While not perfectly accurate (e.g. Mixi is missing for Japan) I stumbled upon an attempt to map the social networks that dominate in each country around the world. May be this motivates someone else to setup a page where people can collaboratively update/work on the map.
This hardly comes as a surprise: Corporations are increasingly tapping into the social capital of networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as reported in this NY Times article by Laurie J. Flynn today. From a theoretical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense: The ties in these online social networks reflect several layers of homophily (friendship, common interests, membership in various groups, partially self-selected affiliation, etc.) in addition to what usually applies to even the best organizational communities of practice. Several companies are now integrating business intelligence applications with the social Web and the Internet. Such "interrelated pools of information" bring value to business, says Flynn, mainly by fostering communication among employees, but also by better identifying job candidates and target customers. Let's just hope that Facebook will react to this development and allow the creation of different profiles for the various personae we represent on the Internet.
The article appeared in a special section of the New York Times today called "Tech Innovation". The section is filled to the brim with exciting and innovative ideas - one of these coming from the ever resourceful Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Together with his team he developed the prediction markets tool "Brain" (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), which can be employed to predict the demand of a new service, such as Internet television. I loved Huberman's quote a propos his brainchild: "We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people." Hopefully the right ones.
Today's WSJ reports that Google executives said the company was having a harder time than it expected generating ad revenue on social-networking sites. In particular, this would put Microsoft's evaluation of Facebook under scrutiny. Around the world, other OSN ventures such as Facebook recently introduced new terms of business to make it easier to utilize the user information for marketing purposes. Many members complained about the move, some even left. Therefore, privacy is still of importance to many users and strategies discussed in Relationship Marketing (see also permission marketing) might be the right move for OSN ventures.
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.
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" »
Yesterday, our teaching case on aSmallWorld.net was released. It is publicly available on the PNG working paper series site.
The case addresses several issues from the social network and online social networking literature. The case's objective is to help students understand how existing offline social ties and interpersonal relationships can be transformed into a powerful online social network/online community which is attractive from several perspectives, such as social networking, online advertising, and entrepreneurial activity.
Alexander Schellong and Thomas Langenberg have jointly developed the case in close collaboration with the Program on Networked Governance as well as the support of Erik Wachtmeister, the CEO of aSmallWorld.net, and Louise Wachtmeister, Marketing Director and Co-Founder of aSmallWorld.
Yesterday, I made use of the ning.com social networking platform and created my first online social network: Team TriOdy (link:http://triody.ning.com). I am part of a group of active endurance sports enthusiasts that is regularly sharing information about races, trainings, and other related tips&tricks. I therefore thought it might be cool to turn this offline community into an online one. According to my own research results regarding information sharing in online communities, I follow two main strategies:
1. Get a critical mass of people involved in this project that are not necessarily "sitting in the same office or area" (so that there is a reason for them to visit the site). I plan to invite all my sports friends as well as the friends of these friends.
2. Also, I want to be as dedicated as possible and create as much interesting content as possible (in so doing I hope to make sure that people come and visit my site). From my latest research I know that community members with high "emotional commitment" and "high participation in information" exchange are most crucial to the success/sustainability of a user community.
I'll keep you updated on my progress!
In case you have nothing to do this Sunday, here is a short follow up on the DLD conference 2007 which I noted in an earlier entry. There was a panel with Erik Wachtmeister (asmallworld), Lars Hinrichs (xing) and Matt Cohler (facbook) which covered various aspects of social networking platforms (i.e. business models, future). Here is a link to the full video of the DLD social network panel discussion "The Link Society" moderated by former Alando and Jamba founder Oliver Samwer. In order to watch the video please click "Monday - January 22" on the navigation bar on the right, scroll down to "10:30 am The Link Society" and then just click on "Play video".
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?
I just taught a segment in David Lazer's Social Networking class at Harvard on how people can analyze and visualize their social networks. David invited the whole class to join him on LinkedIn and we noticed that a couple of students were hesitant to join due to security concerns. We have a very mixed audience of MPP, MPA, Midcareer and PhD students from all kinds of different industries - some of them from the military and security area. One of the students asked me: "Can you give me one good reason why I should join any of the social networking sites?" - given the background and affiliations of some of the students, I couldn't come up with an argument why people should join - on the contrary I understand that some people need to keep a low public profile, so that not too much of their private information or details about their CV will become publicly available.
So I started to think about what are reasons why I have all my information uploaded to all kinds of websites? I have a Flickr page, an openBC/Xing profile, a LinkedIn profile, a personal website, a corporate website and post on my own blog and on our blog at the Kennedy School. Am I too open to give away this much information? On the other hand, I am not working in the military or security area, right?
It turns out that there are ways to control what people can find out about you. I talked with Bill Liao, the co-founder of Xing (formerly openBC) about this issue and he pointed me to the people finder search engine ZoomInfo. It is a search engine that gives summaries of people (Find tab) or let's you create a more detailed profile online, so that recruiters, etc. can find you easier (BeFound tab). Controlling what you actually want other people to find about you comes with a price: pro version for $49/month. But it is definitely one way to control what information can be found about you and also a way to manipulate your online information.
I tried it and was surprised about the result (Remember, I have a at least seven different pages directly connected with my name where I actively produce content). Here is the result:
So there are four entries - one with the direct link to my Kennedy School subpage, but the others are from older sources tracking some of my (past) academic activities. That's about it. Google on the other hand finds 13.200 different entries.
Another way of controlling what is found by Archive.com or Google seems to be to ask thems to take down some of your indexed information and not display it when people search for your name.
What are your thoughts on the dangers of having your information publicly available on social networking platforms? Are there any measures you take to avoid having too much information available for the rest of the world?
(hm... guess I just created another piece of publicly available information)