Category Archives: Socialization

The Social Web: Defining Real-World Social Factors

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I noticed this a while back, while watching FFundercats, as they discussed the possible loss of the service, with founder Paul Buchheit. They also discussed why Friendfeed captured the audience it did and why most of the users hate/dislike Facebook. It’s the content and community that exists on each, and what value you receive from them. I ended up breaking the real-life social experience into 3 fields, to try and explain this.


Introduction

Commonality
A shared interest in similar items, friends, or favorite places to hang out or eat. It should be easily distinguishable to find a similarity to begin with as your mutual friend introduces you or you end up at the same location at the same time. You may both go to a place to enjoy a hobby you both share, and make a connection from that.

Mutual Experience
You have both being through an incident or event in which you share similar experiences, this could fall under commonality, but it is something that isn’t common enough that you would normally share with a stranger. It could be your profession, a disease that has affected your life, or going to an exclusive event. It is a personal connection that randomly comes out and creates an initial connection.

Notable Interaction
This is the kind that is often used in movies, but occurs quite often in life also, the cliche in films is when someone drops there books and gets assistance from someone. It’s just an accident that creates an opening for introductions. In real life this could be any unplanned event where people share some information about each other, whether it be a car accident, being stuck in an airport due to a delay, or any accident that causes people to offer assistance.

Acquaintance

Re-occurrence
The event that any of the aspects of the Introductory Field reoccurs often enough that you begin to know each other on a more personal level, than you would on a one-off meeting.

Mutual Shared Personal Knowledge
The information that most people don’t want you to have if they don’t know you very well, their birthday, their relationship status, where they’re from. It’s the most basic of info that provides accessibility to each other and also a little detail about one’s current state of affairs.

Caring
The use of Personal Knowledge to express yourself to the person. You can wish them a happy birthday, with out it being to awkward, or provide condolences when they lose something/someone very dear to them. It is the ability to express without being perceived as fake that you are willing to be there for the person in the moments they need support.

Friendship

Deep Interaction
The point in which you can discuss things that matter to you, that you might not share with people you don’t know very well. Discussions which involve personal knowledge to be gathered that isn’t public information. It is the ability to trust the other person with more personal information.

Experience
The effect of Deep Interaction is that you are begin to know more about the person. You have inside jokes, can pass on interests, and know how to change their mood for the positive or negative. The insight that comes with being a friend allows you to interact more fluidly with the other person.

Ease of Access
The ability to start a conversation with a person relatively simply, you make time for each other to have a discussion. It can also be, likely is, the provision of multiple channels to reach the person for such discussions. Having such ubiquity helps further and accelerate, the relationship.

Catalysts

Real-Time Discussion
By now we should all understand what this means, but I will clear the meaning up for those that don’t know. Real-time discussions are fluid interactions that happen rapidly enough, within a short period of time, that they can be seen as a seamless conversation.

Randomness
The spark that can ignite a friendship. It is the driving force of introductions and fosters connections. You see someone grasping something that you like as well, you have an accident, you trip. It is the key to mutual experiences, and notable interactions. It also keeps everything interesting, you may come across something new, at any time.

Currently, I haven’t found an online service that offers all of these qualities, but the top few have hit some sweet spots that make it much easier to manage socialization on all levels. Below I posted a chart of what factors Friendfeed, Facebook, and Twitter have become useful for. And I’m not saying that they don’t have ways to do all of this, it’s just not simple, if it’s not simple to manage the social factors, it’s useless.

Factor Chart

The Social Web: At Home, At The Bar, And On The Street

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We’re constantly seeing comparisons made between Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter, and various other networks, sometimes these comparisons are valid. The reasons to use these different services collectively, is because the environments are different. These environmental factors describe the type of interaction people use and receive from the service.

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Sometimes The Small Things In Life Matter

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No one is too small to make a difference, they just might be too small to do it by themselves. If you can get a few big dogs in to help you out that’s great, but the problem with them is that they can’t be everywhere and help you all the time, look for someone smaller. Turn to the rats to help you out, they are plentiful and will be eager to help you for next to nothing as long as you provide something that makes them happy.

That was the realization I had watching Wanted, when Wesley releases the rats into the mill. He provides them with peanut butter, albeit laced with gasoline, in order to have them help in his mission. Several dozen dogs couldn’t have presented him with the return that he received for the hundreds of rats that went out to return his favor. So maybe you should follow his lead and seek the little guys that want you to help them out, not the big guys that you want help from. How do you think they got big, they helped the little guy out, and he let his friends know about it.

Look at how the successful social-networks grew. They all start with a small focused market, Myspace with Musicians, Facebook with College Students, Twitter with texting and the Early Adopter. Each of these small markets had one huge thing in common, they were set in a location where they could expand to the general population, Myspace to fans, Facebook to older Alum and the general public, Twitter to marketers and people looking for an audience. Then they expanded to the mainstream audiences through word of mouth and the necessity for people to have friends on the network to interact with.

They did 3 things and they did them well.

  • They decided on a market.
  • They expanded their market into a natural evolution of the original Market.
  • The focused on the large groups, of small people, to help spread the message, not small groups, of big guys.

Far too many people have the wrong perspective. They seek to become a giant by standing on the shoulders of other giants, rather than building a self sufficient community that helps each other rise up to the sky. I’m going to show you a perspective variation of the King’s Chessboard, a parable in which a king offers a peasant a payment for his services, the peasant simply asks that the king give him double the amount of rice that he gave the day before, until he has covered each square on a chessboard, starting with one grain of rice. The king soon realizes that he can’t honor this payment as it’s too much for the kingdoms granary.

In my variation, I’ll have the king offering 2 different rewards to the peasant, he can receive 1 billion grains of rice each day until each square has been covered, or he can take the option from the original story of 1 grain of rice and have it doubled everyday for each square. Most people would be blinded by the large sum that they are told they will receive each day and wouldn’t quantify the fact they will actually lose a large sum by taking the larger initial choice. In fact, you will receive only ~.0000007% of the total had they chosen the doubling.

So remember, sometimes it’s better to go with the small people and to take time for the little things in life. They will pay off much more in the long term than always trying to do something that involves the major points in of focus. Take your time and if someone needs help don’t be greedy go and help them you never know the power to change your life they might have.

The Twitter Tradeoff

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Do you follow many people or few? This is the most essential question and most disputed aspect of Twitter, although it is also a huge part of other networks as well. I’ve been thinking about it alot the past month and  the answer is both depending on how you want to use the service. You can go small and extract alot of data and make deeper relationships or you can go big and funnel your relationships though they would be diluted.

Why go Small?

The main reason to go small is that you can stay heavily connected and have relevant data flowing constantly with out much noise in the stream. The system was originally designed for keeping track of friends so it makes sense to stay small. There are still problems with only following a few people and the main problem is based on the reciprocal friending that occurs on the service, if you are followed by someone they want you to follow them back. Having only a small group makes it hard to get a large set of advice and responses when you ask a question.

Why go Big?

The main reason to go big is to spur on the reciprocity that I mentioned above that allows you to poll your followers for answers. Also with the reciprocal reaction that gives you lots of followers it allows you to market yourself and your products to them. Another plus that comes with the mass friending is if your able to monitor and track the data that is coming through your stream you can pull out large amounts of focused data.

Now the downside of big is that you can’t build meaningful relationships easily with your friends based off of their tweets. You are opening the door to spammers by (auto-)following everyone back. It makes it harder to use apps because of to much data coming into the API for your user.

My Choice: Small

To me I’d rather have a large group of followers that I could ping off of but only be following a subset of them so that I can have a wealthy stream of information that’s relevant to me. To me I don’t want to have a lot of crap, I want to have valuable wealth inducing assets in my stream. It’s up to you whether you are marketing or there to extract information and build relationships to decide which path you want.

Note this is something that is equally applicable through the broad area of Social Media and it’s up to you. Twitter just takes this single aspect and inflames it in how their service is used making the way you use the service change based on the numbers. One site that has a similar set of changing data based on the numbers of friends & followers is Digg in that you have the ability to shout a story(currently being analysed for removal) to your friends to get dugg up.

Social Impacts Of A Stone Soup

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Have you heard the Grimm tale “Stone Soup“? It’s a tale of travelers that, being famished, come up with an ingenious plot to get food. In doing so they create an air of mystery by starting their plot with a fire and placing a kettle, filled with nothing but water and a stone, upon it. As the townspeople come forth to question what they are creating they reply with the simple response, “Stone soup, but it would be more delicious if we had such and such ingredients.” As everyone in the town comes forth the soup has grown into a meat and vegetable soup, with a fairly hearty broth, that everyone shares. It is a tale of co-operation and compassion that provide all parties better off than they were as individuals.

It is a story that aligns very well with the depression and wartime era’s of the early 20th century. During these tough times, friends, family, and neighbors would gather what little they had and make hearty feasts to share with each other. This would provide them with more variety in the foods they were able to make and they were also connecting with each other.

Co-operation and compassion are key in tough times in keeping your communities strong.

There is no greater proof than David Armano’s assistance with his family friend, on Tuesday night. He used his personal capital on Twitter, friendfeed, and his blog to raise just under $15,000 for her in the past 24 hours. What this proves, is what we are all involved in on these social arenas is very much a community, nearly as real as that which we walk through each day. When we had raised $7,000 for Daniela, David created a video thanking everyone who contributed, with donations or spreading the word, but the thing that stuck out is he spoke of a feast with neighbors in which they would all cook everything when the power would go out and share with each other.

If one person can start an initiative to help another and raise that much in a day, what is stopping us from helping those that need it now more than ever. We have hit a period in which everyone is hurting, much like the depression and wartime eras. If we can share what we have with others to make our community better and also make connections what is the hindrance.

If we can share what we have with others to make our community better and also make connections what is the hindrance.

Non-Linearity Of Education

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I was re-reading through, “The Black Swan,” and came across this passage.

Your child does not seem to have a learning impediment, but he does not seem to want to speak. The schoolmaster pressures you to start considering “other options,” namely therapy. You argue with her to no avail (she is supposed to be the “expert”). Then, suddenly, the child starts composing elaborate sentences, perhaps a  bit too elaborate for his age group. I will repeat that linear progression, a Platonic idea, is not the norm.”

Now, the reason I mention this is that I know for a fact that this exact example is very true. I went through it when I was in  2nd grade, of the K-12 system, at age 7. I didn’t know how to tie my shoes, dress myself, but the big one where school comes in was my reading comprehension and verbal language.  However, by my 3rd grade year, age 8, I could tie my shoes and dress myself, but also my reading comprehension had jumped to that of an average 10th graders, verbal language was also on par with older students. Over time, they have both lost that advantage.

Education will never be a linear system, yet, that’s how our systems treats it. Our system focuses on the ones with the most promise to fill the position, the rest are left alone or sent to remediation to see if they can recover, most can’t. I was the exception to this case and even now I’m behind in my composition and verbal usage, I’m sure it shows.

I would be pleased to hear any stories that you may have to share on the subject.

Walking Through Darkness To Find Life

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As I begin my decent down the side of the winding mountain road, the air is frigid and the world silent. This night is young and shall welcome emotion all along the way; let it be fear, love, the search for something more, or just serenity. I have left my home on a voyage seeking something unknown for an unknown reason, but tonight my feet shall carry me.

As I walk through this frigid world, I have nothing to distract me from what is inside. I open myself up to everything that enters my mind. I am only on this journey for the pleasure that may wait on the other end. As I reach the bottom of the mountain, the lights begin to grow dim from the world above. I have a strong sense of fear growing over me as I don’t know what awaits around the next turn, could be nothing, could be pain. I hear a river rippling off in the distance and walk towards it, because I know it will be my guide through the night. My only friend, the only sound in the dark, it leads me along yet never fails me. This shall go on for multiple hours, tonight.

After about two hours, my mind begins to wander, “What have I done?”, “Why are you doing this?”, “What do you seek that is this important?” My answer to the first is a triviality, because there is no turning back from here, not now. I can only assume that I have to do this for my fear or for the fact of my own humanity. ” What do you seek that is this important,” how do you answer, so many possible things. This is when I come to realize I have lost myself in society. We have no knowledge of what it is to be free from everything, no one to bother you, nothing to distract you, just the open mind that you find filling your body with brash feelings.

The mind shall fill you full of hope, even when there is none. The mind shall fill you full of the memories of love, even if they be only memories. The mind shall fill you with dreams and delusions, even if they can never come true. Some dreams can come true; all they require is a steady will and a challenge for it. Your will can get you over the obstacles in life, if you allow it.

This is the challenge that I face, and is one I cannot do without in my life; the challenge of understanding me and what I want from life. I realized then that all I ever wanted was to take care of everyone that I care for. I cannot do this in my current state so I will have to apply everything to make this work. I have to force my way through life, ambition will get me there but only if I am wise enough to know how to control it.