Now Playing Tracks

Google+ Circles ;)

Social circles consists of people we already know. Social network consists of entities that we don’t have a personal relationship with -   like individuals, search engines, websites, or organizations. 

Circles reinforce our relationships, while networks expand them.

When trust comes into play, social circles build on existing relations of trust, while social networks build out new relations of trust.

…

This distinction, while it appears to be minor, matters for how we acquire and share information. 

It becomes crucial for us to understand that people’s trust-forming mechanisms for impersonal ties (networks) are different from personal ties (circles).

If your best friend and a stranger told you that your bag was stolen, the process you would use to verify this information from your friend and the stranger would be different.  Trust building mechanisms with a source depends on the type of existing relationship we have with the source.

In the absence of personal ties, people go through a set of trust-practices to determine the least minimally risky path to establish a connection between themselves and the source, hence they create desire paths. And sometimes these paths, disrupt the internal consistency of institutions.

(Source: triciawang.com)

Friends & Frenemies: Why We Add and Remove Facebook Friends To friend or to de-friend, that is the question. New research from NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company, reveals that there are innumerable factors that help Facebook users decide to add a friend or cull someone from the fold, though knowing someone in real life is the top reason cited for friend-ing someone (82%) and offensive comments are the main reason someone gets the boot (55%).
Zoom

Friends & Frenemies: Why We Add and Remove Facebook Friends

To friend or to de-friend, that is the question. New research from NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company, reveals that there are innumerable factors that help Facebook users decide to add a friend or cull someone from the fold, though knowing someone in real life is the top reason cited for friend-ing someone (82%) and offensive comments are the main reason someone gets the boot (55%).

Op-Ed: Stop Feeding Facebook, It's Time for Moderation

Like Short, I’m not sure I have an answer except this: moderation.

We cannot depend on Facebook to be moderate in its attempts to be the center of the Web. The answer is not a kinder, gentler and less privacy abusive alternative to Facebook.

The answer is to moderate our use of and dependence on Facebook. Like moderating diet, drink, television consumption or any other pleasurable but ultimately damaging-if-done-in-excess activity it is up to individuals. If we cannot do this, the fault lies only with us.

The damage being done by excessive social media is every bit as real as the damage done by a steady diet of bacon cheeseburgers and no exercise, and just as slow to become obvious. Frictionless sharing is the cardiac event that should signal it’s time to cut back on the endless diet of bacon cheeseburgers. Stop feeding the beast, and start using social media in moderation.

Web 2.0 Map Adds Cities of Data (But One of Facebook’s Skyscrapers Just Got Taller!) By Richard MacManus The Data Layer (a different view of the map) shows the incumbents as cities. Each city is made up of buildings that correlate to eight data segments, such as “Social Data” and “Interest Data.” The size of each building is determined by an ‘Engagement Score’ - calculated from data points provided by Nielsen, including sessions per person, pages per person and time per person. In other words: the more engaged the site is in a particular data segment, the higher the building. In Union of Social Networks, for example, Facebook is shown as having a skyscraper of “Social Data,” along with a nearly-as-tall edifice that is enigmatically described as “Wildcard Data.” The map legend defines Wildcard Data as “data that is uncategorized, but could have huge implications.” Inan explanatory post, Web 2.0 Summit co-chair John Battelle described two examples of Wildcard Data: “For example, Microsoft knows how people interact with their applications and OS. Microsoft and Google have a ton of language data (phonemes, etc.).” Facebook’s Wildfire Data is in this example appears to refer to its Open Graph and Like buttons. So does that mean the building should now be much taller, after Facebook’s re-design last week? The Like buttons have suddenly been complimented by read, listen and watch instant sharing - as just one example of what’s changed since this map was developed.
Zoom

Web 2.0 Map Adds Cities of Data (But One of Facebook’s Skyscrapers Just Got Taller!) By Richard MacManus

The Data Layer (a different view of the map) shows the incumbents as cities. Each city is made up of buildings that correlate to eight data segments, such as “Social Data” and “Interest Data.” The size of each building is determined by an ‘Engagement Score’ - calculated from data points provided by Nielsen, including sessions per person, pages per person and time per person. In other words: the more engaged the site is in a particular data segment, the higher the building.

In Union of Social Networks, for example, Facebook is shown as having a skyscraper of “Social Data,” along with a nearly-as-tall edifice that is enigmatically described as “Wildcard Data.” The map legend defines Wildcard Data as “data that is uncategorized, but could have huge implications.” Inan explanatory post, Web 2.0 Summit co-chair John Battelle described two examples of Wildcard Data: “For example, Microsoft knows how people interact with their applications and OS. Microsoft and Google have a ton of language data (phonemes, etc.).”

Facebook’s Wildfire Data is in this example appears to refer to its Open Graph and Like buttons. So does that mean the building should now be much taller, after Facebook’s re-design last week? The Like buttons have suddenly been complimented by read, listen and watch instant sharing - as just one example of what’s changed since this map was developed.

Can Google+ circles stand the test of time? A look inside Google’s user experience

Google+ engineer and former Plaxo CTO Joseph Smarr

A common problem with online sharing today is that the audience is too wide, so people either overshare or undershare,” he said. “We want to better reflect users’ offline relationships by respecting the real social circles they have in their life. We believe this will make online interactions much more authentic and meaningful.

Ted Livingston

If Google could personally train every person in the world, would people find value in Google+? To me, the fact that on Facebook you’re sharing with all your friends and not specific groups, that’s an advantage. It very much revolves around the social dynamics of real life. It gives people not an excuse, but an opportunity to share all kinds of content about themselves that make them look good.

Joseph Smarr of Google+ on early lessons, an API, and pseudonyms.

Smarr also talked about the nature of identity on Google+. Those following the launch of the service know that Google+ and pseudonymity is a hot-button issue. As the Electronic Fronter Foundation’s Jillian C. York noted in an essay making a case for pseudonyms, Google+ has changed some of its processes, moving from immediate account deactivation to warning users about the issue and giving them an opportunity to align their Google+ username with its “real name” policy. This week, Kaliya “@IdentityWoman” Hamlin became the most recent person to have her Google+ account suspended. (Given her work and role in the digital identity space, Hamlin’s use case is likely to be an interesting one.)

“There’s cases where that authenticity and knowing that this is a real person with whatever name they tend to be called in the real world is really a feature,” Smarr said during our discussion. “It changes the tone of discussions, it helps you find people you know in the real world. And so, wanting to make sure that there’s a space that is preserved and promoted is really important. On any of these social networks, it’s not enough to write the code, you have to make the right community. Lots of networks choose different approaches to how they do that, and they all have different consequences. It’s not that one is inherently better or or more valid than the others, it’s just that if you don’t do anything about it, it will kind of take its own course.”

There are clearly some gray areas here, particularly given Google’s global reach into parts of the world were using your real identity to share content could literally be life-threatening. “Obviously there are a lot of cases where being able to share things not under your real identity is valuable and necessary, and Google has a lot of products like this today, like YouTube,” said Smarr. “If you’re posting videos of authoritarian governments during a revolution, you may not want to use your real name, and that seems pretty valid. Whether or not that type of use case will be supported in the Google+ as you know it today is something that we’re all thinking through and figuring out, but it’s not meant to stop you from doing that in other products.”

Convergence 2.0 = Service + Social + Physical Convergence 2.0 The rise of the internet requires a reassessment of Convergence 1.0. Negroponte developed his model of convergence very early. Personal computers were in their infancy. The internet was a small government experiment used mainly to exchange mail and files. Nothing like the web existed. Negroponte has acknowledged, that none of us saw the web coming. It took a while to see, as Andy Grove later did, that “All companies will be internet companies, or they will be dead.”[7] Or as Tim Misner put it, “All hardware products want to be web-sites.”[8] Or that most human services will become networked. Or as Tim O’Reilly observed, “Virtually every application is a network application, relying on remote services to perform its function.”[9] Convergence 2.0 recognizes that interactive multimedia exist within a networked world and depend on networked services. It recognizes that most services have a social component. And it recognizes that people are rooted in the physical world and networks are increasingly connected to things. Convergence 2.0 integrates interactive multimedia with internet-based services, social networks, and the physical world.
Zoom

Convergence 2.0 = Service + Social + Physical

Convergence 2.0

The rise of the internet requires a reassessment of Convergence 1.0. Negroponte developed his model of convergence very early. Personal computers were in their infancy. The internet was a small government experiment used mainly to exchange mail and files. Nothing like the web existed.

Negroponte has acknowledged, that none of us saw the web coming. It took a while to see, as Andy Grove later did, that “All companies will be internet companies, or they will be dead.”[7] Or as Tim Misner put it, “All hardware products want to be web-sites.”[8] Or that most human services will become networked. Or as Tim O’Reilly observed, “Virtually every application is a network application, relying on remote services to perform its function.”[9]

Convergence 2.0 recognizes that interactive multimedia exist within a networked world and depend on networked services. It recognizes that most services have a social component. And it recognizes that people are rooted in the physical world and networks are increasingly connected to things. Convergence 2.0 integrates interactive multimedia with internet-based services, social networks, and the physical world.

From influentials to small connected groups

The most critical point to understand about this shift, is that the people connecting groups are not special. They are just you and I. Each one of you is likely a bridge between at least four groups. Knowing that groups are independent, each one of you is the only person on earth connecting about 30-40 other people together. If we want ideas to spread, if we want people to evangelize our brand and for their messages to spread, we need to focus on everyday people, and understand how their groups of friends are connected.

To Tumblr, Love Pixel Union