Celebrities - social objects or fake friends?

With the prominent celebrity deaths this week flooding our many publics, friends are pushing back. Doc writes:

obsessing about celebrity is unhealthy for the single reason that it is also unproductive. Celebrity is to mentality as smoking is to food. (I originally wrote “chewing gum” there, but I think smoking is the better analogy.) It is an unhealthy waste of time.

Mary responds:

Michael Jackson and other celebs are the replacement for that sort of seriously time consuming difficult religion, because media and post-modernism make it easy [...] If nothing is more important than the individual, but he/she needs to follow something bigger than the self [...] you have the perfect primordial soup to grow the MJ, etc worship replacing organized religion we see now.

I think there are two other components to this - celebrities function both as Jyri's Social Objects the cultural touchstones and shared ideas that we use to bridge our publics, as I have said:

The small number of highly-connected entities that fulfil the role of social objects are sometimes people. If you think about celebrities, they clearly fit- being able to discuss Brad and Jen and Angelina's latest shenanigans binds you in, and shows like American Idol are designed to draw on this need, giving the Faustian bargain of fame in exchange for objectification.

This week, research was published confirming this:

"The very experts who could kind of inform everyone else don't. They actually keep feeding them the information they already know because that helps establish a connection," Nathanael Fast says.

If this whole argument seems circular, that's the point. Prominent people stay popular for longer than they ought to because they serve as conversational fodder, which in turn drives more media coverage.

"Take Paris Hilton, somehow or another she became well known and now people are more likely to talk about her," Fast says.

This supports Duncan Watts's experimental work on self-feeding fame.

But there is another component to this as well - that we perceive celebrities as part of our social group - they take up one of the slots we have available for modelling and keeping track of other people. My first experience of this was when I worked at BBC Elstree, and said hi to some oldish chap I recognised in the corridor, later realising that he didn't know me at all - he was Arthur from EastEnders. (Now I've done a bit of public speaking this happens to me in reverse now and then - people who've seen me speak somewhere later on come and say hello, remembering it as a conversation). danah's classic Fakesters discussion touches on this too, with Friendster's symmetric Dunbar assumptions confounded by users wanting to connect through the famous; whereas MySpace and especially Twitter have embraced the fundamental asymmetry of who pays attention to whom in this way.

My take is that while Doc is right about the time-sink of celebrity for it's own sake, which may be an example of losing a useful person-slot to a synthetic creation. Mary's implication that there is a God-slot there is perhaps supported by Robert Wright's argument that the God as human-like role model can have good influences on us.

Certainly, being aware of our own choices of 'fake friends' to act as role models is likely to be better than having to choose them from a limited 20th century media model.

Notes on Charlene Li's Future of Social Networks SF AMA talk

Last night I went to an interesting talk by Charlene Li at the SF American Marketing Association -here are my twittered notes. See also, Charlene's slides.

says @charleneli: Theme is "social networks will be like air" - her better phrasing of my "Social Cloud" idea
says @charleneli: in future we'll say "wasn't it quaint that we had to go someplace to be with our friends"
says @charleneli: "I want Amazon to have a 'friend's reviews button on there - or anywhere else they could be"
says @charleneli: we'll have a feed of the presedential debates with our friends tweets on - like I did in 2004: http://bit.ly/IRCdebate
says @charleneli: universal login with OpenID lets you tie your IDs together, and sites can import friends from your networks
says @charleneli: I had to friend my co-author Josh 35 different times on different sites - Portable Contacts should save us from this pain
says @charleneli: Profiles where they are useful - eg LinkedIn profiles showing up in Lotus Notes via email
says @charleneli: your friends activities in context with GetGlue.com's plugin - Iron Man wikipedia page and IMDB page shows friends reviews
says @charleneli: 2 sets of standards exist Facebook's own protocols and the OpenStack backed by Google, MySpace, Plaxo, Yahoo and more
says @charleneli: advertising has evolved - content targetting for demographics; Search marketing for intent; behavioural targetting
says @charleneli: how many of you have gone to a social network site and remember seeing an Ad? or clicked on one?
says @charleneli: Who wants to be a fan of FiberOne on Facebook?
says @charleneli: people want to tell each other about things they care about - need new ads for this
says @charleneli: examples of new Ad types - branded virtual gifts, shown to you as your friends gave or received them
says @charleneli: SocialVibe has profile sponsorships that donate to your favourite charity eg colgate ad to leukemia
says @charleneli: the Tipping Point argued that there are influencers that can make a product go viral [I disagree see http://bit.ly/watts ]
says @charleneli: social graphs and interests, culture of sharing and online and email behaviour can create context for ads
says @charleneli: vendors who identify influencers include 33across, lotame, media6 degrees, unbound technologies
says @charleneli: network neighbourhood modelling in interesting - homophily is a good predictor for clusters - you are like your friends
says @charleneli: Google tracks who I email most - very useful to me: "In Google I Trust" http://bit.ly/BtvV
says @charleneli: Media6 identifies you by profiles you view on SNSs - shows ads to your friends based on your purchases
says @charleneli: Media6 gets 3-7x increase in response rates on banner ads through this homophilic targetting - no PII involved
says @charleneli: Influencer strategies are a misnomer, btu clustering works
says @charleneli: People will demand greater contol over when, where, how profiles + friends are used. Detailed permissions - a UX nightmare
says @charleneli: remember when people didn't trust callerID? Now if you turn it off, people won't take your call
says @charleneli: setting up lists of who can see your pictures is a pain - have to categorize people - reclassifying is hard
says @charleneli: there's a need to better articulate and detect sub-groups of friends so this is less of a chore
I pointed out the power of asymmetric friending eg http://bit.ly/publics and @charleneli and audience agreed that it reduces awkwardness
says @charleneli: people will pay real money for virtual gifts
[ChrisSaad @kevinmarks asymmetic is good, the term friending is not great. I prefer follow or subscribe ]
@ChrisSaad agreed "following" is a better term for this
Audience: when will people profit from us using their profiles? @charleneli says we all have our own CPMs
[clynetic @kevinmarks What is CPM?]
@clynetic CPM is marketingspeak for 'cost per thousand' - I suppose CPA ( cost per action) is better
says @charleneli: don't give up your social capital for short term gain me: don't be the Amway guy at the party
says @charleneli: behavioural targetting is often faulty, as behaviours change
says @charleneli: social media advertising experiments are waiting for turnaround
says @charleneli: GYM (Hotmail for M) will test social media integration with webmail
says @charleneli: Facebook Connect and Open Stack gaining traction with media co's
says @charleneli: Social shopping experiments start - we want our friends recommendations
says @charleneli: identify where social network data and content shoudl be integrated in your sites
says @charleneli: leverage existing identity and social graphs where your audience is
says @charleneli: get your privacy and permission policies aligned with an open strategy
says @charleneli: find your trust agents - in google I trust? do you trust facebook?
says @charleneli: the media buyers are still trying to buy demographics or content, not better targetting

Blogging's not dead, it's becoming like air

One thing I learned at Technorati is that one sure-fire way to get linked to by bloggers is to write an article about blogging. Sure enough, The Economist and Nick Carr have, with their 'death of the blogosphere' articles, garnered a fair bit of linkage.

Their curious obsession with the Technorati Top 100 is missing what is really happening. As JP points out, the old blogging crew are still around, they're just blogging less that those paid to do so a dozen times a day. Not because they are less interested or engaged, but because there are now many new ways to do what we used blogs for back then.

In 2001, if we wanted to share brief thoughts, we used a blog; to link to others’ posts, we used a blog. If we wanted a group discussion, we made a group blog.

With Technorati, and trackback and pingback, we built tools to follow cross-blog conversations, and learned that we are each others’ media. As I wrote in 2004:

The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.
You can even start a blog, link to them, and join the conversation

A year later I reiterated:

By tracking people linking to me or mentioning my name, Technorati helps me in this distributed asynchronous conversation (thats how I found Mike and Dave's comments, after all). However, as I've said before, "I can read your thoughts, as long as you write them down first". In order to be in the conversation, you need to be writing and linking. Perforce, this means that those who write and link more, and are written about and linked to more, are those who most see the utility of it.

What has happened since is that the practices of blogging have become reified into mainstream usage. Through social networks and Twitter and Reader shared items and Flickr and HuffDuffer and all the other nicely-focused gesture spreading tools we have, the practice of blogging, of mediating the world for each other, has become part of the fabric of the net.
This may be the first blogpost I've written since August, but the many digital publics I'm part of have been flowing media and friendly gestures to and from me all the time.

Open Source and Social Cloud Computing

Tim O'Reilly has written an excellent review post on Open Source and Cloud Computing which says, among other things:

The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor's private preserve.

So here's my first piece of advice: if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized. Architecture trumps licensing any time.

But peer-to-peer architectures aren't as important as open standards and protocols. If services are required to interoperate, competition is preserved. Despite all Microsoft and Netscape's efforts to "own" the web during the browser wars, they failed because Apache held the line on open standards. This is why the Open Web Foundation, announced last week at OScon, is putting an important stake in the ground. It's not just open source software for the web that we need, but open standards that will ensure that dominant players still have to play nice.

The "internet operating system" that I'm hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn't social networking be a system service?

This isn't just a "moral" appeal, but strategic advice.[...]

A key test of whether an API is open is whether it is used to enable services that are not hosted by the API provider, and are distributed across the web.

I think this API openness test is not strong enough. As I wrote in An API is a bespoke suit, a standard is a t-shirt, for me the key test is that implementations can interoperate without knowing of each others' existence, let alone having to have a business relationship. That's when you have an open spec.

The other thing I resist in the idea of an internet operating system is that that the net is composable, not monolithic. You can swap in and implementations of different pieces, and combine different specs that solve one piece of the problem without having to be connected to everything else.

The original point of the cloud was a solved piece of the problem that means you don't have to worry about the internal implementation.

Thus, the answer to "shouldn't social networking be a system service?" is yes, it should be a Social Cloud. That's exactly what we are working on in OpenSocial.

How not to be viral

Graphing Social Patterns East is on tomorrow, and I'm sorry not to be there, though m'colleague Patrick Chanezon will be. However, reading the schedule I notice the word 'viral' is still much in evidence.

If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system

At the Facebook developer Garage last week, I heard a developer say: when I hear 'viral' applied to software I replace it with 'cancerous' to clarify. A few months back I wrote that social Apps should be Organic, not Viral, and at Google I/O last week I expanded on this with m'colleagues Vivian Li and Chris Schalk. Here's an overview of the alternative reproductive strategies to being a virus that we came up with:

r-Strategy - scatter lots of seeds

Break free
Originally uploaded by aussiegall

Some plants and animals, like dandelions and frogs, rely on having huge numbers of offspring, with the hope that a few of them will survive - this is known as an r strategy. In application terms this is like wildly sending out invitations, or forcing users to invite their friends before showing them useful information. It may help you spread your seed, but most of them will die off rapidly.

K-Strategy - nurture your young

Proud mama
Originally uploaded by debschultz

Mammals take the opposite strategy; they have a few young, and nurture them carefully, expecting most of them to grow up to adulthood and reproduce themselves. This is known as a K strategy. This translates into software by following Kathy Sierra's principles to create passionate users who will share your application through word of mouth. Another way to nurture your users is to encourage them to use your application before they have to install it, as Jonathan Terleski describes.

Fruiting - delicious with a seed in

help yourself
Originally uploaded by *madalena-pestana*

Many plants encourage their seeds to be spread more widely by wrapping them in fruit, so that animals or birds will carry them further, eating the fruit and helping the seed to propagate. The analogy here is in making sure your invitations aren't just bald come-ons for your application "a friend said something - click here to find out what" - with a forced install on the way, but instead are clearly bearing gifts to the receiving user, so they will want to click on the link after seeing what is in store. This is one of Jyri Engström's principles for Web 2.0 success with Social Objects.

Rhizomatic - grow from the roots up

Sweetness / Dolcezza
Originally uploaded by WTL photos

Another reproductive strategy that many plants, including strawberries and ginger use is to send out runners or shoots from the roots, so that they spread out sideways, from the bottom up, known as rhizomes or stolons. The analogy here is for social applications that spread through appearing in users activity streams and via entries in application directories, growing outwards through the 'grass roots' runners that they send out as part of their normal usage.

Being dumb gets low CPMs

A lot of the debate around viral applications reminds me of a David Foster Wallace quotation:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Social networks aren't like TV - everyone sees something different in them. If you want to gather engaged, inspired, interested and indeed valued users, write an application that speaks to their refined and aesthetic and noble interests, and see how they will spread it through their social networks to find the others who share their interests.

It was interesting to see Slide redirecting away from virality today. GSP West was on at the same time and place as eTech, and I heard some eTechies refer to it as 'Grasping Social Parasites'; I hope that the growing realisation that a disease is not a good model to base your business on means that tomorrows conference will spread a better reputation for GSP East.

Be Organic, not Viral

I just got back from the VLAB Multi-platform Social Networking event, which I thought was very interesting overall. Jeremiah Owyang did a great moderating job, and Jia Shen, Sourabh Niyogi, Ken Gullicksen and Steve Cohen brought lots of different viewpoints to the discussion. Growing and deriving value from Apps within Social Networks is still full of lots of unknowns, but it was good to hear some basic shared principles come through - my summary of one point was 'before you think about a Business Model, make sure you have a Pleasure Model'.

Another point well made by Steve Cohen of Bebo was something I've been thinking for a while too - the hunger for 'Viral' growth is a mistake - what you really need is 'Organic' growth. Just as we distinguish between Organic search results and bought or spammed ones, social network sites and their users are distinguishing between the viral apps that are essentially parasitic, using their hosts as a means to their propagation, and the ones that organically become part of the social ecology, making both the site and the users richer by their presence.
I spent the last weekend fighting off a flu virus, partly by eating lots of organic fruit. I expect social networks and their users will continue to do the same.

The Social Cloud

My talk from LIFT is here for you to watch below (20mins, needs flash):


The others are up at the LIFT Video site

OpenSocial and Social Software history

In the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison have written a very thorough history of Social Network Sites.

Over at the OpenSocial API site we've written what we hope could be their future. Let me know what you think.

Social networks - what's the Object-ive?

One way of thinking about social networks is through "social objects" - the cultural touchstones and shared ideas that we use to bridge our Dunbar-constrained networks to broader communities. We all do this - use some shared object as a point of conversational reference. Here in the US it tends to be sports teams activities; in the UK there's always the weather to fall back on. (This fails in California because it's too predictable - when I came here in 1998 it took me a while to realise that saying "beautiful day again" was like saying "I see gravity's still working" to Californians).

Talking about social objects is nothing new - Jyri discussed them at length back in 2005, and danah dissected Friendster's suicide in 2006 when they killed off the Fakesters (user profiles that represented social objects like "Jack Daniels" and "Burning Man").

Where I find the 'Dunbar number' idea falls down is that social network connections, like so many other human-made things, are power-law distributed. The small number of highly-connected entities that fulfil the role of social objects are sometimes people. If you think about celebrities, they clearly fit- being able to discuss Brad and Jen and Angelina's latest shenanigans binds you in, and shows like American Idol are designed to draw on this need, giving the Faustian bargain of fame in exchange for objectification.

Different social network services can be distinguished through the different kinds of object that lead to their success. Friendster's expulsion of Fakesters, and later attempts to use TV characters is one example; MySpace's embrace of independent bands and FaceBook's initial use of Universities as touchstones help explain their divergence. LinkedIn has Companies as their touchstone, Orkut has it's communities, which are often used as badges for the users to express their identity. Suicide Girls is a blog network focused around models-as-objects, last.fm uses songs and bands, Flickr uses photos, Dopplr uses places.

Looked at in this way, James Hong's attempt to change the core objects of HotOrNot from pictures of strangers to pictoral self-tags he calls "Stylepix" seems an interesting experiment.

Making sense of the different object graphs and how they interact with the social graphs in these overlapping sites will keep lots more researchers busy, I'm sure.