Image source: Amazon.com

I love the idea nanocelebrity or micro-celebrity, where people are famous among a small group, but far from being a household name. Academic conferences are often a great place to find micro-celebrity. In the US, few academic cross over to the mainstream celebrity. Within a field, an academics can become rock stars, who have followers and detractors and can be controversial for their ideas. Their opinions can be widely cited and discussed in formal scholarship as well as on blogs and discussion groups.

At the recent Computational Social Sciences conference I attended and covered here, many of my social network theory rock star heroes  were speaking, including Lada Adamic from the University of Michigan. Adamic has done some important and early work looking into the link structures of the blogosphere.  In 2005, she “famously” looked at political blogs after the 2004 US Presidential Election, showing how most blue and red blog were far more likely to link to similarly minded blogs. Some of her visualizations made their way across the internet increasing her micro-celebrity status. The first time I met her (in the elevator at another conference) I didn’t even realize who she was. In the world of micro-celebrity, one’s ideas can be posted across the blogosphere, and can have the occasional pictureless quote in mainstream publications, adding to their street credibility among their small fan base.

Clive Thompson recently wrote a nice column on the subject and how Facebook status updates are like sending out press releases. He quotes Theresa Senft who is attributed with coming up with the idea micro-celebrity in the digital age, “People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives.” In a networked society, information flows more freely and connections are more easily made. Groups of interested parties are form around people, through discussion forums and Yahoo Groups are Thompson sites. However, micro-celebrity can even be sliced into smaller facets.

Facebook allows anyone to be and operative as a micro-celebrity. It’s not uncommon for people who went to college in the Facebook era to have over 500 friends. On the occasional ego-check to see how many “friends” I have, I usually surprised to see how high the number is, because I don’t consider myself a power user. Digital micro-celebrity is replacing what was the traditions of the “small town.” The traditional “small town” with multi-generations living near by, if not the same street or house, fostered micro-celebrity. The only difference is that the micro-celebrities have a distributed network of fans, rather than local ones.  Small groups (of say, less than 1000) can easily form, some of the forces which motivate the formation of these groups are worth looking to into, and will be covered in posts to come.

Image source: USGS

Yesterday, Facebook was frequently mentioned at the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace conference, but I’m trying to figure out what is the value my Facebook network.

For a free service, Facebook is getting expensive. Not just for Microsoft, but for the users who maintain their social network. Dealing with Pokes, Invites and Scrabulous take time, effort and bandwidth. As the popularity and membership of Facebook increases, the cost for not participating grows as well. Just as there are costs associated with not having a telephone or email address, the social and economic pressure to join these sites can be readily felt.

These Facebook clicks of “friendship” are simple gestures that replace deeper interactions. This form of communication is low bandwidth, in terms of data but more importantly of cognition. We are now able to easily increase our social networks in terms of reach, but the fidelity of our interactions within the networks is decreasing. Facebook seems to value to the size of the network, but not the fidelity of the links. The value of a network is not only the number of nodes, but also the quality of the information that flows through the edges between the nodes. Finally, the work of Ronald Burt suggests that there is value in having a network that is unique from those with whom are competing. The low fidelity of Facebook communications show a shift toward networks which have low costs, effort, and unique characteristics, which overall have less value than we suppose.

Looking at usage rates, it is becoming the preferred tool for many people, young and old. One of the main reasons Facebook is a popular because of its convenience. We are able to maintain these relationships, which seemingly take a minimal amount of effort. A simple click allows us exchange gifts, play a game, or say hello. It also increases the efficiency of the user by automating one communication effort across many friends. By filling one movie quiz, we are able to apply this work to all our other friends who answered the questionnaire describing how much they liked “Shrek.” In a way, it’s like sending out a mass interactive Holiday Letter, which is admittedly better than nothing, but not quite fulfilling. Nevertheless, these Facebook apps are extremely efficient for members who have hundreds of friends. We are able to interact with all these friends though one gesture. For many current and recent students, Facebook is an intimate part of their social experience. However it is successful because it is compliments real time interactions, of a past history of deeper real time interactions. These compliments could have been face to face or some other digital communication form that has more fidelity than a Facebook post of ten word sentence on a user’s Wall.

What is the meaning of these gestures? What is the meaning when an app is flawed, as in the case of the movie taste matching application, if none of my favorite movies are listed? What is the cost of forgoing communication with higher fidelity?

The adoption of Facebook shows our willingness to extend a network (adding nodes) in exchange for quality of information and even meaning. Facebook is an important tool for maintaining relationships, especially when a person in a friendship moves away, such as attending a different university after high school or leaving a job. Before, these ties may have dissolved, but now they have a longer lifespan. But how long can a purely Facebook relationship last within itself?

The beauty of Facebook, and one of the reasons for it adoption, is that we can fake friendship, which is to say, simulate a relationship with minimal work. Rather than actually having a meaningful exchange with a person, in a couple of clicks you can send the latest application interaction to her. But has anything meaningful been communicated?

We do not acknowledge the trade offs between a large social graph with less fidelity in communication and a smaller social graph with higher fidelity in communication. With high fidelity, and more information, the relationship and connection will most likely wither away. This trade off is important and often left unconsidered.

After many years, I finally made it to a dorkbot meeting, a tech meetup before there were meetups. One of the three presenters was Ted Johnson, a great tech guy and overall hacker. He showed a handful of projects, but my favorite is his Instant Digital Camera. Hacking together a Gameboy camera, screen and calculator printer, he captures digital images (which was pretty decent resolution) and translates it into analogue numeric printing, which is reminiscent of ASCII art.

The best thing about this project is how Johnson takes printing back in the opposite direction. The abstract rendering of forms by smudged numbers is a reminder how digital color printing’s “perfection” can look really soulless at times. At work, I always prfer the old HP black and white laser printer over the color printer. The HP produces crisp black type, which you can physically feel to the touch. The color pages come out slick and shiny, as if they were still on a screen.

However, I’m skeptical of this nostalgia. Growing up in the transition from print to digital text, my infatuation with the physicality of text may merely be a reflection of age. The physicality of printed text gives the illusion of permanence that digital text lacks. This psychological relationship we have towards that illusion is powerful, which is reflected in the tendency to downgrade online academic journals and ebook over their print countrparts. As the march toward digital text continues for reasons of both efficiency and sustainability, the question remains on what we will lose in the process.

I attended a very good discussion at MobileCamp on Mobile Social Networks, which was run by Keith Erskine of padpaw. We ended up talking a lot about facebook, which seemed to be on a lot of people’s mind. When talking about Linkedin and Facebook, the overall vibe I got was that people liked keeping their social networks separate in all their various forms.

In terms of social netwoking sites, Linkedin was for business, and Facebook was for friends and family. Recent feature additions or announcements for upcoming features on both sites are making them look more like each other. Linkedin recently added a photo feature and plans on opening up their platform. Facebook added groups and has a limited profile features, which comes very close to allowing different groups to get different versions of your site (although it’s not quite here yet.) Even with these features, it seems as if the group wanted to keep them apart. (There was the sense in some people are reaching the limit on how many sites they wanted to maintain.) It seems easier to me to maintain one, rather than several. Although I guess people may not want to have all their data locked into one privately owned site. This point brought up protocol, standards, and Open Social, which I want to address in another post.

People often use different email addresses for work and personal use, I check a handful accounts everyday. Since getting my Blackberry, I can finally synch my computer and phone address books, which was a simple but powerful change. Now, all my devices share the same information and it is now stored in multiple places.

Recently, I’ve received work email through Facebook which complicates my email archiving system. Friends have invited me into Linkedin. Although some relationships are clearly defined as work or personal, social circles are usually not that discreet. Their edges are porous and overlap, and people migrate from one to another. What is also interesting is how the bucketing of people now can get directly verbalized. That is, accepting an invite to Linkedin from a co-worker and then denying the invite into Facebook.

Why do people like to keep their social circles separate some of the time and not others? It is a personal preference? Or are there user experiences (for lack of a better word) involved which have an effect if we want to group them together or not?

Image source: usgs.gov

My last post to flowtv.org described the work by Kevin Werbach, a legal professor at the UPenn’s Wharton School of Business. I first heard about him at this year’s Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. He is looking at how the different forces pull the Internet together as well as pushes them apart. I wrote about how it got me thinking about how the Internet is fractal, and how important is it to have models like Werbach’s to help explain it.

At first, because the Internet works so well as a decentralized network, Werbach’s suggestion of the idea of a fragmented network comprised of archipelagos and walled gardens seems unlikely and unwanted. However, Techcrunch is reporting that in China, attempt to access Google and Yahoo are getting redirected to the homegrown (and approved) Baidu. A chance of this kind of fragmentation is quite real, which could also mean that the ICANN testing of non-Roman language domain names might be too little, too late.

Image source: flickr

I’ve recently been poking around in Facebook fairly frequently. It helps that I got a handful of invites, as friends migrated from MySpace to Facebook, and used the email addressbook suckers to contact me. Noah recently posted about Facebook, so I was inspired to add my proverbial two cents on the topic.

Over the last month, I am spending far more time there, than either I ever spent in MySpace or during my first foray into Facebook. The key difference between than and now, is that Facebook opened up their platform for developing widget by third party developers.

I’ll admit that last spring, I figured that Facebook was a niche social community for college students, which had passed its height of relevance. After it started opening its doors to high schools and then to anybody, I thought that the site was ruining its brand, alienating its power user base, and was headed to the social networking graveyard, right next to Friendster.

I was completely caught off guard, when they opened up their platform to let anyone release apps and widgets. That announcement was a game changing move and immediately drew my attention. It was especially well timed, as MySpace was being criticized for being a closed system, as seen in their blocking of Photobucket, the third party image / video service, from their pages just before they bought the company.

A year ago, I first ventured into Facebook, after chatting with a cousin who was in still an undergrad. Using an old grad school email account, I made a profile with the least amount of information they allowed. I found her profile listing 700+ friends, which was a little overwhelming. All I saw as I clicked around, was a lot of college kids and not much else, so I moved on to other concerns. My experience in MySpace was basically the same. I logged on just enough to see what it was about and to get to some walled content, like the Tracey Thorn page and blog, when her new record was coming out. But mostly, it just looked like a competition to make the most number of friends, which seemed like a lot of work. Basically there was little reason for me to go back to either site, after signing up for a profile.

Now with Facebook, there are the reasons to go back. I lost a couple of evenings playing Q-Bert in the retro-arcade application. The apps give me a reason to regularly return to the site, whether it is to see the cities friends have travelled to or getting your friends to compete with each other. The open platform is an easy way for developers to access a wired pool of users. It’s a great example of the gift economy at work.

Of course, in the end, the measure of success between the sites will probably come down to money. Just because I love free apps doesn’t mean that Facebook will ultimately be more profitable than MySpace or some other social networking site. It will be interesting to see who can monetize their user base more effectively, just as Andy Chen recently queried. Until then, I’ll be playing Centipede and wishing I had a track ball.

I’ve been back from San Francisco for a couple of days, and I want to go straight back as soon as I can. I finally got a chance to see the Prelinger Library, about a year after I had learned of its existence while at the institute. What can I can say? The library is pretty impressive.

In a somewhat nondescript office building in downtown San Francisco, Rick and Megan Shaw Prelinger have made their 40,000+ book collection open to the public. Megan has taken intricate care to create a unique taxonomy of the collection. I love the idea of describing a narrative for a collection of discrete units of knowledge of the physical book. Here, the narrative is one step abstracted from the normal way people construct them, which is based upon of the ideas in book as the unit, rather than the book itself. Starting with San Francisco, the collection’s organization ends in outer space, with land use, urbanism, suburbanism, communications, media and business in between.

I started taking pictures of shelves so I could document what might be interesting for future research. I was surprised to find a business section, with some great titles such as “The Organization Man” and “The Firestone Story.” Current business books are rather disposable forms of publishing, so it was great to see business books from the past. It’s not important that every page may or may not have been read by the Prelingers or a visitor to the Library. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes in his insightful and current business book bestseller “Black Swan,” the importance of a personal library is just as much knowing what is unread as is what has been read.

If you are in San Francisco and have some down time, definitely try to make a visit.