I just filed this story for MSNBC about the business value of social
networking services. Truth or hype: can some SNSes become helpful
professional tools for businesses -- in particular, independent
entrepreneurs and smaller companies, for whom each new personal
connection is a significant business building block? Includes
interviews with unrepentant compulsive digital networkers danah boyd, Frank Keeney of SOCALWUG, Noah Glass of audblog, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid, Scott Rafer of Feedster, Travis Kalanick of RedSwoosh (and, once upon a time,
Scour.net), and human router Joi Ito
-- who said this:
Their usefulness depends on your needs and networking style. LinkedIn,
for example allows you to search histories and CVs in your network --
it's great for finding people who work in a particular company, or who
have worked with someone you know. It's also an interesting way to
find references for people or companies you're getting to know.
I think email is broken in a serious way, and SNS is trying to address
some of the issues associated with that breakdown. These networks may
get it right and really change the way we do business, but we're still
at the beginning of the development and evolution curve.
Grok Headline matches for MSNBC: Social Networks Go to Work
MSNBC - Online social networks go to work
MSNBC - Online social networks go to work07/30/2004 05:07 AM Online social networks go to work - Where personal connections lead to
professional allies .. it's now online on
MSNBC
Social networks and my big a-ha06/14/2004 07:45 PM Wisconsin Technology Network,WI-54 minutes agoReaders of DEMOletter
know that I've written regularly about so- called social networks,
services such as LinkedIn, Spoke, and Google's Orkut. ...
How Many Social Networks Is Too Many?
How Many Social Networks Is Too Many?11/14/2003 02:29 AM I keep reading about all these "social networking software" plays, and
the amazing thing to me is that, unlike during the last bubble,
everyone except people working for these companies or
venture capitalists seem to know it's a bubble. Yet, they keep on
coming. The latest is that Evite has launched their own version of Friendster
tied to their event organizing system, and eMode (known for their fun
tests and dating system) has changed their name to Tickle, which is
what their Friendster wannabe is called. They also bought another
social networking service, to take one of about 100 off the market.
Who the hell signs up for all of these systems? Paten
ts aside, there is nothing complicated in creating such a
site (there's even one Friendster rip off calledYet Another Friendster Rip Off). The
complication comes in actually making money from such a site. The odd
thing, though, is the rampant skepticism about these sites. In the
90s bubble years, it was never like this. Sure, there was some
skepticism, but not the near universal skepticism that is focused on
social software space right now. What's funny is that you would think
so much skepticism would make the VCs stay away, but the reverse is
happening.
Looking for gold in social networks
Looking for gold in social networks02/10/2004 02:36 AM But those plans could be short-circuited by Internet giants like Yahoo
and Google, as well as by established players in the online jobs and
dating categories ...
IFTF on Social Networks04/09/2004 04:02 PM Next week I'm attending an Institute for the Future event on their
technology forecast. Came across a sample report on Social Networks in
the World of Abundant Connectivity (.pdf) that had this great comment
on technology product design: Social networks...
Thefacebook.com recently
included UCLA in its collection of universities—generating 3,500
new UCLA users in just one month. It appears that UCLA’s bruinwalk.com will also be adding
social networking functionality to its menu of services, according to
Phillip Lin for the Daily Bruin. Bruinwalk.com plans to offer services both
‘comparable’ and additive to Thefacebook.com.
What
social networking services are currently lacking on Thefacebook.com?
Do any readers utilize this university service?
Social Networks Against Spam02/18/2004 02:56 PM While the various social networking services continue to push forward,
some researchers are using the same basic concept of linking people to
their friends to see if social networks
can help fight spam. The idea is that most people get their email
from a limited social network of people, and that network can be
worked out by looking at the "to:" "from:" and "cc:" portions of your
email. The theory being that if I know two people, they're much more
likely to know each other as well, and the system can link them, and
assume that if they email each other it's unlikely to be spam. Spam
messages, however, have no such linkage, and are more easily picked
out from the crowd. Of course, it doesn't sound like this works all
that well. You don't get any false positives, but it seems to only
recognize a little over 50% of all spam. The folks behind this
research say it's still useful, if used in combination with other spam
filtering techniques.
The Heisenberg uncertainty of social networks
The Heisenberg uncertainty of social networks01/04/2004 05:54 PM
One of my New Year's resolutions is to open up this weblog to a wider
audience. So on first mention of something obscurely technical, I'll
try to define it. Today's obscurely technical topic: FOAF.
...
Artist/curator friend Mark Soo did a piece for one of the
Infest openings where he visualized the curators' social network using
balloons with people's names printed on them as the nodes and ribbons
tying them together as the edges (the data comes from "invites" he got
the curators to send to one another). This was a great, inviting,
tactile "graph manipulaton interface". But the reason I liked it so
much was that it really brought out the problems of social networks
visualizations as a way of learning about the networks being
visualized: too confusing!
He also cites a few examples of some of the attempts to visualise
them - the problems should become self-evident:
Two things immediately occur to me - firstly how do we as humans
make sense of this data in our everyday lives (because we're
incorporating at least some of it into our mental models, surely, and
understanding that would make it easier for us to enhance those models
rather than creating new ones that create nothing but cognitive
overload), and secondly What would Tufte
do?.
Missing the Point of Social Networks01/03/2004 11:02 PM I thought I was done talking about this stuff, but I guess not. In
response to my FriendRank post, I noticed something on
StartupSkills.com that I've been hearing lots of recently: Like so
many people, I've used Friendster and found it an intriguing idea from
both a technical and business standpoint. It is a revolutionary
concept, although by no means is it original. Social networking is a
subject taught in business schools around the globe. The
'entrepreneurial model' of social...
Adding Fees To Social Networks
Adding Fees To Social Networks01/27/2004 02:24 AM Okay, take an idea that's being done to death all over the internet
for free - with new (sometimes deep pocketed) players showing up every
day. Then, wait until the market is so saturated that most people are
already getting sick of the idea... and then try to charge for it.
That appears to be the plan of Tickle (formerly eMode) that is now
going to try to
start charging for some aspects of their "social network"
Friendster-clone. Since they know they're the first, and they must
know they're going to face backlash, they're only charging if you want
to contact someone who is separated by more than four degrees from you
- at which point, I wonder what the point of social networking is? If
the idea is to meet friends of friends because they might have similar
interests, what's the value in using such a system to meet a friend of
a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend? Isn't that just a
stranger? There are lots of ways to meet strangers online that don't
cost money.
Social networks by referrer, through bl0grolls
Social networks by referrer, through bl0grolls06/12/2002 06:22 AM Mark Pilgrim compiles blogrolls from his referrer stats, then from the
blogrolls of the people he links to in his blogroll, then one level
further.Update: Mark does it with the Google "related links" feature
too, and says it would make a nice web service. It's my opinion such
web services will most probably exist by next year, if not sooner.
edventure.com/conversation/article.cfm?Counter=4143472 track this
site | 4 links
Identity Theft and Social Networks
Identity Theft and Social Networks01/02/2004 06:09 PM scubacuda writes "This Security Focus article looks at the lack of
security social network sites have, particularly their lack of SSL
logins, which means a ...
Competition in Social Networks of Agents
Competition in Social Networks of Agents09/25/2004 07:43 PM A new TRN
article discusses a new quantitative model of agent competition. The
new model has potential uses in many fields including the optimization
of communication and control within robot collectives. Traditional
game
theory has limitations in describing complex interaction in
collectives
of intelligent agents. The new theory allows the agents to make
choices
based on incomplete information. Even though mistakes are made, each
agent has access to the knowledge and experiences of its neighbors
allowing the collective to evolve complex dynamics quickly. One of the
more interesting results is that the a scalable leadership system of
"hubs" within the collective evolves spontaneously. For a more
in-depth
look at the theory and research see the original research paper:
Competition in Social
Networks: Emergence of a Scale-free Leadership Structure and
Collective
Efficiency (PDF format). The research was done
by M. Anghel, Zoltan
Toroczkai, Kevin E.
Bassler, and Gyorgy
Korniss. It was funded by grants from the Department of Energy and
National Science Foundation.
Asking favors is fundamentally different than offering them. People
gain by being bridges. Thus, to be able to tell you about a job gives
me whuffie in our relationship. Feeling pressured to connect you to an
open job makes me uncomfortable. In all of the networks described
above, the bridge got to control the information flow. In Milgram's
"Small Worlds," if you didn't know that i knew the target person, you
may not have tried to pass it on to me. If you don't know that i am
dating someone who has something that you want, you won't try to
pressure me into giving you access to it. Thus, i can choose when to
reveal my connections in a situation where i can come across as being
helpful, rather than being put in a position to feel cornered.
Revealing the network shifts the power.
David Weinberger has
a brilliant
quick statement about how BOTH namespaces and social networks will
be used to disambiguate tags'.
I sure as hell hope so. I'd hate it if there was nothing to
disambiguate tags.
Namespaces and Social Networks in a Tagged World
As the interest in tagging and folksonomies grows, we are going to be
faced with a choice: Namespaces or social networks.
The problem is that tags are too simple and ambiguous. (That's also
their strength, but we'll let that go for the moment.) As tens of
millions of people start tagging Web resources, many tags will include
too many disparate items: When you're searching for pages about
London, do you really want to get pages about Jack London? And, no one
really wants information about London; we always want information
about some aspect of a topic. So, the "London"-tagged pages about
London's club scene are noise to someone looking for information about
London's form of government.
Namespaces, or domains of discourse if you prefer, are one way
around this. For example, the Global Voices group that encourages
inter-national blogging, suggests tagging relevant pages with the
prefix "gv" as in "gv:ghana" or "gv:thailand." We will undoubtedly see
a proliferation of such prefixes, and if tagging really takes off, we
may end up with an unregulated version of the domain system in which
multiple organizations squabble over who gets to use a particular
prefix.
Social networks provide an alternative. If I knew who the people
associated with Global Voices were, and if I knew who was the author
of particular tags, I could search for the "ghana" tag and find only
the ones created by GV members. That wouldn't be perfect because it
would get pages tagged by GV members for personal use, but it might be
good enough, especially with further refinement.
This is not an either/or. I'm confident we're going to see both
namespaces and social networks used to disambiguate tags. And there
are undoubtedly brilliant ideas waiting to be had. But it seems highly
likely to me that social networks are going to become more important
than ever in a world gone made with tagging.
It's especially heartening for me to listen to David talk about
social networks - as I know he's against the 'Friendster/Tribe' school
of thought - but seems to have accepted a more generalized notion of
what social networks are - and will be.
Anyway - I never said I liked those explicit social networks - it's
just that it was so much dam fun gaming them (apparently Joi had fun
-too!) But it's up to folks like David - who keep us honest -
especially when it comes to the difference between something explcit
liek calling someone "your friend" - versus truth and honesty.
Missing the Point of Social Networks...and other things
Missing the Point of Social Networks...and other things01/04/2004 12:18 AM Jeremy
Zawodny: "If you really think that Friendster, Tribe, LinkedIn, or
any of those other sites are going to survive doing what they're doing
today, you're really smoking something. However, if you think that
also means the technology isn't worthwhile--that the notion of
modeling social networks in software is a pointless exercise, well
then you're really smoking something good. You
couldn't be more wrong."
True. This reminds me of a tendency I notice constantly and have been
meaning to articulate: The inability to see others evolving
(companies, products, people), even though one's own vision is all
about oneself (or company, or product) evolving.
Come to think of it, this is a corollary to one of my favoriate
truisms: We judge ourselves by our intensions and others by their
actions.
New Search Engine Taps Into Social Networks
New Search Engine Taps Into Social Networks01/22/2004 07:26 PM Google, the most popular Internet search engine, ranks results by
polling all of cyberspace to find the most relevant information. ...
So-called social networking is very popular these days, as
show the proliferation of services like Friendster, Orkut and dozens
of others. But do the companies behind these services have any idea
of what is hidden inside their complicated networks? When these
networks reach a size of millions of users, it's not an easy task. A
researcher at the University of Michigan is trying to help, with a new
method for uncovering patterns in complicated networks, from football
conferences to food webs. This
overview contains more details and references about this
non-traditional method. It also includes a spectacular representation
of the Internet and another image showing a food web at Little Rock
Lake.
My 2004 Crystal Ball: Search, Social Networks, Reputation, RSS
My 2004 Crystal Ball: Search, Social Networks, Reputation, RSS12/08/2003 11:43 AM Given the upcoming new year, I figure it's a good time to share what
my crystal ball is telling me. The year 2004 will be exciting for
technologists. Pressure has been building in several areas that are
poised to really cook next year. Here's my brief take on each of them.
Search: Personalization and Relevance Let's face it, PageRank is Dead.
Really. I've said it once and I'll say it again. Google knows this.
Microsoft knows this. Anyone seriously into...
"Jeremy Zawodny's bl0g: Missing the Point of Social Networks"
Council awaits social work report05/06/2004 01:34 AM
A council faces criticism over its handling of the case of a woman
with learning difficulties who was abused.
Matcheroo puts social networking to work
Matcheroo puts social networking to work01/27/2004 01:43 PM Focusing on healthcare and financial industries, the startup joins the
growing list of companies offering online social networking services
aimed at the enterprise.
V2N18 May 3, 2004 Current Awareness Happenings on the Internet: Online Social Networks
V2N18 May 3, 2004 Current Awareness Happenings on the Internet: Online Social Networks05/03/2004 06:56 AM This edition of Current Awareness Happenings on the Internet by
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S.,
A.M.H.A. (May 3, 2004 V2N18) is dedicated to the latest
happenings in Online Social Networks. Click on the
audblog link at the bottom of this posting to hear an audio by Marcus
P. Zillman discussing these new and exciting networks. The below
listed sites are some of the latest and greatest online social
networks:
Friendster (beta) http://www.friendster.com/ Friendster is an online community that connects people through
networks of friends for dating or making new friends.
Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy
(ISNAE) http://www.isnae.org/index.html
The purpose of ISNAE is to study social networks and use the
resulting knowledge to promote economic growth and social well-being.
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/ Find
the people you need through the people you trust - Your trusted
friends and colleagues can help put you in touch with many more people
than you expect; and those people can refer you to thousands of
contacts.
Orkut http://www.orkut.com/ Orkut is
an online community that connects people through a network of trusted
friends. They are committed to providing an online meeting place where
people can socialize, make new acquaintances and find others who share
their interests.
Spoke -
Extending Business Relationships http://www.spoke.com/ Delivering
insight, influence and access through relationships for greater
business advantage.
Tribe http://www.Tribe.net This site is
devoted to tapping the power of social networks. Their goal is to
provide tools that help make your network most useful.
Visible Path http://www.visiblepath.com/ Visible Path delivers unprecedented reach into companies and access
to decision-makers by allowing sales teams to discreetly leverage the
relationship capital of the enterprise throughout the sales cycle.
Zero Degrees™ - The
People Network Company http://www.zerodegrees.com/ ZeroDegrees (ZDI) automates Milgram's process. ZDI replicates the
social process we use when we ask colleagues with an introduction. If
no one knows the person directly, they ask others on our behalf. If
all parties along the way, agree-an introduction is made and discreet
contact information shared.
The Slashdot article that
discusses PeopleAgreggator an Open Source Social Network is available
by clicking here.
Social Networks are gaining great popularity and we will be hearing
and seeing many new and niched networks in the near future. Please
send me listings of social networks that I have not listed and I will
continue to keep this posting up to date.
Grok Description matches for MSNBC: Social Networks Go to Work GrokA matches for MSNBC: Social Networks Go to Work
LinkedIn Preps Paid Services for Social Networking
LinkedIn Preps Paid Services for Social Networking09/01/2004 09:05 PM After reaching the million-user mark, the company plans to introduce
premium options, such as the ability to conduct reference checks on
job candidates or search for business experts in the network.
HireAbility Teams with LinkedIn to Expand Recruiting Technology Networks
HireAbility Teams with LinkedIn to Expand Recruiting Technology Networks04/12/2005 02:16 AM HireAbility.com, a leading provider of recruitment services and
software, announces today the signing of a co-marketing agreement with
LinkedIn, the world's largest and most effective business network.
LinkedIn's referral-based recruiting tool is a natural match for
HireAbility's recruiting network. LinkedIn and HireAbility will
promote each other on their respective websites with sponsored links,
banner ads, newsletters, special pricing, and email campaigns targeted
to HireAbility's recruiting network. [PRWEB Apr 12, 2005]
"Social network analysis is the mapping and measuring
of relationships and flows between people, groups, organisations,
computers or other information/knowledge processing entities." (Valdis
Krebs, 2002). In the context of knowledge management, social network
analysis (SNA) enables relationships between people to be mapped in
order to identity knowledge flows: who do people seek information and
knowledge from? Who do they share their information and knowledge
with? In contrast to an organisation chart which shows formal
relationships - who works where and who reports to whom, a social
network analysis chart shows informal relationships - who knows who
and who shares information and knowledge with who. It therefore allows
managers to visualise and understand the many relationships that can
either facilitate or impede knowledge creation and sharing. Because
these relationships are normally invisible, SNA is sometimes referred
to as an 'organisational x-ray' - showing the real networks that
operate underneath the surface organisational structure. This resource
is from the National Electronic
Library for Health's (NHS) Knowledge Management Toolbox. This has
been added to Social
Informatics Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.
Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy (ISNAE)
The purpose of ISNAE is to study social networks and
use the resulting knowledge to promote economic growth and social
well-being. In order to fulfill this purpose ISNAE will conduct and
support basic and applied research on social networks, collect and
disseminate knowledge about social networks, and engage in activities
aimed at acquiring the resources to fulfill its mission. I posted a
list of Online Social Networks a few weeks ago and it is available by
clicking here. I also listed the posting in my latest V2N5
May 2004 Awareness Watch™ Newsletter available at the Awareness Watch Newsletter
home page.
ZIP Code Visualizer
ZIP Code Visualizer12/22/2003 06:29 PM ZIP Code
Visualizer A Java-based map of the continental US that
progressively narrows down the area covered by a ZIP Code as you type in the numbers one by
one. [Doesn't work so good in Mac IE 5. via xBlog]
All right, I have been neglecting my LinkedIn account
because their survival was questionable before and LinkedIn UI was
irksome, but I
think it's time I started nurturing it.
If I know you and you have a LinkedIn account, send your link
requests. You
can find me under, surprise, 'Don Park'. If you don't
know me but I know
you (?), you can still invite me. For example, if you are
Bill Gates, you are
welcome to invite me. :-)
As to my LinkedIn profile, I'll get to it someday. Thanks to
Niall
Kennedy for the reminder.
TrendIQ has been measuring "internet presence" of the Social
Networking meme over at Social-all, which I mentioned recently.
Looks like LinkedIn has been getting a lot of buzz, recently. [Get Real]
Yes - LinkedIn certainly has been getting attention. It's probably
becuase people are getting JOBS!
The other thing about LinkedIn - is that it appears it's gonan
remain closed. No FOAF for
Hoffman.
Now if I was Joi ito - I'd be pressuring my good friend Reid to
change that. Oh well.
The LinkedIn dilemma
The LinkedIn dilemma12/16/2003 03:01 PM
Here's what stopped me from writing an endorsement for somebody on LinkedIn today: the requirement
to define our relationship as one of these choices:
The same kind of thing stopped me from joining the identity-badge
party at the Digital ID conference recently. I'm bugged by forms that
invite or require me to specify the unspecifiable. Particularly when
Google already knows the subtle truth of the matter. For example, the
signup for nTag asked me to state
my interests. But I already do that all the time. Everything I write
is a statement of my interest in something. Should it be my job to fit
those interests into the Procrustean bed of somebody else's form?
...
Watch iTunes visualizer through transparent windows
Watch iTunes visualizer through transparent windows07/20/2004 09:42 AM OK, this is beyond useless, but cool. I recently read this article
and thought the idea of seeing through your workspace was cool. Sure,
you could use this to collaborate, but why not use it to make web
browsing or email, o...
WTF? Did Linkedin lose their domain name?
WTF? Did Linkedin lose their domain name?11/13/2003 03:59 PM BoingBoing buddy Jason
Calacanis points us to Linkedin.com, which -- instead of the
Linkedin network site -- now defaults to a domain registrar temporary
page. What's up? Someone forget to pay the domain name renewal bill?
Something related to recent reports of patent conflict, backbiting,
and incestuous dealmaking involving Linkedin, Tribe.net, Friendster,
and a horde of hungry investors? Or, what I suspect to be the real
deal here -- our alien overlords have returned to earth in a shiny new
spacecraft, and they want to eat all the online networkers first? Link
Is it me, or is the quality of the stuff coming across on LinkedIn getting better? I've
seen more job offers, media contact requests and other useful stuff
come across my LinkedIn box than ever before. I wonder if something
happened. Did you do something Reid?
LinkedIn links a million
LinkedIn links a million08/31/2004 03:07 PM The social networking company passes the million-member mark for
registered users.
Tecplot Edge 2.0 data visualizer adds GUI Builder
Tecplot Edge 2.0 data visualizer adds GUI Builder04/16/2004 10:25 AM Tecplot Inc. has announced that
Tecplot
Edge 2.0 is now available; the tool is aimed at software
developers who want to integrate XY, 2D and 3D plotting capabilities
into their applications. The new version of the data visualization
product features the ability to customize the user interface by
modifying the menu system and replacing the Tecplot sidebar, support
for bitmapped buttons in the GUI Builder and better development tools.
Briefly: LinkedIn links a million
Briefly: LinkedIn links a million08/31/2004 05:07 PM roundup Plus: AOL gives exclusive sneak peek for fall TV...Copernic
debuts desktop search tool...Charter signs 3 phone deals.
I've been getting a lot of SNAM (Social Network Spam) so I'm happy
to hear that LinkedIn has a new flag
that you can set that prevents you from receiving invitation from
people who are not in your address book. It's a bit snobbly, but it
prevents you from having to turn down invitation requests from people
you don't know. On LinkedIn, I generally don't accept invitations from
people I don't know because the purpose of the network is to refer
people to each other and you can't really write a reference for
someone you don't know. Although this probably lowers the "virality",
I think this feature will enhance my LinkedIn experience and hats off
to Reid for implementing it.
For people who are on LinkedIn, here's the URL to set the flag. If you haven't uploaded
your address book, this will effectively make it impossible for people
to invite you though.
Create a Debugger Visualizer Using Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1
Create a Debugger Visualizer Using Visual Studio 2005 Beta 109/23/2004 12:55 AM This article describes how to create a visualizer, using the Visual
Studio 2005 Beta 1 release, which enables you to customize the way
data is displayed when you are debugging through managed code. (
Friendster Expands Its Network (washingtonpost.com)
Friendster Expands Its Network (washingtonpost.com)06/03/2004 10:50 AM washingtonpost.com - It pays to have friends online, six degrees of
them to be precise. That's the theory propelling the growth in social
networking sites. And in a sign that business is booming, Friendster
has pegged Scott Sassa, a former NBC executive, as its new chief
executive.
Share internet connections on a 192.168.x.x network
Share internet connections on a 192.168.x.x network04/04/2005 11:17 AM At the office and connected via AirPort, I get an address on the
192.168.2.x network. Unfortunately, if I attempt to use internet
connection sharing (in the Sharing Preferences panel), this conflicts
with the built-in 192.168...
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: netdeva linkedin friendster network visualizer terrorist network visualizer "mathematical analysis of social networks" pdf linkedin graph connections java applet visually
David Weinberger has
Bits on Wheels is a Mac-only BitTorrent client that shows you your
current downloading "swarm" as a 3D visualization.
