Frank pointed out some clever research at Microsoft Research. Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec parsed through one month of MSN messenger communication, or about 1 billion conversations a day. Among the 240 million users, they discovered an average of 6.6 degrees of separation between any two random users. 6.6 is obviously close to the famed six degrees of separation found in Milgram’s 1967 study. Although, some debate still continues on the validity of that finding. Horvitz made the full paper available, and has really in depth analysis of the spread of MSN Messenger and the communication it facilitates. The image above shows the density of users. The numbers of user shift from high to low according to the light spectrum, with red as high and blue as low (think ROYGBIV.) Since this finding, Horvitz wonders if there is some larger phenomenon at work, with six being some natural average of social interconnectedness. More thoughts to keep me up at night.

Via (Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)

Figure 1. Frequency from 2/2004 to 2/2008

Figure 2. Frequency from 4/2005 to 2/2008

Every once in a while, I get the inclination to try to do a little math. It’s a dangerous endeavor, but sometimes I can’t help myself. But before I get ahead of myself, I should give a little back ground.

Sometimes you learn a word and all of the sudden you see it everywhere. The nagging question is, was is always being used and you just glossed over it, or is there a change in the frequency of its use? You discovered the word precisely because it was starting to be used for more often.

Not too long ago, I found the word “awesomeness” entering my general vocabulary to signify great approval. Awesomeness feels fresh, a slight tweak on the new vintage “awesome” from the 80s, a personally influential era. However, in the past week, I’ve seen the word Awesomeness appear in a lot of places, from friends and strangers alike. I started thinking if the word has gaining traction in the public at large, so last weekend I started the quest to figure out ways to capture the growing use of the word.

Word frequency counts is nothing new. Media studies have been doing this type of research in newspaper and magazines for decades. However, it is becoming much more democratic, mostly because of the decreasing cost of computing and the related increase span of the web, which has been collecting data much easier. I decided to use the blogosphere because it seems like a pretty good proxy for general language usage. As well, the Google blog search feature allows you do set the dates for your search. Of course there are drawbacks to uses the word count of Goggle, including that the blogosphere is a obviously a subset of general usage and also because I have no idea how Goggle tracking and tallying the blogs it is indexing. Nevertheless, I can live with the approximation, given that the only cost for retrieving the data is bandwidth and time.

I searched for “awesome,” “awesomeness,” and “are” for each month from February 2004 to February 2008.

The word “are” was used as a control of sorts. Because the blogosphere itself it constantly growing, the number of times a word appears in a given month is expected to increase. Using an often used word such as “are” can be a proxy of the overall growth of the blogosphere. One could not expect the rate of the word “are” to fluctuate greater from month to month. Any true increase of the word usage would have to outpace the growth rate of “are.”

I also tracked the usage of the root word “awesome” for a couple of reasons. Sometimes search engines clump different variations of the same root word together in its search results. I wanted to check to see that “awesomeness” wasn’t being put together with “awesome.” The two are also an interesting comparison. If both increased at similar rates, then maybe what I am seeing is just an overall revival of 80s idioms. However, if “awesomeness” is also increasing at a great rate than “awesome” my original suspicions would be validated.

In the short time I started on this little math adventure, the word kept on appearing, and in the write up of my findings, I came across the the ultimate reference, apparently a website which declared March 10 (last week) International Day of Awesomeness.

Just looking at the words appearance in the past two full months, this is what I found:

February-2008: Awesomeness: 17,182 ; Awesome: 736,783 ; Are: 61,531,049
January-2008: Awesomeness: 9,627 ; Awesome: 429,769; Are: 57,214,958

There is clear jump in the past two months, but what does that jump mean, if the total number of blog pages continues to grow? Both Awesomeness and Awesome almost doubled as compared to Are, but how do you measure the significance of that? Graphing all the frequency of these three words against each other is hard because are orders of magnitude higher then the others. My math coach Pam (yes, I actually call her that) suggested I take the log of my data to make it more comparable. If your recall high school math, log (1,000,000) = 6, log(100,000) = 5, and log(10,000) = 4. Now, if you take the log of all your data points, the curves can fit on a single graph of manageable size. It even gets better, because it translates an exponential curve into linear curve, which makes finding the growth rate (i.e. slope of the curves, which is the rise over run of the function) much easier.

If you look at the two figures, you’ll notice an upwardly trend. There is a peculiar elbow in the spring of 2005, which could be a big spurt of growth or some aberration of Goggle’s indexing. After looking at the first graph, I decided to draw another graph to focus in other growth of all three term’s use in the past year and focus the analysis on that because I wanted to fit a linear line to the curves and removing the bend would give me a closer fit. (Is that cheating?)

I fed the curves into excel to fit linear functions, and can see that Awesomeness has a slope of 0.0003 versus Awesome which has a slope of 0.0001. This is good, because it means Awesomeness is being used at rate that is 3 time more than Awesome. However, Are (our base line) has a slope of 0.001. This is sort of bad, because 80s slang doesn’t seem to be outpacing the general growth of blogs, which I was hoping to see.

I’m not sure what to make of it, in the end. However, it does have me thinking about blogs from a higher altitude and that math is pretty awesome. Many thanks to Pam and Wojciech who gave me some good nudges. Of course, I’ll take the blame for the conclusions. I’m curious to hear what my math friends say, especially if they find mistakes in my logic. Also, it has taken me much too long to post this, which is why I’m just throwing what I have up. I’ll post any corrections later including typos.

I have IM accounts on AIM, iChat, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail and Skype. (Years ago, I once used ICQ and IRC.) I always find it interesting, how certain services are popular in specific countries. AIM is most popular in the US, where as, MSN more widely used in Asia, South American, Canada. IM, like all networks, benefit from network effects. If a service gains traction early in a country, when it can maintain growth, even if it is surpassed by other services who may be globally larger.

The shrunken image above from Valleywag shows which social networks are most dominant by market share, which was tipped off to me by hellowojo. The color coding is a bit confusing, because they decided to make match the countries by the color of the social network’s logo. Because most of social networks logos are blue, a network’s reach is difficult to differentiate. Fortunately, Valleywag also includes another graphic with a list of all the countries by social network.

Going forward these data will change. I wonder if there will be a consolidation of these networks, start into interconnect, or with they stay fractured, in the same way that email addresses were once closed. Here are a couple of possible of future scenarios.

Just as standards for email have been created, Open Social or some other social networking set of standards can allow for competing sites to share information with each other. Wordpress or Moveable Type could become the open platform, where people host their own blog which would act like their profile, or use a service provider to maintain their profile/blog. Gigaom has postulated Wordpress’ move into social networking. Third party widgets could be created to offer function, such as status updates, photo albums, walls, and gifting applications to mimic many of the features of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others SNS. This sounds like a lot more work for the end user, which would be fine for the people who want to have control and heavy lifting which that entails. For the Blogger and LiveJournals users of the world, adoption is only going to take place if setup is as easy as creating a Blogspot or Facebook account.

Where the first example envisions some combination of blogs and SNS, another example is email fully integrating with social networking profiles. Google has been able to effectively enter the IM space by introducing a closely integrated chat client into its Gmail service. By sidestep the application download step, millions of their email users instantly became IM users. Similarly, the Xobni Insight plugin for Outlook, connects information profiles on email contacts, giving Outlook an SNS feel. I haven’t used Outlook in a couple of years, but if I did, I would certainly be trying to get a copy of Insight, which is still in an invite-only beta.

The final possibility to consider is the consolidation of social networking sites into one main site, which may have an open API like Facebook, but is also closed and propritary in the sense that people cannot easily export their profile data out of Facebook, MySpace, or Orkut. While people can leave at any time, if all your friends and contacts use a network then there is incentive to stay in that network. In this way, a company like Google, Yahoo, and MSN could use its adjacent email or blogging services to leverage its entrance into social networking and possible become the de facto platform. Although, as of yet, none of these sites have been about to make a major impact across continents.

So, I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens.

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.

I just got back from a couple of days outside New York. I had Friday off, so instead of Christmas shopping , cleaning house, and going to yoga, I went to a couple of great conferences. Yesterday, I went the Conference on Computational Social Sciences at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Afterward, I got on a train to attend the one day Symposium on Reputations Economies in Cyberspace hosted by Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. I looked around the people today to see if anyone else attended both. I’m not sure, but I may have been the only one.

I’m a bit tired, but there were some very good panels… and enough fodder for blogging to last me through the New Year.

I guess that is something to be thankful for the day before Thanksgiving. Gigaom is linking to an Xing site, which calculates the value of your network. Mine is over a million dollars. You enter in some demographic information and they describe the size of your network, and the frequency of contact. Of course, a figure like how many people do you speak to weekly is very hard to estimate, which makes me question this numbers and charts really mean.

In the gallery section, you can compare your network value with others by country and industry and age (which is the horizontal access.) This clever addition makes it competitive, and vastly more sticky and viral. But I’m not sure why we are seeing all the peaks and curves. I’m not sure how many people have submitted to this, so it might a few people might be outliners and causing spikes. Getting more data points might smooth out the curve, I guess I’ll check back later.

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: IEEE

Noah Brier posted an interesting link recently to an article claiming that Metcalfe’s Law, which famously has been paraphrased to be the value of a network exponentially quadratically grows with each additional node, is wrong. This is a provocative thesis because the law is widely trumpeted in all that is good about the Internet.

In the theoretical long term view, networks with more nodes will encourage late adopters to join (and pay.) People often cite the instance of email, the rates of people setting up (and paying for) email accounts in the 1990s rose much faster after it was possible to communication with people outside a user’s ISP, being AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, or an academic institution. However, network adoptions plays out differently in other cases.

The disconnect here may be that in the definition of value, more specifically value by whom. In the valuation of a network, the network of 100 is worth more than a network of 10. According to Metcalfe, it’s worth 100 times (10^2) the smaller network. For the consumer, it is clear that the value of the telecommunications network grows with each new person, especially if the costs for the user doesn’t increase. However, consider combining access of two competing networks from the perspective of the network operators. From this angle, the smaller network will clearly see more benefit than that larger network, as the article suggests. Further, both operators will see an increase in the costs associated with network traffic (from hardware to customer service,) with no new paying customers. If the operators are charging an unlimited usage prices, there is little upside to combining networks, which shows why network operators tend to resist interoperability. Why would a market leading operator take on additional cost with increased revenue and help a smaller competitor?

Coming back to the definition of value, the value of the network actually doesn’t change if the willing to pay (i.e. the ability to extract fees) from the customers of the network. I’m still trying to grapple with the difference between the value of the network from the customer versus the operator. That is, the problem is that as although the value of a larger network may grow, there willingness to pay by the customer does not. In fact, it may even shrink, which was noted in a MobileCampNYC talk by some smart folks at Air Arts last Saturday. Consumers have been conditioned to expect prices to fall, especially in the area of telecommunication services, even as nodes (and the value of the network) increases. Is the reason that customers don’t want to pay for that additional nodes because the new nodes are less valuable to the customer as the article suggests? Is it a matter of marketing conditioning from other services industries associated with the properties of the economics of scale that prices for services should go down over time?

Although the article was published last year, the valuations for networks will only receive more scrutiny after Facebook’s USD$15 billion valuation, which is about 25 times what News Corp paid for MySpace, which has more than double the users than Facebook. Expect more discussion to follow.

Image source: Princeton University Press

I finally got around to reading Elizabeth Currid’s book, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, which argues that these creative industry are an important economic force in the city and social networks that allow it to function. The book is a breezy read, with an academic context but written for lay people. Thankfully, Currid references in an academic style. Many of her citations which left out of books aimed at the general public have been added to my to read list. Books in this style are very important because they counter the increasing obscure that academic research often takes has it plummets in sub-sub genre navel gazing. Although I have some issues with the book, I’ve been thinking about it for a week, which is a sign that it was worth reading. Aside from a few factual errors that slipped though the editorial process, (the Roxy was located in Chelsea, not the East Village) the book ends up leaving me wanting a lot more exploration on the merit of the social networks which promote the creative production and why that is good for New York.

She sets out and shows how the creative industries of New York, provide real economic value to the city’s economy and represents a growing percentage of the labor force, which quickly and adequately does in Chapter 3 of the book. She then spends the rest of the book describing how the social networks of these creatives (the people working the industries Currid explores) help produce output that drives these industries, by interviewing people who have successively used this networks to advance their careers. Also she shows the creative industry has value, she doesn’t explain why it is valuable over other uses of resources. That is, the creative industry and its use of social networks is assumed to be worth continuing because of its past existence. However, this assumption doesn’t question the dependence on the social network itself. Is this dependence on being able to capitalize on social networks efficient, fair or democratic?

By only interviewing the success stories, she risks overly celebrating her subjects like Quincy Jones, Jeffry Dietch, and John Varvatos. A more complete study needs to include examples of failure. The barriers to entry of these networks are only slightly mentioned. She quotes of a successful graffiti artist, Colt45, who mentioned that other talented colleagues did not achieve success or fame, while other less talented ones did. Interviewing those who lost out, I suspect reveal a new narrative. Last year, the painter, James Rosenquist gave a telling interview (around 30:30-31:45) in which he discusses being selected by Henry Geldzahler to be the now legendary show “New York Painting and Scuplture: 1940-1970″ at the Met.

He goes on to explain that the his success has a lot to do with luck, and recounted that he knew many talented artists who never were able to achieved fame. These experiences only get brief mention the Warhol Economy but deserve examination, because they shed insight on why we should ultimately care about these social networks and ask if they are better systems to encourage cultural production.The middle chapters of the book describe the interaction with creative workers and the gatekeepers of culture, be it fashion, music or art. Here, the analysis misses an opportunity to show how digital technology is influencing production of culture and the tradition powers of the gate keepers. These are relevant changes, because the fall of the cost of digital media production and the rise of digital social networks are having effects which simultaneously work for and against the gate keepers. This simultaneity of opposing forces caused by digital networks has been discussed here in previous posts, as well, and I will admit is a personal interest of mind. In this case, decreases in the cost of audio recording equipment, the rise of peer to peer networking and increases in the access to high bandwidth, are creating opportunities for musicians to circumvent traditional music labels. Further, promotion of music has similarly seen a massive increase in the ways a musician can self-promote her music as well. When anyone with a personal computer can record and distribute music, the creators are seemingly no longer as dependent on gate keepers found at big music labels and mainstream publications.On the other hand, with an abundance of choice, we often look towards these taste makers as trusted brands to do the filtering for us, which in turn increases their power. Disruptive forces in the music industry, such as MySpace and P2P file sharing, radically change the importance of the nodes of that a band’s social network. Currid interviews the independent band, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and describers their rise of success from in part, being in New York and playing shows in the Lower East Side clubs. While this is undoubtedly true, here is a slightly different narrative from metafilter:

“Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are a band that, less than a year ago, were making music without the help of a record label, pressing CDs themselves and selling them at concerts and on the Internet. Then the following happened: June 9: Dan Bierne writes about the band on his MP3 blog, June 14: Pitchfork Media posts a review of the song “In This Home On Ice”, June 15: Blogger Gothamist posts an interview with the band, June 20: Blogger Stereogum announces the band’s show at the Knitting Factory, June 21: Gothamist reports that David Bowie was in the audience at the Knitting Factory show, and June 22: Pitchfork posts one of a slew of reviews of Clap’s first album. Now, they’ve been named to dozens of critics ‘best of’ lists, they’re playing Conan and Letterman, and are about to embark on a new tour.”

Pitchfork, which Currid mentions, is not just a well-regarded online music review site. It was started in 1996 by a recent high school grad in Minnesota, and then relocated to Chicago. The digital social networking component was both decentralized and an important component to their eventual success. It also suggests that changes in social networks can have effects on the culture economy and therefore, according to Currid’s research, New York City’s overall economy which depends on cultural production. The reason acknowledging the influence of digital production and communication is of value, is that it is changing the status quo, which Currid’s proposals seek to maintain. Policy makers have a tradition of regulating for the past, certainly not the future, and rarely for the present. While is it impossible to predict, closely studying the present is useful, of which William Gibson is often attributed for stating something to the effect of, “the future is here, it’s not just widely distributed yet.”

As the book is mainly a descriptive text, rather than normative (or proscriptive) I’m wondering what Currid feels about the current social network, gatekeeper system that is in place. The title of the book is telling, as Warhol redefined not only the art of his time, but also idea of fame, wealth and celebrity of living and working artists. In his aftermath, the idea of the starving artist is passe. Not only the rapidly rising cost of living in New York that is changing, but the expectation of what an artist’s standard of living should be. It’s hard for me to tell if $300 bottle service is good or bad for New York’s cultural economy, because she makes it sound so alluring.

Currid concludes by suggestion a few ways that local government can support artists and designers through subsidized housing and studio space, as well as, more open policies toward nightlife. However, with this suggestion, it’s not clear to me that they would work, or if we want them to work. I wish she included more than a paragraph reviewing of what other countries (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are doing in supporting the culture economy. I’m curious to know how can we learn from cities with better funded social-welfare programs, such as Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, and London strengthen or weaken her ideas. While what Currid documents in important, there seems to be a lot more work to be done.

As a follow up to a short post a few days ago, Gigaom cites a comScore report showing a 9.3% dip in the last month.

Is this an error or a sign of facebook fatigue?

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