"An Arizona State survey was administered in September over the Web to all freshmen in the university’s campus residence halls; about 21 percent responded. Asked whether they use a social networking site, 93.2 percent said they do actively, 4 percent had in the past and 2.8 said never. For Facebook, the percentage of active users is 88.6, compared to 3.4 former users and 8.1 percent who said they have never used it." Students also said they find Facebook more valuable for social than academic interactions, indicating that faculty could probably find more value in social networks.

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Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy

Clive Thompson has a terrific feature in the International Herald Tribune about social networks and "ambient intimacy", which is the phenomenon of sustaining relationships through casual awareness of what others are doing. Twitter and the Facebook News Feed are bringing new breadth to this concept, enabling people to glimpse others' lives through occasional insights into their everyday activities. This intimacy becomes addictive. People who initially reject the News Feed as too intrusive or the constant stream of Twitter chatter as too overwhelming often find themselves drawn in to the point that monitoring the stream becomes addictive. There are also downsides to this phenomenon, in particular the lack of privacy and control over one's own persona. The Internet was supposed to liberate people to reinvent themselves, but the arrival of tools that let anyone publish information about anyone else has actually done the opposite: it has given us less control over our own image.

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In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive.
The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They're far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered.
But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they'd scored a big success. Even the daily catalogue of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.
Each little update each individual bit of social information is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.
when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they've never actually been apart. They don't need to ask, "So, what have you been up to?" because they already know. Instead, they'll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.
The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night tiny updates like "enjoying a glass of wine now" or "watching TV while lying on the couch." They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn't very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.
wareness tools aren't as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It's personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they're not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you'll read them all, maybe you'll skip some.
Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the "Dunbar number," as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?
But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their "weak ties" loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently "friended" them on Facebook, or somebody from last year's holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist.
Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.
"I outsource my entire life," she said. "I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes."
Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.
Yet Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won't stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what's being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn't optional. If you don't dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you're doing right now! if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.
When cyberspace came along in the early '90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity become someone new.

"If anything, it's identity-constraining now," Tufekci told me. "You can't play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, 'Oh, right, ha-ha I know you, and you're not into that.' " She laughed. "You know that old cartoon? 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'? On the Internet today, everybody knows you're a dog!
The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to "know thyself," or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter's Web site "What are you doing?" can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they're trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

Facebook micro-payments total $35 million, VC says

Facebook may book $35 million in small-dollar virtual gifts this year, or about 10% of its total revenue, estimates venture capitalist Jeremy Liew. This indicates that people are willing to pay good money for items that have no practical value, as long as the sentiment is there. Facebook could be an innovator in creating the kind of micro-payments system that has been unsuccessful in other markets.

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Scrabble Comes To Facebook, Way, Way Too Late

Hasbro badly fumbled the opportunity to profit from the popularity of Scrabulous, a knock-off version of Scrabble that is a megahit on Facebook. Instead of partnering with or buying the developers of Scrabulous, Hasbro sued them instead. Now it is bringing an officially sanctioned version of Scrabble to Facebook - a year late. Expect audience indifference.

Tags: daily_reading, facebook on 2008-07-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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For Coors Light, a Night Out That Begins on MySpace

Coors has a new campaign called “Code blue” that's built on the new feature of Coors Light beer bottles that turns the color of the mountains pictured on the labels from white to blue when the beer gets cold enough to drink. Facebook users will soon be able to send friends “Code blue” alerts inviting them to meet up for a beer. They can even set a meeting point using Facebook maps. (via <a href="http://www.womma.org/blog/2008/05/coors-light-uses-online-networks-to-help-friends-connect-offline/">WOMMA blog</a>.

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The wonderful horrible life of Facebook users and their data (or, "data hogs get slaughtered")

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ScrabbleWars: P For Piracy, Or E For Extra Exposure? - Media Post, Jan. 18, 2008

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On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data - New York Times

Tags: daily_reading, facebook, research, socialnetworking on 2007-12-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

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