameters and have the building change from day to day by itself would be fascinating.

The data in this ongoing study is kept public (online as well as access through a public display) to members of the laboratory being studied, although not to the outside world. This is a marked departure from previous studies, which would often only release analyzed behaviors months after the study. Still, it is important for people to know who is looking at the data, since someone at the lab could potentially use the data to track someone. Interestingly, when the system was installed there was an initial minor backlash, but now that the system has been in place for so long people mostly ignore it. I have experienced this before with the badges, but I suspect this is true in e-mail monitoring and similar applications as well.

Many companies are developing this built-in sensing technology, and NEC appears to be emerging as a leader with their IR motion sensors that actually leech power from fluorescent light bulbs, allowing them to last indefinitely in the environment, versus 3 years for the MERL sensors. While this technology is still experimental, this technology should become commercialized in the next few years, either as a consulting package or a standalone sensing tool.

Posted by Ben Waber at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I recently picked up my oldest daughter from immersion Chinese camp in Vermont (an interesting statement in itself about global networks). It was striking to me that as soon as she got home, she got on Facebook to friend many of the kids she got to know in camp. This was quite a contrast to my own experiences in high school and college (fairly typical of my cohort), when intense, immersive social experiences for the Summer almost never yielded friendships that lasted beyond. I wonder what the long run effects of Facebook and related sites/technologies will be? Do they make friendships stickier? There are a few reasons why they might. First, the technology is designed (e.g., through "status updates") to remind you about your "friends." You will still see status updates pop up on someone you friended years later. Second, Facebook acts as a self-updating address book. For example, when all of the kids in my daughter's camp cohort go off to college, they will update their profiles accordingly. Facebook thus greatly facilitates search--search based on finding a particular friend, or finding friends in particular locations. E.g., will my daughter, years from now, move to some town, and notice that someone she went to camp with in high school is there, and resume that latent friendship? In my generation that would have been implausible; for the Facebook generation, I suspect it will be rather different.

This yields an interesting, researchable question for some reader out there. One could imagine a survey of people, say in their late 20's, asking how many were still friends with people they met in high school, as well as people they met during high school but not in high school. If one could do repeated cross sections over the next decade, the question is whether there is a sharp disjuncture at the point that Facebook became near universal.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

In the late 1990s everything connected to the Internet got an "e"–say eGovernment or eCommerce. With the evolution of mobile technology we saw the "m" appear by 2002–say mGovernment. Eventually we also saw the rise of "i" a little later. Now its a "2.0" frenzy every time ideas and principles of Web 2.0 are applied to a subject matter. To name a few: War 2.0, Politics 2.0 or Cyberlawyer 2.0. Of course there is also Government 2.0. A little research reveals that O'Reilly who coined the term Web 2.0 had briefly addressed this topic in May 2006. Though NYT's David Pogue stated in May 2007 that we have only picked the "low hanging fruit" of Web 2.0 ideas. Among his suggestions of what had been missed were applying Web 2.0 to government. Further research gave me the impression that with a few exceptions, the discussion of Government 2.0 has not been truly connected to work in eGovernment, political or administrative science. While I am still working on a paper to address this issue, I would already like to put one of my arguments out for discussion, that is the philosophy of Web 2.0 was more revolutionary for the business world than for government.

A fundamental aspect of Web 2.0 is user empowerment. In Web 2.0 this is done in different ways. Information that was formerly rated as proprietary, is now openly available. Users may rate or comment on products or firms in general, whether facilitated through an enterprise or by using their blogs. Moreover, firms make various resources available to the users so that they can satisfy their individual needs or create something new. In the early 90s, enterprises recognized the need to build closer relationships with their customers. While many companies have not lost control, they have significantly opened up. They have also followed public expectations and are active in government domains. We could, therefore, say that there has been a democratization of the consumer. The individual and collective power of the voice option increased.

Shouldn't governments do the same? Well, yes you might say. However, let me ask you the following question: Haven't they done so in the past? For centuries political philosophers have discussed the obligations of government and citizens and the relationship of the two sides. For hundreds of years it has been a common practice to offer citizens (offline) alternatives of participation/ empowerment. For hundreds of years we have also seen many ways of disempowerment. Today, there are citizen consultation groups, commentary sections on websites, virtual/real town hall meetings and many more ways of participation. Of course there is a lot of information government does not want to share with the public for other reasons than national security. Government could also do better by including Web 2.0 ideas into their eGovernment offerings. In particular, in the field of public participation which is still rated at a low maturity stage in the latest eGovernment survey be the UN. In conclusion, a government's experience in integrating the "consumer" should not be forgotten when talking about Government 2.0.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I read an interesting op-ed in todays NYT. The basic argument is that the basic notion of Web 2.0 counters the terrorist group's overall communication strategy and philosophy. An additional argument is that the empowernment of the online community through Web 2.0 in the Arabic-Islamic world is Al Qaeda's weak spot in line with the former argument.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 6:45 PM | Permalink

by Philip Mueller

VENDOR-DRIVEN Theory: a vendor's conception or mental scheme of something to be done, or of the method of doing it;

As we are moving into network society, we need to be aware of the phenomenon of vendor-driven theorizing and able to critically reflect vendor-driven theories.

- When we talk about theory, it makes sense to distinguish between theories observing the world and theories shaping the world. Let us call the first, explanatory theories (e.g. Newtonian Physics) and the second constitutive theories ( Liberal Democracy). Of course, most theories are hybrids (think Marxism, Liberalism, or Confucianism), but we can distinguish when hybrid theories observe or shape.

- I use the term vendor-driven theories to talk about situations in which a supposedly neutral software application or management approach introduces a substantive theory into a process. Think of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management in the business world in the 1990s as examples of how the software changed the theory of how business was done.

- ERP and CRM vendors, integrated solution providers, and consulting firms have recently discovered the public sector as the next market for existing software applications. ERP has been re-christened GRP, as in Government Resource Planning and CRM, CiRM, as in Citizen Relationship Management. Government officials and public administrators have been happy to take up the ideas pitched to them and are implementing.

- What is interesting is to ask of course, in how far the analogy between ERP and GRP and CRM and CiRM works and where it breaks down? We also have to ask in how far these vendor-driven theories carry transformative potential and if it corresponds with our ideas about how governance should be organized.

This posting is indebted to Alexander Schellong, Hasnain Bokhari, and Philipp Zimmermann. In discussions with them I developed an appreciation for the amazing/scary transformative power of vendor driven theorizing. I believe it is an important term to introduce into the debate, which I hereby do.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today's online version of the economist included the following figure on membership growth of facebook. It appears that growth rates have somewhat peaked.

How about our readers. Are you tired of your current social networks?

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In an earlier post I discussed how intrade.com on election nights anticipates electoral outcomes a few hours before they are publicly known. Well, what happened on Super/Duper/Tsunami Tuesday? Here is a chart that does not do justice to the wild vacillations (a finer granularity focused on just 3pm to 3am super tuesday would have been ideal; unfortunately, I could not produce a chart with exactly the right time period.):

Late afternoon/early evening Obama shot up from mid 40s to about 60, and then collapsed to about 40, and steadily climbed to a level a bit above 55.

What happened? The early movement in Obama shares certainly did not anticipate the outcomes of the evening. Well, apparently, the private information flowing through the network "in the know" was that early exit polls were very good for Obama-- potentially in a good position to win California, for example. This would have been a huge victory for him. Of course, as the returns came in (and more data to the exit polls, which generally did pretty well), it became increasingly clear that while Obama would do fine for the night, he would not win California, resulting in a lot of selling of Obama stock (note the volumes).

And the information since Tuesday, especially on the money front, has been very good for Obama, presumably fueling an increase in value Obama shares (I have not parsed the timing of the Clinton announcement and the movement of Obama/Clinton shares).

In any case, sometimes where there's smoke, there is a fire. Just, perhaps, hidden in the network....

Posted by David Lazer at 3:53 PM | Permalink

Right now I’m at Sunbelt 2008 in Florida, and there have been some very interesting talks on the first day.

Johannes Putzke (pictured above) presented very interesting work on MMO game social networks. His collaborator, Marius Cramer, built an German MMORPG that developed a large following that enabled them to collect detailed interaction and performance data on players. By examining a random selection of 55 players over a period of 3 months, they found that demographic factors significantly impacted network formation, with women being more desirable partners than men and older individuals accumulating more ties. However, the structure of the network actually had no discernable impact on player performance.

In fact, I saw this trend echoed throughout a few presentations today. These studies were often replications of previous work, yet the results they found were much weaker than others that have been reported. It did appear, however, that when this information was combined with demographic or other job-related data that predictive power increased dramatically. This is in line with some newer results that are emerging in the field as more diverse environments are being studied, namely that you cannot just look at social network structure. You need to dig deeper into the data at the node level to obtain a greater understanding of the individuals embedded in these networks. In fact, the data at this level may be even richer than that at the network level, as well as more easily interpretable.

Posted by Ben Waber at 4:51 PM | Permalink

I have been meaning to write about the incipient rise of network ideas within political science since the political science (APSA) meetings over Labor Day weekend. There has always been a (very) thin thread of network ideas within the discipline. The most robust has been on political behavior, most notably the work by Robert Huckfeldt, John Sprague, and collaborators, and Samuel Patterson wrote about networks in legislatures. And there has always been a networky component of the federalism literature, e.g., in Jack Walker’s work on diffusion among states. And of course, the recent work from Robert Putnam on social capital has a relational foundation. Recent years have definitely witnessed an uptick in network-related publications in political science, but nowhere is this trend more evident than at APSA. As a point of comparison, back in the mid 90s, there would be at most a handful of network-related papers (some years, just me, I believe). This year, I am guessing there were 50-60. This included a thematic panel to lead off the conference, with Michael Heaney, John Scholz, Scott McClurg, John Padgett, Christopher Ansell, James Fowler, Sarah Reckhow and myself.

I will note that those of us on the thematic panel met after to talk about what we could do to catalyze the network agenda within political science. Approaches like this face a particular challenge within political science because of the fairly rigid division of the discipline into subfields across which there is relatively little communication. Thus, cross-subfield methods and theories face a critical mass problem. It’s not insurmountable, but it does require some self conscious efforts to get the ball rolling.

Anyhow, while we have floated the possibility of doing a conference on networks in political science (stay tuned on that), one immediate step I would recommend is getting a solid group of political scientists to attend Sunbelt. I have now spoken to a number of folks, and I think we are pretty much assured of getting 10-15 political scientists there (instead of < 5), and I would encourage any interested political scientists to attend. Note that the deadline to submit abstracts is coming up fast—October 5.

And in the mean time, I would be interested in hearing suggestions as to how to catalyze things (either through e-mails to me, or preferably as a comment to this posting).

Posted by David Lazer at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

While the baby boomers are slowly taking to online networking (see my earlier post here), some youngsters should probably do a little less of it.
Apparently too much use of Facebook does not have a positive effect on "real-life" (or traditional) networking. An article by Michael Schulman in this week's edition of the New Yorker talks about an NYU freshman seminar entitled "Facebook in the Flesh". The aim of the seminar, part of a series of seminars during freshman orientation, was to re-introduce the Facebook generation to face-to-face meetings. Participants were given a few questions ("What drew you to NYU?") they had to ask each other in pairs. This excerpt from the article nicely summarizes the outcome:

"[The facilitator] blew a whistle. 'Thoughts? Feelings? Reactions?' he said. 'Was it hard?' 'Harder than Facebook,' one girl said."

Some food for thought.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 1:00 AM | Permalink

An article in today's New York Times discusses the emergence and popularity of social networking sites aimed at the 55+ population. Very interesting, I thought, in particular the hypothesis that while these sites might take longer than myspace or facebook to reach high levels of usage, baby boomers are likely to "hang around". This resonates well with investors...read the full article below.

The Graying of the Web
By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 11 — Older people are sticky.

That is the latest view from Silicon Valley. Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users.

The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown. They look like Facebook — with wrinkles.

And they are seeking to capitalize on what investors say may be a profitable characteristic of older Internet users: they are less likely than youngsters to flit from one trendy site to the next.

“Teens are tire kickers — they hang around, cost you money and then leave,” said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog “Infectious Greed.” Where Friendster was once the hot spot, Facebook and MySpace now draw the crowds of young people online.

“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.”

This prospective and relative stickiness is helping drive a wave of new investment into boomer and older-oriented social networking sites that offer like-minded (and like-aged) individuals discussion and dating forums, photo-sharing, news and commentary, and chatter about diet, fitness and health care.

Continue reading ""Older people are sticky" - social sites for baby boomers" »

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Online gaming is a multi-million dollar business. World of Warcraft, one of the most successful role playing games (RPGs) which is said to generating revenues over $250 million. Yet, this business allows third parties to make money too. Given an average age of over 25, many players in the US or Europe don't find the time or just don't want to spend numerous hours in the virtual worlds to develop their characters. The solution comes from countries like China. There, virtual gold is mined or characters are "trained" and then sold via online auctions to those in need. Today's NYT offers an in depth-look at the life of the virtual gold farmers.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:25 PM | Permalink

In line with David's recent post on social networks and investing, I stick to the topic and would like to point your attention to Social Finance...

VoIP companies such as Skype, now owned by Ebay, are having a big impact on the telecommunication business. Youtube and blogs are threatening traditional business models in media and communications. The business of head hunting is most likely altered by online social networks. Yet, the tools and structures to do money lending or investing have remained the domain of professional organizations such as banks. Could Social Banking or P2P lending change this?

Social Banking or people-to-people (P2P) lending is a term that is describing web based ventures that provide people an alternative opportunity to lend/borrow money. The banking is called social because it uses social mechanisms used in social software. The purpose of social banking can be for profit or non-for-profit.

How does it work?
Prosper.com was the first people-to-people lending market place (starting in mid 2006). Others followed such as the UK based Zopa, the German based Smava, CircleLending or the soon to be launched Microplace (bought by eBay). Lending club recently announced its collaboration with facebook where its application can be integrated by the 25 Mio+ facebook users. P2P lending allows people either to lend money or borrow money. People who want to borrow money name the amount and their maximum interest rate they are willing to pay. In addition they need a social security number, drivers liecense, a bank account so that prosper can verfiy the identity and other credit information. Borrowers also present their reason for lending the money (i.e. pay for K-School tuition, extend a business), their personal income and expenses and a picture. This information is available to anyone - even non registered members. Former lenders or others such as family members may endorse a borrower. Combined all these measure aim at creating an environment of trust, community and control. Borrowers may also found groups to improve their average credit rating which creates a level of pressure for all group members to avoid late payments which will have an effect on everyone else. Yet, only $25,000 can be borrowed at one time per group or individual borrower.

Lenders can bid on those loans although Prosper is essentially providing the loans and sells it to the lenders. In order to diversify risk, lenders can decide to lend small amounts of money to several borrowers with different credit rating.

Some thoughts
The boundary of interest rate elasticities is obviously determined by the market (central banks and major credit actors). Therefore, lenders are less likely to consider investing money once a borrower's interest rate is below the one lenders would receive in a risk-free money market account. On the other hand borrower's are most likely on willing to pay an interest rate that is the same or below the one provided by major market players.

I am just wondering whether this concept is transferable into any culture and nationstate. According to a survey 74% of British citizens would consider using social banking websites. In contrast, anyone I talked about the idea in Germany was very critical about it, especially the trust component. Trust, cultural norms, social circles and government regulations likely play an important role. Social Banking will certainly be an era where economists and experts of social networks and social capital can enrich each others discussion. This is an emerging trend and as I heard a hot topic for online business investors. Its too early to judge whether social banking can be a disruptive to the banking industry. However, that might be an interesting alternative to many people who are afraid of investing in stocks. Speaking of stocks, may be the next platforms allow individual users or groups of users to do their own IPOs - from P2P lending to P2P stocks!?

What do you think about social banking?
Where do you see its advantages and disadvantages?
Would you participate in it?
Can it disrupt the banking industry?

Continue reading "Social Finance - P2P lending - Could Web20 provide the people with the power of banking?" »

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

While CRM has been researched and applied in private enterprises for years, it has only recently gained attention as a concept for government. Concurrent with the emergence of eGovernment and the general tendency of transferring more and more business concepts into the government domain, articles and studies started to address the topic. Many articles on eGovernment briefly address CRM when referring to aspects such as one-stop government or a multi-channel environment directly or indirectly. Besides CRM, authors introduce slightly altered terms like Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM), Constituent Relationship Management (CRM), Public Relationship Management (PRM) or Citizen Encounter and Relationship Management (CERM) to underline its government orientation and application.

Private sector CRM literature is highly fragmented and lacks a common conceptualization (Zablah/Bellenger/Johnston 2004). It is, therefore, somewhat unsurprising to find the same characteristics in its application to government. Truly sarcastic oberserves might say "garbage in, garbage out". The literature on CiRM currently lacks a common definition, conceptualization and set of goals. I define Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) as,

a strategy and set of management practices, enabled by technology with a broad citizen focus, to maintain and optimize relationships and encourage new forms of citizen participation.

Most articles on CiRM review private sector CRM, technological aspects (CRM systems) and expected benefits in government. There is a general agreement that many aspects of CRM are not sector-specific. However, they need to be translated into the context of each sector. Customer segmentation can serve administrators to identify those needing help or who are about to do so. Customer retention strategies can be directed at preventing citizen’s from using a service again. Yet, the termination of unprofitable customers, data mining, broadening the service range and thus choice, the issue of externalities or conceptualizing the citizen as customer are believed to be harder to transfer to government.

Another issue is that term CiRM is applied to describe any citizen-focused initiative or interaction. For instance, public service provision through an online portals are presented as successful CiRM projects. Administrators struggle with the lack of knowledge on CRM, in addition to their discomfort with CRM terminology. Public administrations, which claim to engage in CiRM, connect it to single customer service initiatives, online portals, electronic case management, call centers, physical one-stop service centers and CRM software. However, the literature offers little to no insights into organizational, cultural or process related changes in CiRM initiatives in terms of a holistic understanding of CRM.

King (2007) analyzed the results of the British CRM Pathfinder program (2001-02) and the CRM National Programme (2003-04). The majority of CRM projects focussed on adding CRM capabilities to call centers and one-stop shops. Participating municipalities can be in different stages of a proposed CRM development path which do not build upon each other. Therefore, a contact center and multi-channel environment may be realized without the changes towards a customer centric organization. In addition, there was little evidence for citizen analytics (segmentation, needs analysis), organizational changes (bridging departmental silos) or true multi-channel access. Janssen and Wagenaar (2002) found similar results and concluded that Dutch CiRM efforts are in an “embryonic stage”. Along these lines, in their survey of the status quo of CRM in German public administration, Bauer, Grether and Richter (2002) reported that the CRM elements implemented are far from meeting the holistic concept of CRM. Per-sonalization and a closer analysis of commonly used public services are frequent practices, while segmentation or profitability analyses remain untested concepts. Among the biggest barri-ers to exploring CRM, German administrations mention their lack of human resources and time constraints. In the United States, CiRM is mostly connected to 311 non-emergency number call center initiatives and innovations such as the performance management concept CITISTAT.

Based on some of these facts, I strongly recommend making sure to come up with a clear definition and concept of CiRM before communicating it throughout the organization and attempting an implementation.CiRM is more than a contact center and it is also different to eGovernment although both can certainly enrich each other.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Permalink

During the last three weeks, I have attended two different conferences - both focused entirely on (Social) Networks: First, I went to Greece to attend the International Conference for Social Network Analysts (main audience/attendance: social scientists) and I am currently blogging from the NetScience conference in New York in the Hall of Science (main audience: scientists).

I talked to a lot of people and listened to a lot of talks at both conferences and I noticed a couple of interesting things:

1. Researchers in all fields, natural and social sciences are working on (social) networks and within their specific fields they are located in a very specific niche within their own discipline. This is reflected for example in the fact, that a lot of researchers feel obligated to explain what a social network is and what the definition of concepts such as centrality are.

2. The basic concepts and analysis methods are the same across all disciplines, but we all use different language to describe what we are doing.

3. Researchers in different fields have different needs for analyzing and visualizing their network data and those who have the abilities to do so are creating/programming their own visualization and analysis tools or libraries. This seems to be an exploding area and I see a potential to synchronize the different needs and tools across disciplines.

4. Academic disciplines on (social) network research are largely disconnected and innovation is occurring within the disciplines, but usually not across disciplines. It seems as if the wheel is reinvented, but because academic disciplines are isolated and siloed the overall network science field is extremely innovative for its specific audiences.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 5:08 PM | Permalink

Today Google announced partnerships with the states of Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia to make it easier to search for hard-to-find public information on state government websites. With millions of data bases scattered throughout the government landscape, Google is of course interested in tapping into that market. It is already offering a special search engine for US government information. Google also provided Ireland with its search technology. Governments on the other hand realized that many citizens already prefer finding government information by using private sector search engines (due to better search results) instead of the ones developed for government portals. Google's government collaborations are probably more about using their technology like "Coop" or "Search Appliance" rather than the data but the press release did not elaborate further on that issue. Google retains personally identifiable information which is a big issue for privacy advocates. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google once said that, "We are moving to a Google that knows more about you". Google, therefore, refused sharing this data with governments in the past. If Google just supplies the technology and data is stored on government servers Google should be safe from conflicts of interest. However, in other arrangements (i.e. outsourcing) it might be more difficult to draw the line in terms of data ownership and access.

In any case here is an overview on how to find government information.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Governments worldwide are facing three issues of importance. Many experienced administrators will retire which also results in a drain of knowledge. Furthermore, governments have to do more with less and be innovative by i.e. exploiting the benefits of ICT while at the same time cutting budgets. I recently read an article about new government recuriting methods which nicely illustrates Granovetter's theory of weak ties for job finding and possible utilization of SNS in government.

"All over the country, municipalities are widely reporting that it’s hard to recruit city managers, technology directors, engineers and people with expertise in the fields of accounting and finance. States seem to be having a little easier time of it right now, especially if they are in the heady throes of gubernatorial transition. In Massachusetts and New York, private-sector experts in areas ranging from public health to homeland security have been enticed to lend a hand to ambitious new governors, even though it has meant putting another career on hold and taking a huge hit in salary [...] When Antonio Villaraigosa became mayor of Los Angeles in 2005, his headhunters required all potential high-level aspirants to apply online, says his transition chief and now chief of staff, Robin Kramer. In the end, Villaraigosa ended up filling most of his top jobs the tried-and-true way: He approached people who were known to him or his top staff or who were referred by some other trusted source. "

In order to find the right people governments are increasingly tapping into headhunters, web based job platforms and certainly social networking sites like LinkedIn to widen their choice of possible candidates.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

To any social network scholars out there, I will feature any decent network pictures that you come up with from the e-mail data released by the DOJ on the Netgov blog.

One of the notable points (to a social network scholar) of the controversy over the firing of the 8 US attorneys are the DOJ e-mails that have been released .

This episode illustrates the siren call of e-mail. Here is a set of people who have an enormous incentive to keep their interactions untraceable, and yet so much of their communication is via e-mail. It’s just too convenient. I am sure that truly sensitive issues are much more likely to be conducted via face to face or phone, but it is hard to anticipate what will become sensitive. Thus, for example, one e-mail highlights the AG’s presence at a meeting about the firings, contradicting some of his later statements. It would have been hard to anticipate that this would be an issue when the e-mail was sent.

Our lives, in short, are becoming increasingly recorded by the (nonhuman) network—via e-mail, via mass transit cards, via phone records. What are the implications for social science? As I have discussed before, and will focus on in a series of entries in a month or so, the implications are potentially revolutionary for our understandings of collective human behavior. Whether the academy is poised to seize the day is another story (something else I will be examining).

Posted by David Lazer at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

IBM has announced to launch its Lotus Connections software in the first half of 2007 and Cisco buys the technology assets of tribe.net. It seems as if social networking software has become an important business line within large software vendors.

From a researcher's perspective it makes sense for firms to connect their employees through social networking software. Finding information, locating experts and spotting project relevant knowledge effectively are promises social software seems to able to hold. If not, why would people be interested in paying annual membership fees on platforms such as xing.com or linkedin.com.

At the same time, software vendors haven't got much to offer than whitepapers, prototypes, or other studies. A persistent question software vendors might be struggling with thus is: What is the USP of online social networking software why is it worth a client's effort to go through a massive data migration effort from several expert or knowledge management databases to a consistent social networking platform?

Here are some arguments/talking points that might help:
- Validation through Existing Models: The success of Xing.com and LinkedIn.com as two prominent examples of popular professional social networking platforms shows that managers and practitioners are willing to spend time and money in locating contacts, knowledge, and information within social networks
- Tie Characteristics and Performance: Studies in the management literature have shown that the characteristics of ties among managers and employees can have strong effects on the firm's or a managers performance (Hansen 1999, Moran 2005, Obstfeld 2005, references see below)
- Privacy Concerns: People are willing to publish their profiles online (as it can be observed on prominent Web 2.0//online social networking sites and as described by Ines Mergel in her prior blog). Hence, people are used to publishing their profiles online, have experience with it and might ranke the expected benefits higher than potential data privacy concerns.

Hence, why should making ties among people within firms visible NOT help these people to become more effective or productive over time?

Continue reading "Enterprise Social Networking Software" »

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 8:09 AM | Permalink

One of those interesting phenomena that I have noticed is the gaming of the google algorithm (at its foundation, a network-based algorithm utilizing various measures of network centrality) through posting of comments to this blog. In the google world we live in, the more links that point to you, the more traffic you get. And more traffic equals money. Given the growing importance of blogs in the web, a number of services have sprung up to place comments on blogs to point to some website. For a while, the comments were easy to pick out-- for example-- "great blog. www.---.com". More recently, however, the text of these comments are more specific to the entry, but often barely intelligible-- which may reflect some natural language automated system, or individuals who are being paid to post quick sentences with links to many blogs. Anyhow, it is both an interesting cat and mouse game on the world wide web, and a bit of an annoyance (a la spam) for us. We are generally catching these, but if one gets by, let us know.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:31 PM | Permalink

The proliferation of "social networking" functionality online is striking. A large number of websites, whose primary objective is clearly to support some other goal, now have features that allow "members" to post material and indicate their relationships with others in the community. (This is rather different than more general social networking sites, such as facebook, myspace, etc, whose business models are to get traffic and data on individuals and somehow monetize that.) Presumably the intuition here is that this increases the attachment of individuals to the cause or the product, and helps facilitate (in particular cases) collective action. It would be interesting to rigorously assess whether these features actually have any impact. While I see the logic, I will admit to some scepticism.

Some examples:

The Barack Obama campaign

United Methodists

Toyota hybrid owners

Posted by David Lazer at 10:20 PM | Permalink

The PEW Internet & American Life Project has just published a new study on Online Social Networking Websites and Youth.

They define online social networking websites as:

A social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users.

One of the main and interesting findings is that 55% of the teens between 12-17 are using social networking platforms to connect with their friends online - girls mainly to reinforce existing relationships and boys more to connect to new friends or dating purposes. The findings also show, that 82% of the respondents said, that they are using online social networking sites to stay in contact with friends who they rarely see.

This supports the theory in our working paper on the sustainability of online ties, that social networking platforms can support the maintenance of existing ties or to reconnect with former friends. See my earlier entry on the sustainability of online ties here on the IQ blog and also on my social networking blog.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The winning “gadget” in google’s gadget contest is “Mapmyworddictionary” which draws a graph of a given word to set of other words with which it has some relationship (synonym, antonym, etc). You can then click on those words to see how they are connected to other words. Below is an example where I typed the word “network” into the dictionary. Rather neat.

Posted by David Lazer at 12:56 AM | Permalink

I just discovered the first age-relevant search engine - slash social networking plattform: cRANKy.com. It is targeted towards +50 year olds (seniors and baby boomers). They intend to provide information on specific topics such as jobs after retirement, how to become 100 years old, how to make new friends, etc.

I like the “How to make friends” section - which ties into what Thomas and I are working on: people in specific phases of their lifes are only adding specific types of (new) contacts to their network of friends. Especially when you retire - you won’t see your co-workers on a daily basis anymore, your routines are changing and you might loose some of your contacts. See my earlier post on the sustainability of online ties.

It’s also great, that the most relevant topics are pre-sorted by relevance (to avoid being overwhelmed by too many results), there are some prominent buttons to increase the text size and you can top 10 yourself, so that information can be pushed at you.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 12:21 PM | Permalink

A follow up on my earlier posting regarding demographics, social networks, and electoral politics. The census bureau just released numbers on population changes since 2000. Quoting from “The Fix” (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/), there is clearly a shift toward Republican-leaning states:

“The ten states with the highest percentage population growth between July 1, 2005 and July 1, 2006 -- Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Georgia, Texas, Utah, North Carolina, Colorado, Florida and South Carolina -- were carried by President George W. Bush in 2004.

Regionally, too, the highest population growth is in areas that are Republican-red. The states comprising the South gained 1.5 million people over the past year, and the region now accounts for 36 percent of the national population. The West picked up more than 1 million people in the same period and now makes up 23 percent of the population; the Midwest gained 281,000 people and represents 22 percent of the nation's population total. The Northeast, which produced Democratic gains in the House and Senate in 2006, added just 62,000 people and is now the smallest region of the country with 18 percent of the population.”

Whether this benefits Republicans is an open question. Assuming most of these changes are due to migration (within the US, and from other countries to the US), as discussed in my earlier posting, it depends on how the migrants act politically—do they adapt to their new environs, or do their new environs adapt to them? In the short run it helps the Democrats if Democrats move to Republican leaning states and continue acting like Democrats. Four or five of those states are potentially competitive in 2008, and a 100,000 votes here or there could easily tilt a state into the Democratic column. This also means that Democratic states in 2008 have slightly (2-3) more electoral votes than they would deserve based on their population, and similarly, that Republicans areas are currently slightly under-represented in the House (lest you worry, the electoral system currently has a number of other biases in favor of Republicans that easily counterbalance these demographic shifts). The recalibration of the House and electoral college after the 2010 census will certain benefit the Republicans, but it is an illusory shift, largely reflecting a shuffling of people toward Republican states, not a shifting of voters toward the Republican party.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:32 PM | Permalink

It is end of the year and X-mas, which means people are spreading out to spend the holidays with their families. We thought it would be nice to stay in touch during this period and therefore created a new platform to connect with each other.

Continue reading "X-mas and Social Networking" »

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 8:09 AM | Permalink

Recently we heard more and more that online social networking platforms don’t really work - Alexa teaches us, that people tend to sign up for MySpace, Facebook or openBC, but platform providers have the hardest time to keep the network alive: people tend to sign up, but don’t or only infrequently come back to their profile.
This made my co-author Thomas Langenberg, EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland, and me start to think about the question: What makes online ties sustainable? We came up with a research design that looks at four different phases of a life cycle of online ties.

Here is the abstract of our paper:

Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published a study about the number of social relations people maintain online and the omnipresent question was raised again: are actual face-toface contacts declining over time and are they replaced by online social interactions. Our virtual life is scattered in online profiles across sites such as openBC.com, Friendster.com, Match.com or MySpace.com. There are currently more than 400 different online social networking sites – with new sites popping up every day. Building on existing factors of persistence and sustainability of network ties in general, we address the key research questions: Which factors lead to the creation, maintenance, decay and reconnection of online network ties? Our research draws on prominent issues in the social network literature, which address the gap between research on offline and online social networks. We examine individual, dyadic, structural and content-related characteristics to understand how and why actors in different phases of their life cycle turn to online ties. Within the presented research framework, we derive propositions and develop a research design to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative network data. The overall goal is to develop recommendations on how online social networks can become sustainable over time, and we develop questions and avenues for further research.

We came up with the following taxonomy of online vs. offline networks in our paper:

Full citation:

Mergel, I./Langenberg, T. (2006): What makes online ties sustainable? A Research Design Proposal to Analyze Online Social Networks, PNG Working paper No. PNG06-002, Cambridge.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 4:00 AM | Permalink

I recently finished serving as an expert witness in a court case in which I had to provide my opinion about the possible locations of a mobile phone given cellular tower IDs and base station positions. While this information had to be subpoenaed from Verizon as part of the litigation, it may be disconcerting for some to acknowledge that in databases distributed throughout the world, mobile phone service providers are storing records of location and social network data for one out of three people on Earth.

Besides the data’s obvious utility in courtroom trial cases like the one I was testifying in, I’m curious about the long-term consequences of commercial companies recording a time series of locations and communication events for billions of people. Who legally owns this data? Because carriers like T-Mobile & Sprint now publicly disclose the locations of their towers, base station locations are no longer the corporate secret they once were, and subsequently can’t be used to prevent customers from obtaining the location information collected about them. If I ask my T-Mobile representative to provide me with my call log history, they don’t seem to have a problem with disclosing my communication events to me. However, when asked to provide me with an approximation of the locations associated with each of my calls, they still claim this is prohibited. So, empirically at least, it doesn’t appear that the customers own the location data collected about them. And if the customers don’t own this information, then I imagine by default, the mobile operators are the ones who own the records of movement data for all of their customers.

What guidelines do mobile operators have to abide by when using this data? Can it be sold to a 3rd party? How much would a detailed time-series of my locations over the last five years go for on Ebay? Who would be the highest bidder? Urban planning consultants interested in public transportation usage? Companies working on developing the next census? Wall St traders interested in where I’m doing my grocery shopping?

This data clearly has value. Already carriers are selling real-time location information to companies who use this information to extrapolate the location and speed of the individual and use this data to offer road traffic updates and forecasts. As the major carriers’ billion dollar networks turn into a commodity infrastructure, mobile operators are going to be ever more interested in monetizing the location data generated from their customers. (“This speeding ticket has been brought to you courtesy of Cingular Wireless. Raising the bar.”)

So here is an exercise for the interested reader – call up your own service provider and ask for the location information associated with your call logs. Let me know if you’ve had any luck.

Posted by Nathan Eagle at 3:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Apparently, the government in Japan is promoting the use of Social Networking Services (SNS) as they are hoping to take advantage of this for consultation and during a crisis like a disaster. As I will take a look at the attempts in my case studies of Yatsushiro-city, Kumamoto prefecture and Nagaoka-city, Niigata prefecture I will keep you updated in the upcoming weeks.

Let's take a look at one of the big social networking platforms in Japan the meantime. Its called Mixi and has some of the following features:
- Invitation only
- It includes a sort of diary or blog which can be shared only with the people directly connected.
- Users review goods and services
- Miximusic / iTunes integration
- You can see who visited your profile
- Anonymous profiles mostly.
- Groups. Mixi has up to a million groups that users have created
- Heavily mobile-based / friendly. Japanese people spend a lot of time commuting on the train so there is plenty of time to take advantage of the 3G network and advanced phone features like chat, mms or GPS.

I begin to wonder when we will move into the mobile SNS world. Imagine when vast ammounts people start tagging their environment with the integrated GPS or connect with their direct or in case of dating, interested "peers". This will also allow for new types of government citizen interactions with regard to disasters and everyday management.

Update: If you would like to read the full story on government social software follow this link.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The following figure by Lazer, D./Mergel, I./Friedman, A. (2006) plots the citation patterns of social network papers published in 2005 in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review.

The squares correspond to the cited papers, where only papers cited at least twice are shown. The black squares are from the social sciences, and pink squares from mathematics and physics. Notably, 22% of the citations listed are from mathematics and physics. Further, eight out of eleven of these papers cite work from mathematics and physics, where Watts and Strogatz 1998 and Watts 1999 are the most cited (six) works.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Neat tool in google shows you trends for particular search terms. This tool also shows you which locations search for the term most often. Interestingly, when one tries "social network" AND Cambridge is number one on the list (Boston is number 6; in between are Seoul, Pleasanton (CA), Washington DC, and San Francisco). Unfortunately, it's not clear what the Y axis is, and the methodology underlying the numbers is too opaque (currently) for research use, but perhaps that might change in the future.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:21 PM | Permalink

Speaking of fields and social network analysis, psychology offers an interesting puzzle for the relative paucity of psych-related social network analysis. Much of the classic early work in network analysis involved psychologists: Newcomb, Bavelas, Festinger, Heider, the Robbers Cave experiments. Yet in the 1960s (my impression is) the field veered away from social network analysis, which took refuge in sociology and anthropology. Perhaps this is due to power of the Asch experiments, which paradigmatically displaced much of the other work (Newcomb, Festinger) on social influence, bringing the focus more to the group level than network.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Despite my best efforts, there is relatively little use of network analysis within political science. This was highlighted by my experiences at the Sunbelt and the Midwest Political Science Association meetings (the second largest meetings in political science, I believe) the last few weeks. I think the overlap between the two conferences was… me. There is a small upsurge in network-related research in the field—I am guessing there were several times as many papers at MPSA using network ideas than in previous years. But I doubt that I would need more than two hands to count the number of network-related papers at MPSA, which is a pretty big conference.

Continue reading "Putting the network into politics (or at least political science)" »

Posted by David Lazer at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The first Sunbelt I attended was in 2000 (also in Vancouver). It is striking how the conference has evolved in just the last 6 years—obviously, reflecting the increased interest in the field. It is much larger than it was then (maybe 50% ??). Some of this growth may be ephemeral—about half the attendees, I think, were fist timers, while I am betting that maybe 10% had attended going back to the 1980s. The composition of fields represented has also evolved. While always interdisciplinary, my perception is that there has been a shift from sociology to public health, organizational behavior, and information and computer scientists. There is also significant private sector interest, with folks from, for example, Microsoft and Yahoo, among many others. There was, I understand, also representation from government (rather less visible). There were few anthropologists, prominent in earlier years, and (alas), other than me, few political scientists, which reflects the still low levels of interest in political science about networks. (In my next posting I will discuss why there has been little social network analysis within political science, as well as the stirrings of interest in recent years.) Some other impressions: as noted in the previous post, there has been an increase in use of behavioral data. There were definitely also more simulation models than in previous years. And there has definitely been an increase in the study (and tools for analysis) of longitudinal data. For any readers who attended Sunbelt 2006 and earlier editions, I would be interested in your observations.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:26 AM | Permalink

I write this as I return from the 2006 edition of the Sunbelt (social network) conference. I have had the privilege of many unanticipated bonus hours in various airports around the continent that have allowed me to get work done. I did not have time to post anything while I was in Vancouver, but my next few posts will be on Sunbelt, as well as on the political science conference I attended the previous week (the Midwest—it has been a busy couple of weeks). Today I will write about some of the observations from Sunbelt; later this week I want to discuss the contrast between these two conferences.

One of the more interesting presentations I attended was by Jim Moody of Duke. He presented some of the work he has been doing on dynamic networks, showing some of the moving pictures of networks changing over time. What was particularly striking to me was his illustration of the principle that when one takes into account timing of the flow of things through a network, ones perspective on key structural features of the network fundamentally changes. For example, the most central node in a network, e.g., as measured by betweenness, can look peripheral if one takes into account the timing of flow. If the most central node gets information slowly, information will flow around that node. A dynamic picture of flow in a network thus can produce a fundamentally different understanding of the structure of the network than a static picture. (I should note that a dynamic picture does not mean necessarily that the network is changing—just that there may be a natural sequence in communication, which may be a long standing structural feature of the network. That is, there is a difference between saying that networks are dynamic and that networks evolve over time.)

This isn’t a totally novel idea—in fact, I think it has been explored in the various research on traffic networks (a field that predates social network analysis), which has always dealt with networks and flow (Ana Nagurney did a very nice job of providing an overview of this field at her talk in the Fall in CCCSN). Nonetheless, it was something that I had not totally appreciated before.

This links back to something that I have written about earlier on the blog—the coming revolution in the study of social networks using behavioral data. It will, in fact, be possible to do an analysis of the scheduling of flows over networks in a fashion heretofore impossible (e.g., to see that Joe talks to Ralph, who then talks to Anne, etc).

A final note on the coming behavioral revolution—I made a wager (dinner) with David Krackhardt that 10 years from now the majority of presentations in Sunbelt will be using behavioral data—e-mail, phone, log, blog link structure, etc. There were certainly a lot more of these kinds of presentations in 2006 than in past years.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:01 AM | Permalink

Social Network Theory and its principles are applied by more and more companies in a way that some of us might not be aware of yet. So what we buy, how we rate products/services, post in forums, pictures we upload or present of ourselves on the web is significantly influencing other, likeminded individuals. In return we are influenced by the network cluster we belong to for a specific habit and the like. Collaborative filtering is a key component of using social networks for different purposes. Further information can be found here. Below you will find a list of various industry and application examples:

Social Networking plattforms
There are the obvious social networking online plattforms. Among them are the open business and personal contact manegement oriented like Tribe.net , openbc, friendster or the inivitation only communities like asmallworld. Either planned or already implemented users can take advantage of added services (search functionality, messaging) by paying a monthly fee 10< USD. Furthermore, there are the rather dating/partner match making plattforms like match or eharmony.

Retail/eCommerce
Most of today's ecommerce sites use collaborative filtering to improve sales, cross-,up- and downselling. A prominent example are Amazon's recommendations based on various user behaviours on their website.

Music/Radio
Tapping into our musical tastes Last FM, Genielab or Pandora present us with streaming music. Here the main business model lies in linking to the respective ecommerce sites like Apple's iTunes.

Books
The same applies to the area of what we might want to read next which also serves ecommerce purposes.

Movies and more
MovieLens is a free service provided by GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota. Whether, you want to book a hotel, whole vacation there are numerous examples of collaborative filtering apps on websites.

Pictures
The most prominent example for sharing, managing and searching for pictures is Flickr or myspace. The latter gaining revenues from online-ads.

Search engines
As I have elaborated in an earlier entry on google bombs the network structure (ties) play an important role in search engine algorithms.

Knowledge Base and OpenSource
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia builds on the power of decentralized, voluntary collaboration building an enourmous depository of multi-language information. Whether it was the development of Linux, Mozilla/Firefox or MySQL all rely on and consist of social networks. Further examples of openSource projects can be found at Sourceforge.

SNA Consulting
As we can see the character and concepts of networks is mainly utilized for recommendations. Actual applications of SNA is done by a few companies and consultants like Rob Cross, IBM, Orgnet or Visiblepath. These companies try to uncover the informal networks within organisations to improve knowledge sharing, initiate change or bridging silos.

Finally, you can always follow latest trends in social network analysis at PNG's subpage on SNA by Ines Mergel.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:15 AM | Permalink

Having discussed Granovetter's seminal paper on "The Strength of Weak Ties" in our last class on Network Analysis, I just found a 21st century application of the theory on the website of Ideentower.blogs.com.

There is a relatively new service on the web, which allows people to connect to each other when traveling from A to B. The service is called AirTroductions and provides interested individuals to register and subsequently look for other, unknown individuals, that might be on the same flight. The purpose of the service is to allow people make interesting contacts which eventually lead to all type of relationships.

I found this interesting as another example for how easy it is today to build weak ties with modern web technology!

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 11:14 PM | Permalink

As a follow up to our entry on the Mohammed cartoons we would like to show you a map of the destinations our visitors came from in the past 24 hours. Apparently 2 link sources (1x Wikipedia article cited earlier, 1x bloglines) cause our blog to get attention from any continent. Europe and the US is dominating though. Well, we still hope to get some more comments from you on the past entry...

This is a joint post with Alexander Schellong.

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 11:48 PM | Permalink

As Alexander mentioned earlier today Google has famously agreed to tailor the results of their new Chinese product. (Summary and links here) The image search has also been affected. Floating around the anti-censorship community is a very evocative comparison of the American and Chinese Google Image searches for "tiananmen":

http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Is this google censorship?

Continue reading "What's in a name, google edition" »

Posted by Allan Friedman at 9:44 AM | Permalink

My next entries will discuss the application of Customer Relationship Management in the public sector. Other terms used are citizen or constituent relationship management. As this is a relatively new topic and less applied concept in the pulic sector I hope our visitors are interested in sharing some of their ideas or questions with me.

What is CiRM?
In how war is CiRM different from CRM?
How is it understood in government?
How is CiRM implemented?
Will it have an impact on customer service in the ps? What other impacts do you expect.
What other questions should we ask?

I am looking forward for your input. I will provide further information on Citizen Relationship Management at my website.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My sense is that social network analysis has increasingly been used for consulting purposes. This raises a couple of concerns and an opportunity. The concerns are two-fold: first is that a body of complex and sometimes conflicting findings are inevitably hyped and simplified as they pass through the prism of the consulting world—I think sometimes beyond recognition. Second is that, as noted in my previous posts, a lot of these findings rest on fairly shaky causal legs—particularly when you consider the lack of studies on system-level network structure and system performance. That is, perhaps importing these ideas into practice is the organizational equivalent of hormone replacement therapy. We make prescriptions based on correlational evidence, and make recommendations that may have adverse effects.

That said, ultimately ideas only matter if they have some impact on how people think and act—that is, people outside of the insular world of academia. One hopes that SNA can offer insights into how organizations (and other collectives) function, and how to operate more effectively. This all points back to my earlier arguments about the need to strengthen the foundations of causal assertions in the field.

This, in turn, points back to what (consultant and other based) interventions can offer back to the field—better insight into cause and effect. For example, do particular types of “network strengthening�? actually improve outcomes at group and individual levels as predicted? Does making expertise and social networks transparent increase knowledge sharing? Do efforts to increase relationships across silo’s improve coordination and access to information? And are there any unanticipated negative consequences? Etc etc. Of course, all of this presupposes building in evaluative measures into the intervention, and then a rigorous evaluation of whether the intervention worked, and it may not be reasonable to expect those that recommend certain interventions to rigorously evaluate them. But one problem at a time….

Posted by David Lazer at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Anna Nagurney
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
and
Radcliffe Institute Fellow, Harvard University

The Evolution and Integration of Social and Financial Networks with Applications (PDF)

Monday, December 12, 2005, 12:00 - 1:30 p.m.
Bell Hall, John F. Kennedy School of Government

This seminar is co-sponsored by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science

In this talk we will overview some of the methodological tools that we are using and developing in order to model the integration of social networks with economic networks, notably, supply chain and financial networks.

Anna Nagurney is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor in the Department of Finance and Operations Management in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is also the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks and the Supernetworks Laboratory for Computation and Visualization at UMass Amherst. She received her AB, ScB, ScM, and PhD degrees from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She devotes her career to education and research that combines management, economics, and engineering. Her focus is the applied and theoretical aspects of network systems, particularly in the areas of transportation and logistics and economics and finance. She is the editor of the book, Innovations in Financial and Economic Networks (November 2003), and has authored or co-authored 8 other books including Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age, Financial Networks, Sustainable Transportation Networks, and Network Economics.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Figuring out the direction of the causal arrow is perhaps the major methodological issue of social science. This challenge is particularly acute in the study of social networks. Does the position in the social network affect success, or does success affect position in the social network? Do birds of a feather flock together, or do dogs and their owners starting looking alike? The strong structuralist tradition in social network analysis, which posits that networks are out of the reach of the agency of individuals, obfuscated this issue for a long time. With the increased attention to dynamic networks, and the development of tools to study how networks and individuals change at the same time (e.g., see the fine work on p* models, and related software, such as SIENA--http://stat.gamma.rug.nl/snijders/siena.html) there has been a dramatic improvement in the statistical toolkit available to deal with these issues. However:

(1) Longitudinal data do not guarantee correct conclusions regarding cause and effect. For example, one can imagine omitted variables dynamically affecting network and/or individual level variables, resulting in a spurious inference of causation in longitudinal data.

(2) Cross-sectional data can, under the correct circumstances, allow reasonable inferences of causation. Festinger’s classic study of social influence is, arguably, one such example.

(3) Despite the massive upsurge of social network related research, only a fraction of published social network research use longitudinal data, and only a fraction of a fraction of the studies that use cross-sectional data even hazard a sentence on where the network in question came from.

So, let me propose the following dictum for social network research:

Any research on the impact of social networks must at least wrestle with the factors underlying the network(s) under study, considering the possibility that (a) the network being studied was the result of the purported “impact�? (i.e., reverse causation) and (b) some plausible third factor has affected both the network and potential outcome (i.e., spurious inference).

This is a pretty low bar, actually, but in many fields I would guess that close to 0% of the research exceeds it.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Note that the deadline for submission of abstracts to the Sunbelt conference is Jan 10. Sunbelt is the pre-eminent forum for presentation of research on social networks. This year it will be taking place April 25-30 in Vancouver.

Posted by David Lazer at 2:40 PM | Permalink

When it comes to social software, a myriad of platforms and websites sprang out of the ground during the last couple of years: The Social Networking Services Meta list shows 380 different social networking platforms, covering interest areas such as business networking, dating, friend networking, pet networking, photo sharing or face-to-face facilitating sites.

It seems as if all these content areas are targeting different user groups, therefore different social circles in which the users are active.

Even though, it might be that some of the circles have overlapping neighborhoods of actors, it is more likely, that people would chose different social networking platforms for different purposes: for example, A might probably want to connect to B for dating purposes on a different platform than the one he uses with C for business contacts.

This leads to my question: Are people changing their personality (or at least are they (inter)acting differently, displaying different kinds of information = showing a different face) on different platforms? If so, where are the differences and why are they occurring?

One way of analyzing these differences would be a) to conduct a self-study or b) to collect data on people that you know of who signed up for different platforms. What would be a robust way to analyze these differences?

Looking forward to your comments :)

Posted by Ines Mergel at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)