Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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)