Just Add Social Noor on social media

This semester, I decided to take a statistics class at the UC Berkeley extension in Redwood City.  Stats has never been one of my strengths so I decided to take the class to bolster my skills and refresh my memory.  For my class project, I decided to conduct a survey of engagement with social media sites, focusing on Facebook, flickr, and del.icio.us.  My main question was whether there is a relationship between a user’s age and their engagement with a social network site.  To assess engagement, I looked at two metrics - size of social network and size of digital artifacts collection. I defined digital artifacts for each site as Facebook wall posts, flickr photos, and del.icio.us bookmarks.  In my sample, I found a weak negative association between age and level of engagement, meaning that younger users tended to be more engaged.  Nonetheless, this relationship was fairly weak.  These results seem counterintuitive to me - I hypothesized a strong negative association.  I believe that these results are due to my sampling procedures, which were not random at all and most participants tended to be around my own age.

Out of curiosity (and because the Excel CORREL function is super easy to use), I started correlating all sorts of various metrics, hoping I can find a strong association somewhere in my data!  I found a strong positive association with the size of a del.ico.us user’s network and the size of her bookmarks collection.  This means that as a user’s social network increased in size, so did their bookmarks collection.  These results are interesting but not too surprising given the nature of del.icio.us.  del.icio.us users with larger social networks are exposed to more bookmarks, merely because they know more users who are posting more bookmarks and those bookmarks are winding up in their Network page.  And once those bookmarks end up on their Network page, they can easily save those bookmarks themselves.

For those who may be interested, my project slides are now available online.

For whatever reason, my fervor in blogging SXSW did not carry over to ICWSM, even though I enjoyed ICWSM far more than SXSW.  I’ve considered going back through my notes from the conference and posting my impressions of various talks but that seems a bit futile now that it has been almost a month since the conclusion of the conference.

At any rate, I did want to post some of my impressions regarding the conference, especially compared to last year’s.  As much as I enjoyed last year’s conference, this year’s conference was considerably better!  Compared to last year’s selection, I noticed a significant improvement in the quality of papers presented at this year’s conference.  This noticeable improvement may have been due to this year’s 26% acceptance rate (I’m not sure about last year’s acceptance rate).

Of all the sessions I attended, the set of papers in the psychology session were my favorite.  Two papers come to mind - What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality? and Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes.  In the first paper,  David Evans, Sam Gosling, and Anthony Carroll used a Facebook application to determine if users’ impressions of their own personality matched how their friends perceive them.  They then built a social network site and conducted the same test but with random users, where users made assessments about others’ personalities via their profile information.  In both instances, they found that users tended to understand one another (or put more appropriately - the way that users perceive themselves tended to coincide with how others perceived them). In the second paper, Kristin Stecher and Scott Counts looked at various aspects of online profiles and found that users can generally learn about other users with a minimal amount of profile information (”think slices”).  They also considered the utility of various online profile attributes.  Not surprisingly, profile photos bubbled up to the top.

I’m looking forward to reading the four papers from this session.  Overall, ICWSM 2008 was a great conference and I’m glad I had an opportunity to attend and present.

This morning, I’ll be presenting my social TV paper at ICWSM.  For those who may be interested, I’ve posted the slides to Slideshare.  I really enjoyed working on this study and I’m looking forward to the talk.  Being that this is the last day of the conference and so early in the morning, I fear nobody will be there!  Hopefully, I’m proven wrong.

I’m in Seattle for the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, where I’ll be presenting my paper Exploring Social Media Scenarios for the Television on Wednesday morning.  Since I tend to make last minute changes to my slide decks, I’ll post the slides after the conference.

If you’re around, please say hi!

Jared Spool gave a great talk the other day at SXSW comparing magic and mental models. Spool’s talk was really fun, very valuable, and timely. He centered the talk around several magic tricks, which were very entertaining. In using magic as a metaphor for experience design, Spool pointed out that people enjoy magic but they don’t have to know how it is done - in fact it might be more fun if they didn’t know. This same point can be applied to user experiences - the user shouldn’t have to know what is happening behind the scenes. The model presented in the UI should be that of the user, not the designer. He used the example of files in operating systems - there are no files (just ones and zeros) and nothing is ever deleted. But does the user need to know that? No, it is much simpler (and offers a better experience for the user) to just create this illusion that there are files and that they’ve been removed from the recycle bin (or copied elsewhere on the hard drive). He also talked about perceived performance vs actual performance. They’ve found that task completion is the one factor that impacts users’ perception of performance. When users can complete a task quickly and easily, they perceive a system to be faster than it really is. Finally, he pointed out a number of ways to delight users - being whimsical (e.g. Twitter), attention to details (e.g. displaying the correct iPod color in iTunes), and offering critical functionality (e.g. Farecast’s fare predictions).

A few days ago at SXSW, I attended Derek Powazek’s talk - Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing for Creatives. What a treat! This was my second time attending a Powazek talk and he always manages to be both engaging and informative. In this talk, Powazek offered strategies for soliciting and incorporating user generated content into online communities. Powazek first started the talk by debunking three common lies for not incorporating UGC - everyone is an idiot, the good stuff is hard to find, and you can’t make any money off of it. To debunk the idiots myth, he pointed to a number of projects, including Wikipedia. He was quick to point out that Wikipedia is hard to replicate since it involves a certain altruistic element that may not be true in all community projects. Powazek then talked about different ways to better enable discoverability of UGC - human powered (e.g. editors), computer powered (e.g. Google PageRank, Technorati), and hybrid (e.g. Flickr interestingness).

He also emphasized that UGC isn’t about getting *free* creative labor. You have to offer your community incentives to generate stellar content and those incentives have to be appropriate for the community and the level of work involved. Powazek pointed out that Threadless offers multiple incentives for participating - bragging rights, money, and access to special features of the site (thus creating a class of membership that others in the community aspire to be).

Powazek also warned that just because you own the content, doesn’t mean that you should do with it what you please (again the old mantra of just because you can doesn’t mean you should applies here). You can’t violate the community’s trust. He gave an example of Yahoo! creating a Wii portal that pulled in Wii-tagged Flickr photos. Even though Yahoo! could do that (technically and legally), they should have asked the permission of their users. Instead, they angered their users who retaliated by posting inappropriate photos and tagging them as Wii - hence having these photos appear on the Wii portal.

Finally, Powazek stated that you can’t build a community - you must grow it. He offered the following tips for growing communities - give users the tools they want, trust people to be good, reward good contributions, punish bad contributions, and expect the unexpected.

I really enjoyed this talk - you should watch Powazek’s blog for the slide deck and the SXSW site for the podcast.

Today’s SXSW keynote given by Frank Warren (of PostSecret) has been the highlight of my SXSW experience. Warren is an engaging speaker, very down to earth, and had a great positive message. It was one of the most heartwarming talks I’ve been to in a long time. It was refreshing to be at SXSW and not hear yet another snarky panelist. Warren talked about how the project started and how it has evolved. He also shared a number of PostSecret postcards, some of them that were not included in the PostSecret books due to copyright or privacy issues. Warren attributed the overwhelming success of the project to the fact that we all have secrets and can probably identify with one of the cards. Warren stated, “All of us have a secret that will break your heart.”

I think what I really enjoyed about Warren’s talk is that this is *exactly* the sort of stuff that makes me love online communities - that ability to reach out to other people whom you may not know, identify with them on a basic human level, and create something bigger and better than anything you could have done without the connective tissue of the Internet. Throughout the talk, I kept thinking back to the 1000 journals project, an art project where participants wrote/drew in traveling journals that were eventually scanned and shared online. What I really love about PostSecret and the 1000 journals project is that these projects utilize the Internet and online communities as a tool to get organized and share with the whole world but they’re not about the technology. The important part is the art, the collaborative nature of it, and the people behind it.

If you’re interested in reading more about Warren’s keynote, CNet has posted a pretty good article.

If you follow tech gossip then you’ve probably heard by now that the highlight of yesterday’s SXSW panels/talks was the Zuckerberg/Lacy trainwreck keynote.  I was fortunate (?) enough to be in attendance and here are my impressions.

The keynote was awful and boring. It was a combination of Zuckerberg being over-prepared/over-coached and Lacy being under-prepared. I believe the audience reacted so harshly because there was a lot of anticipation and excitement about the keynote and it was a total letdown. The largest ballroom at the Austin Convention Center was packed, as was the adjoining overflow seating ballroom. People were looking forward to hearing Zuckerberg talk about Facebook.

Things were headed in the wrong direction even before the interview started. As Zuckerberg and Lacy came on stage, several attendees in the front shouted out “ZUCKERBERG” - almost like we were in a rock concert. Lacy seemed annoyed and stated something along the lines of, “Hey! What about me?” At this point, I was thinking, “What about YOU? Who are you anyway?!?” I’d never heard of her before the keynote and I don’t think anyone was attending just to see her.

Lacy was an extremely poor interviewer. For one thing, she was just rude. She repeatedly cut off Zuckerberg and even when he was talking she kept adding “right” and “aha.” She also didn’t seem to understand the SXSW audience at all. Most of her questions were pretty flat and focused on business topics - nothing that was really of interest to this audience of geeks/devs/designers. Zuckerberg wasn’t really all that engaging either - he kept going on tedious rambles about nothing. He repeated himself over and over again and kept saying that Facebook was about “communicating efficiently” (he probably said “communicating efficiently” at least 10 times). As the interview progressed, lots of folks started filtering out early and there were a lot of people sitting next to me groaning and complaining about her questions (or lack there of) and interview style.

Throughout the interview, Lacy kept interjecting herself into the conversation, which was really inappropriate and unprofessional. She was essentially pulling an Oprah but very few people can pull that off and not a lot of people knew who she was or cared. She kept talking about her book (and how you can pre-order it on Amazon) and acting like she and Zuckerberg were old friends. She also mentioned a few things that were just inappropriate - that he sweated through his white t-shirt during their first interview and that there were bongs and pot all over the FB office during another interview. You could tell he was really uncomfortable with those comments and it was really uncomfortable to witness the whole thing as an audience member. Her body language was extremely unprofessional and flirtatious. She kept twirling her hair and emphasizing her legs. As a professional woman, I found it all pretty offensive. It was a total trainwreck and the only reason I stayed was just to watch it unfold.

The keynote was awful and one of the weirdest things I’ve ever witnessed - especially at a professional conference. If I were Zuckerberg, I’d fire my PR people. I have no idea how the SXSW folks let it happen - did they not rehearse this beforehand? Did Lacy change her style at the last minute?

I first started blogging way back in 2001. At the time, I was 21 and a senior in college. I was impressionable and really excited about everything that was happening on the web. I was amazed by the ability of fairly basic web software (post to database, present post to user) at offering almost anyone the ability to have their own open mic of sorts. There weren’t a lot of people blogging back then (certainly none in my social network) or participating in social media so the only blogs that I knew about where those of the “famous” brilliant people behind a lot of the early tools and blogs. I looked up to these people - I wanted my blog to make me brilliant and famous, too. Every March, they’d all blog about attending South by Southwest and I dreamed of having the opportunity to attend and be like them.

Fast forward to my mid twenties - I went off to grad school where almost every other person in my class had a blog or started one during the course of our program. I grew up a bit at this time and stopped caring (and didn’t have the time) about what was happening in the lives of the A-list bloggers. It was just so much more interesting to read about what my classmates were doing and what was happening in their lives - because it all impacted me and was part of the reality I was living at the time. I wasn’t vicariously living through somebody else’s social network - I had my own.

Fast forward to about six months ago - CHI (my “home” conference of sorts) is taking place in Italy this year, which made it impossible for me to attend. When I started brainstorming other US-based conferences to attend, SXSW immediately came to mind and I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to attend this conference that I had wanted to go to for sooooo long. I had built it up in my head for so many years and I really couldn’t contain my excitement and anticipation the whole week prior to the conference.

Today marked my third day at SXSW and it has been a really bizarre experience. There are times when I feel like I’ve been swallowed whole into the tubes of the interwebs. I keep seeing “famous” people walking around and all I can think, “OMG! IT’S [INSERT A-LIST BLOGGER/INTERNET FAMOUS PERSON] FROM [BLOG/URL]! OMG!” I keep imagining these people walking around with their URL and Technorati rank floating above their heads (sort of like the Sims). All the while, I couldn’t help but feel like I was back in high school again.

I hated high school.

And that’s really what SXSW feels like when you’re a nobody. There are the cool popular kids (the “Internet famous”), the semi-popular kids who hang out with the popular kids (these are usually the people who are dating the Internet famous or who happen to work at the same startup), the unpopular kids who aspire to be popular and want to hang out with the popular kids even if it means tolerating hanging out with the semi-popular kids, and the geeks/dorks/nerds. At SXSW, I’ve reverted to my high school status of geekdom. In high school, I attended classes and shunned extra-curricular activities and parties. And that’s essentially what I’ve been doing at SXSW - selectively attending panels and avoiding the parties.

It’s not to say that I’m not finding it valuable or entertaining as an experience. I’m really glad I finally got the opportunity to go and get it out of my system. But I can’t say that I’m having fun or that I’d ever go back.

It’s just been really fascinating (and bizarre) to be peripherally part of this subculture that has its own celebrities and its own gossip. But once you step away from all of that and get back to the real world, nobody really has any clue what you’re talking about.

And the irony of it all is that these now popular people were probably just as geeky as me in high school.