What they know about me…

Nice little video about Facebook. I don’t who, when, where as I am not sure my Youtube source is the author… In any case, this is how you can get the full story of a man’s life, for free, out of an social networking website.  It is scary the amount of information we give away.

It is another one of these videos/articles/interviews that makes me realise we really need to reevaluate the concept of privacy today. Why do we give away so much? Does these informations matter to us as much as they use to, or has our entire idea of privacy changed completely? There is that incredible gap between our Internet usage and our outcry for privacy. Everywhere I hear or read “Oh my god, marketing companies get our data? They use it? They make money out of it? I want my privacy back, leave me alone and anonymous”… All this usually written on a Facebook status, tweet, blog post… Choose your medium.

This is one survey I’d like to take on!

Video found whilst reading http://www.adverblog.com/ (Props to them)

Object Centered Sociality

An interesting blog post “exchange” happened in 2005 between entrepreneurs/bloggers Russel Beattie and Jyri Engestrom. It started as Beattie wrote he “linked out” of LinkedIn simply because he couldn’t see the point (post here). As a response, Engestrom sparked a great discussion with his post about “Object Centered Sociality”. He used Beattie’s example to examine why some social networks services work and others don’t (post here).

Engestrom, instead of referring to familiar theories and definitions of social networks used by authors like Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchanan, prefers to introduce us to a different concept. This other view is about “object centered sociality” as defined by sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina. It is difficult to explain it better than Engestrom does:

“Russell’s disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term ‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it’s not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term ‘social network.’ The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.”

He argues for social networks to not turn into a game of who is the best/most connected but instead to concentrate on the reasons why a social network service is going to be a positive in a user’s life. He argues that “we can use the object-centered sociality theory to identify new objects that are potentially suitable for social networking services” and makes on interesing comment on how technology is sometimes not ready or not accessible enough for some services to really take off (he cites the example of geo-tagging and other location-based services).

What an interesting read and a good perspective on how pertinent the “object” of a social network is. We sometimes seem to forget that social networks are not just people linked together but also have a purpose.

Note: Russell Beattie posted an update and praise of Engestrom’s post, available here

Internalised Externalities?

What’s a network? Duncan Watts defines it in this simple way : ” A collection of objects connected to each other in some fashion” (Watts, 2002). These connections between objects (that we will call nodes) have effects. There is no denying that. And yet, in a network, certain effects that cannot be directly linked to the nodes of a network can be observed.

Some call these effects ‘externalities’. Simply because they are external to the activity of said nodes. Externalities in the case of networks are tricky. Because if you think about it, almost everything can be linked together today. So how exactly ‘external’ can that be?

To answer this question, we need to go back a little bit in time and talk about the ‘network effect’. In 1950, Harvey Leibenstein isolated what he called the “Bandwagon effect”, which he defined as “the extent to which the demand for a commodity is increased due to the fact that others are also consuming the same commodity. It represents the desire of people to purchase a commodity in order to get into ‘the swim of things’”. The “Bandwagon effect” remained largely unexplored for two decades until economic standardisation lead a large number of economists such as David (1985), Farrell & Saloner (1985) or Katz & Shapiro (1985) to explore the subject. They came up with the ‘network effect’ also generally called ‘network externalities’. Simply put, it is what happens when the value of a product increase with the number of its users. They isolated two types of effects : direct network externalities (when the physical effect of the number of users increase the value of a product, like the fax machine or the telephone) and indirect network externalities (when the number of associated products increase or become more easily available with the increase of the number of users, like associated softwares for an operating system).

But let’s stop a minute and have a close look at these effects. They are called ‘externalities’. Classically, these effects can be considered external if the agents fail to internalise them to their decision-making process or cannot have any control over them. And here is one big problem: agents entering a network of users for a certain product will not internalise the effect of their joining on other users… But the owner of the network certainly will! Isn’t this making these ‘externalities’ no longer externalities but merely effects?

It is an interesting point of view about externalities and how to consider them in a network. This has been identified by Leibowitz & Margolis (1994) but still finds some resistance amongst economists. My opinion is that it is difficult to let go of a convenient and well-understood economical concept. However, network theories are becoming more and more influential as the world is becoming more and more connected.  It might be time to carefully reconsider the use of some of our beloved terms.

References:

P.A. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review (May 1985).

J. Farrell and G. Saloner, “Standardization, Compatibility, and Innovation,” Rand Journal of Economics (Spring 1985).

M. L. Katz and C. Shapiro, “Network Externalities, Competition, and Compatibility,” American Economic Review (June 1985).

H. Leibenstein, “Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers’ Demand,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 1950).

S. J. Liebowitz and S. E. Margolis, “Network Externalities (Effects)”, New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, MacMillan (1998)

D. Watts, Duncan, ”A simple model of global cascades on random networks”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (9): 5766–577 (2002).

Regulate Human Reproduction using Network Theory?

A mexican computer scientist, Melanie Moses, asked herself is human societies were bound by the same rules as networks regarding size and development. She writes in an essay she published in Nature: “Across contemporary nations, the decline in human birth rates with increased energy consumption is quantitatively identical to the decline in fertility rate with increased metabolism in other mammals.”

The outcomes of her essay are interesing in terms of policy for nations. She proposes that energy should be wisely used and as green and clean as possible to ensure the future of the human population. The risk is that as our energy consumption is augmenting, our fertility rates might decrease.

Thanks to Network Theory, now that this correlation has been discovered, humans should make informed and intelligent decisions about energy consumption to change this potentially disastrous trend. Contrary to other mammals, humans have the possibility to evolve from this. She concludes by saying:  ”It’s obviously a relationship we don’t want to maintain. In order to break that relationship, we need to understand its causes” in an attempt to foster research on this subject as she admits the relationship between social and biological energy patterns is still only a hypothesis.

Apple goes more and more social.

Inspired by Sydney Morning Herald article: “Apple unveils social network, new iPod and TV tool”

Getting more “social” is the new gold for online content, websites or applications. Having developed a strong base for online activities in selling entertainment content via its iTunes platform, it is logically that Apple is evolving towards a more “social”model. Of course, it is nor Twitter neither Facebook. What Apple is unveiling is “Ping”.

This innovation seems logic as music (iTunes primary activity) is a very “social” medium. People share music, want to discover new songs and share their discoveries. The success of the Genius application (who proposes new songs from ones we already own according to other users’ playlists) was not a surprise.

This new step, Ping, is increasing the possibilities of interactions between users. Ping looks like a simplified Facebook. The users have their profiles and their friends (called  ”People”) in an application integrated to iTunes. They can share and discover music but also follow their artists’ activities or learn more about them.

This new add-on to iTunes seems promising although everything seems to be getting more social. Is it possible we might end up with an Internet that is “too social”.

Networks and Innovation

What do networks do? They create social capital, permit diffusion of ideas or information…Today’s question for this post: do they have a particular effect on innovation?

Let’s look at certains mechanisms in networks, isolated by Jason Owen-Smith for the University of Michigan on behalf of the OECD in a presentation. He defines three key mechanisms:

- “Network Pipes” (the resources and information channels as Owen-Smih calls them, who can also be considered as what we understand as flows in a network)

- “Network Prisms” (the statuses and certifications, which can also be defined as the signals a node sends to other nodes regarding its importance, its connections and its experience).

- “Network Peeps” (the social influence).

Interestingly, Owen-Smith describes the influences of these mechanisms proper to networks have on innovation but using his main points we can aslo stress, in our own way, how networks support innovation.

The pipes permit a recombination of research and findings, can prevent redundancy  if information flows pertinently and help spread discoveries faster. The prisms offers to the one enjoying a particular status a certain freedom of movement and respect for their findings. The prisms can aslo help foster adoption of new findings. One main danger isolated by Owen-Wilson is conformity and low risk-taking as statuses are a rather fragile asset. The peeps are the impulse, they help spread discoveries, adopt and diffuse new findings.

Isolating these mechanisms is key to understand networks, especially as it relates directly with how certain networks theories were discovered. The discovery of the Power Law’s translation to scale free networks is linked with he study of citations in academic papers and therefore to the spread of research and findings in the academic world.

Eco-Networks

Network theories especially the “Small World Experiment” can find application in an extensive range of subjects from technology to social relations, including the World Wide Web and even the anatomy of the human brain… An interesting one would be ecosystems…

The intimate linkage of relationships that can be uncovered thanks to the Small World theory. A theory that was discovered by physicist Albert-Laslo Barabasi and his colleagues of the University of Notre Dame. This linkage has found a new application in ecosystems as ecologists are starting to apply network theories to nature’s organisation, uncovering very close relationships and very few degrees of separation between vital conditions specific to animals or plants.

Ecologist are mapping relationships and flows between species, creating “complete roadmaps of ecological networks”. Leader in this mapping of nature’s networks is Jordia Bascompte, an ecologist of the Spanish Research Council who started to travel and catalog animals and plants in their relationships in their ecosystems (especially marine ecosystems in the Caribbean).

Carl Zimmer, author of the article ”Network Theory: A Key to Unraveling How Nature Works” who inspired this post believes that “network theory tells scientists that subtle changes to complex networks can trigger sudden changes”. The application of his research is extremely important as it can help predict the influence of any changes appearing in particular species or relationships between them.

“It may be possible to monitor ecosystems for early warning signals of collapse as well”, writes Zimmer. It is probably one of the best tools at hand to help preserving fragile ecosystems around the world. And another domain of application of Network Theories.

Tyranny Book

Great idea from Leo Burnett Iberia for Amnesty International: A Facebook for tyrans or how o exploit social media tools for a greater good. Facebook is the website concept that probably engages the most Internet users in relaying information, sharing and reacting to news as well as communicating with each other.

The concept is great, sadly the website is inaccessible at the moment. So in terms of real user experience, I will not be able to share any opinion. Have a go and tell me if it works : http://www.tyrannybook.com/

Meanwhile, the accompanying Youtube video is definitly worth a watch :

6 is the number.

It’s a small small world. The six degrees of separation theory, which for some is an academic urban legend, refers to the principle that everyone on earth is at most six steps away from another human being. The original theory is either attributed to Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy or to Nobel prize Guglielmo Marconi. But here is not the place to decide who created it. It was still an influential concept for the early thinkers of social networks.

Many others tried to research the concept. Milgram’s Small World Experiment was the most famous even if he never actually used the six degrees term. In 2001, Duncan Watts attempted to recreate Milgram’s Six Degrees experiment using email chains and found out the number of intermediaries was around six…

Interesting concept. As any interesting concept, there was potential for advertisers. ZenithOptimedia decided to embark on this journey on behalf of Tooheys Extra Dry. And there it was: 6 Beers of Separation. Targeting an audience of male aged 18 to 24 years old, ZenithOptimedia gave four people a six pack, a camera crew and 18 days to prove this six degrees theory.

The result is a very important digital budget (20% of the overall budget) and a very successful campaign who ran for 9 months. The campaign incorporated a mobile site and content in the form of episodes distributed across iTunes, Facebook, Youtube and Foxtel television. Video content reached 700,000 views, iTunes registered 21,398 downloads and 630,000 unique visits were made to all digital destinations. A very interesting campaign indeed. At least in terms of efficiency. The reach is very important and this is one more proof that branded content can be successful and is a good strategy to reach young targets.

Now, has it empirically proven the six degrees theory… I’ll let you look into the content. I’d say yes!

See for yourself: http://www.6beersofseparation.com.au/