Group items tagged

For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends

typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks.

ACT ONE : NETWORK EFFECTS

Friendster was designed as to be an online dating site.

MySpace aimed to attract all of those being ejected from Friendster

Facebook had launched as a Harvard-only site before expanding to other elite institutions

And only in 2006, did they open to all.

in the 2006-2007 school year, a split amongst American teens occurred

college-bound kids from wealthier or upwardly mobile backgrounds flocked to Facebook

urban or less economically privileged backgrounds rejected the transition and opted to stay with MySpace

At this stage, over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site

the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout.

do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users

all fine and well if everyone can get access to the same platform, but when that's not the case, new problems emerge.

ACT TWO : YOUTH VS. ADULTS

showcases the ways in which some tools are used differently by different groups.

For American teenagers, social network sites became a social hangout space, not unlike the malls

Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended purpose as a social utility. For example, it is a tool for communicating with the past.

dynamic more visible than in the recent "25 Things" phenomena.

Adults are crafting them to show-off to people from the past and connect the dots between different audiences as a way of coping with the awkwardness of collapsed contexts.

Twitter is all the rage, but are kids using it? For the most part, no.

many are leveraging Twitter to be part of a broad dialogue

We design social media for an intended audience but aren't always prepared for network effects or the different use cases that emerge when people decide to repurpose their technology.

One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties and dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem.

you are probably even aware of how inaccurate the public portrait of risk is

ACT THREE : RESHAPING PUBLICS

I want to discuss five properties of social media and three dynamics. These are the crux of what makes the phenomena we're seeing so different from unmediated phenomena.

1. Persistence.

The bits-wise nature of social media means that a great deal of content produced through social media is persistent by default.

You can copy and paste a conversation from one medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it

2. Replicability.

much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.

3. Searchability.

Search changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips

4. Scalability.

Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral out of control and scale to the entire school

5. (de)locatability.

This paradox means that we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.

Those five properties are intertwined, but their implications have to do with the ways in which they alter social dynamics.

1. Invisible Audiences.

lurkers who are present at the moment

visitors who access our content at a later date or in a different environment

having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience

2. Collapsed Contexts

Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood.

3. Blurring of Public and Private

As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.

The key lesson from the rise of social media for you is that a great deal of software is best built as a coordinated dance between you and the users.

Social media is not new. M