Tell me, please

In client work recently I have come up against the the importance -- and difficulty -- of satisfying multiple user positions and experiences. Social media work because the author and the reader are satisfied. Sure, social MEdia need to be satisfying to me, but if they are to scale and succeed, the social system needs to reward readers and recipients, too.

This has brought up a few interesting principles of late. I want to share them just because I find them interesting.

The first is that there's an asymmetry between the interest which motivates the user who "acts" (creates, posts, etc) and the user who responds. Not all systems are built around a coupled statement-response model of communication, of course.

But there's an intrinsic interest in response for a lot of users and use cases in twitter and other conversational tools. If I ask a question on twitter, I am motivated by my question, which is something I want an answer to now. The person who is asked (who sees) the question has no interest at all. His or her interest can be piqued and aroused -- but is not the same as mine.

The act of answering may more likely be the motivation, and not the content of the question. Question and answer systems are difficult because they involve satisfying two users, the asker and the answerer. If these user experiences are satisfied in real-time, then the interaction itself handles the experience. If they are satisfied out of synch, then each user has to produce his/her own interest: one in the act of asking, one in the act of answering.

This asymmetry extends to other aspects of communication in social media. Take, for example the case of sharing.

Because users are different, and have different personalities:

• Some who share do so because they want to share with (someone).
  
• Others share because they want to show to (others).
  
• Some share to exchange for (something).
  

These are different experiences and are met with different technologies or have different technical solutions.

For example, the user who shares with someone probably posts the photo in order to send it along. Sharing is the act; The photo is the symbol. This user wouldn't post this particular photo if it weren't for the person or people s/he was thinking of.

But take a person who finds something online, and book marks it because it is interesting, but has no person in mind to share it with. Later, this person decides either that the thing is interesting enough that others would find it interesting, and shares it. Or s/he thinks of a person who might enjoy it also, and shares it. Sharing in this case has come afterwards. It is a second act, it adds value to this person's user experience, but wasn't the original motive or interest.

The user in our first case, on the other hand, wanted to communicate from the beginning. Communicating was the primary act, and was the motive and interest.

These are just two simple examples of how the activity involved in sharing stuff online can be broken down into two acts: one of saving the thing; one of sharing the thing. And that these are different, depending on whether they are governed by the act of saving or the act of communicating.

In the first case the action carries the content. Communication leads.
in the second the content precedes the act. Communication follows.

These distinctions may seem trivial but they're not. They have significant implications for:

• how the system scales
  
• who finds it useful (and who finds it a waste of time)
  
• what content is produced as a leave behind
  
• how personal or public it is in tone
  
• how easily it can be organized and structured, and so on

Social problems can have only social solutions.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Transient conversation networks on twitter

This is a re-post of a comment left on a post by Larry Irons, who commented on my recent post about HP labs' research on twitter's social networks.

My comment became a post unto itself.

Larry,

Great post. i think there's little doubt that in talk tools like twitter, which are time-based and conversational (of a form), the Dunbar number, while constant, probably includes a smaller number of active conversation participants.

Let's say that some percentage of the Dunbar number is a close set of friends, with whom daily interaction is not necessary to sustain engagement and maintain the relationship -- but with whom that conversation might be very grounding, rewarding, and meaningful.

There might be another percentage that is a set of peers -- members of one's network with whom coded and informative exchanges serve to surface, explore, share discoveries and create collaborations.

And there might be some percentage given over to new contacts, or more accurately, twitter partners in talk -- transient network members with whom a relationship is latent but not yet enduring. People for whom we are available for talk, but with whom we have no explicit commitment to maintain contact. The conversational activity among members of this subset would be more governed by the etiquette and practices common to the social tool in use: twitter is not blog commenting is not facebook friending is not linkedin answering and so on.

I would like to see some research into twitter networks that is diachronic -- which tracks conversation over time and correlates that with follower/following count.

I would expect that the number of transient relationships increases with an increase in followers/following. Does the Dunbar number hold steady? Or is it the wrong metric altogether for conversation monitoring? I suspect it's the wrong metric. Our ability to sustain engagements would more likely be a matter of our attention spent on the site/service, our interest in it (which goes through phases), our "goals," our experience to date and historically with the site (rising interest after adoption, plateau, fade out, rediscovery....), and of course the runs of talk themselves (talk increases around cultural news and events).

I would imagine that these conversation engagement metrics would also correlate to user personality types, and to the differences between monological, dialogical, and relational (Self, Other, Relational activity-oriented) "archetypes" of people in general.

To wit, a Self-oriented person might talk more if s/he believes he commands a bigger and more attentive audience. Stats revealing traffic to his site, click throughs on his links, retweets and @replies will embolden his/her engagement and make him/her more enthusiastic about tweeting.

An Other-oriented person might talk more the more @names and Directs s/he receives. Being inclined to respond to people, and to engage in one-to-one conversations, this user's increasing following count will likely create more conversations -- but possibly very passing and transient ones -- as many of them are of course greetings and introductions (what we do when we meet people).

A Relational/activity oriented person might @name @name @name people more the more s/he sees group activity on twitter. This being the kind of interaction that is least well supported in twitter (multiple D messaging isn't possible, for example, cutting out backchannel chat). Chat-style communication, which is necessary to create a sense of communal or group involvement and interaction, isn't possible in twitter. So the relational/activity oriented user must sustain an awareness of social groups over time -- this is a gate to group interactions. [I'm finding that Yammer, which I use with adhocnium members, is a twitter-chat tool for me. There's no sense that a public reads our posts, and we conduct a slow chat over Yammer that in which, almost paradoxically, the @reply becomes a sidechannel!]

A smart marketing tool would thus not use influence, but would use conversation dynamics and transient properties of social media conversations and their participants, to determine not who to impress, but rather how to distribute by means of user-centric social media communication networks.

I'll put this in Benjamin's language: Communication in the age of its technical mediation is contingent no longer on the interaction handling of facework but on the loosely-coupled coordination of asynchronously sustained individual commitments. I nearly called them "commentments." (reference is The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin)

(This became so long that I'll blog it on my site, too. Thanks for the inspiration -- keep it going!)


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Attention and inattention on Twitter

I missed this research on twitter social networks as i was taking time away from the internets when it was posted. Here's Jeremiah Owyang's coverage of network analysis conducted at HP labs.

The research does seem only to illustrate the obvious. For all the followers one may have, we engage in a much smaller subnetwork or core group. If you're into social network analysis, the paper is worth a read.

But it may be risky to draw conclusions from it, and here's why. The research can only cover tweeting activity -- it cannot measure reading. To measure twitter's value only by tweet activity mistakes activity for attention. And to measure "networks" by conversationality mistakes talking for influence.

I think it's a fair bet that most of us consume a lot more of twitter than we actually reply to, retweet, or direct message. We have impressions of people we have never messaged. We have impressions of people based on their followings, without having read them. We have impressions of people based on what they say, regardless of how many followers they have.

I use tweetdeck, like many of us. I have no clue how many followers most of you have. But I have an impression of many of you. There's no way to extract impressions we have from attention we spend, if the attention is not given actively -- as an @reply, direct message, or follow. Social media are highly asymmetrical -- how we give or spend attention can be tracked only by our actions. There's no tracking the things we don't act on -- tho we may be paying attention.

Furthermore, the actions (tweeting) that can be tracked may just as well correspond to a self-interest as correspond to an interest in the person addressed. Because I @reply doesn't mean I know you, your blog, or your influence. I may simply be responding to you. I may be soliciting your attention to me. I may be soliciting the attention of your audience (who follows you). I may be soliciting the attention of the audience I feel a part of (those I follow). Or I may be soliciting the attention of my audience (who follows me).

There's a grand asymmetry in audience attention and awareness in twitter, due to the fact that our own tweets are shown (inaccurately) within the context of those we follow, not those who are following (seeing/reading) us. You probably have felt, as I have, that your tweet is being seen by the people you see in tweetdeck. Those aren't the people who see your tweet (excepting mutual follows)! We tweet to an audience in front of us, when in fact our audience is behind us.

Furthermore, the research assumes that conversationality = trust = networks that matter. Conversation and networks are two different things. I can have fun and engaging conversations on twitter with people I don't (yet) know, but be influenced by many I have never tweeted to. Network influence shouldn't be measured by conversationality alone. Research such as this, while illuminating, fails to address why we do it and what it means to us. In spite of the obvious asymmetry in follower count vs actual conversation on twitter, in spite of the obvious fact that all friends are not equal, there's still the fact that we add followers, accrue followers, and are motivated by some aspect of that practice. Engagement with the medium should not be reduced to participation and activity.

I think there's a myriad of other factors at work behind who reads, who @replies, and who RT's. Some want the attention of the influencer, and will act on that by tweeting. Some, intimidated by the influencer's influence, may read -- but read pretty religiously. Some influencers attract a following but maintain a hands off and non-conversational tweeting style. Some influentials have extremely chatty and present tweeting styles, and may be much more capable of making things happen. Can loyalty be measured in twitter activity and patterns of use? Where would it be found -- in network density or in reciprocity and frequency of activity?

There's also the matter of what sociologists call the "public sphere." Some commentators criticize social media for clipping our attention spans and eliminating the binding commitments we form and sustain in face to face interactions. I make those claims sometimes. There's no denying the difference mediated interaction has with situated interactions. We don't share time on twitter. But there is clearly a benefit to one's sense of self, and clearly a self-interest satisfied by accruing followers on twitter. Some amount of the price paid by our reduced "attention spans" may be refunded by an enduring sense of presence and belonging we feel by our attendance.

Sociologist Erving Goffman had a concept for what he called "sanctioned eavesdropping." It described situations in which overhearing is permitted, and forms a low-commitment kind of social interaction. He also had a concept for "civil inattention." As Anthony Giddens put it, "Civil inattention is trust as 'background noise'—not as a random collection of sounds, but as carefully restrained and controlled social rhythms." They were talking about face to face situations. But I have little doubt that we bring our sensibilities to online social practices also.

As Goffman put it best, "These two tendencies, that of the speaker to scale down his expressions and that of the listeners to scale up their interests, each in the light of the other's capacities and demands, form the bridge that people build to one another, allowing them to meet for a moment of talk in a communion of reciprocally sustained involvement. It is this spark, not the more obvious kinds of love, that lights up the world."


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Small talk in Tinychat: from twitter to chat

I had one of those eureka moments yesterday trying out tinychat from twitter. Tinychat is a "disposable" chatroom launched from a tinyurl. You tweet the room's address and wait to see who shows up. Several of us got in there yesterday morning and had quite a lively discussion about tinychat.

I decided to try it again in the afternoon after blogging -- just to see if tinychat might serve as a kind of live commenting alternative to blog comments. The afternoon chat was very different however, and got me thinking about the whole value proposition and its success requirements.

I'll make this a short one, and do the social interaction design on it in a separate post. (There are some concepts we can take from real world interaction dynamics and forms of talk as a means of anticipating design challenges and pitfalls to going live).

First off, there's a strong novelty factor in tinychat. Just going from tweetdeck to a chatroom was pretty cool. Even more cool was to change register and chat with twitter followers. There's a payoff to stepping up the interaction from the "l'm talking" mode of twitter to the "we're talking" mode of chat. Tinychat shed a bit of light on how differently conversational twitter is. We can feel as if we're in conversation over twitter. Switching to chat meant actually being in conversation -- it feels different.

Going live is not only a matter of switching apps, it also breaks the frame. If twitter is an open talk tool, then chat is enclosed. Upon entering the chatroom, each of us became bound by the higher presence demands of chat. Conversational etiquette and the many and rich aspects of talk and giving face take over. The continuity of presence in chat replaces the discontinuity of twitter, just as conversation replaces tweeting (as the mode of interaction).

I wondered whether this change of frame and change of app would be a gate on tinychat's usability. To many users, and in many situations, frame changes are a usability gate. (The reason most of us don't invite friends to chat in Facebook, even when we can see very well that they're online.) Change of frame is a change of commitment.

Chat is also much more susceptible to who's chatting. And here an unintended design consequence comes into the picture. With Tinychat you invite people following you -- not people you follow. Those who show up may include people who want to talk to you more than you want to talk to them. The people you have been seeing on twitter are not the people who have seen your tinychat invitation (unless you follow those who follow you). And as soon as one other person appears in a chatroom, you are obliged to change your conversational register and be nice. (That I'm exposing the mechanics of online conversation is not a reflection on my experience yesterday!! I'm merely extracting some principles from the experience.)

if one could invite specific people to a private tinychat room (still would be from people who follow you), the service would be a lot more interesting. Because in chat it's all about who's in the room. And when people appear in a chatroom that they don't want to stick around in, they will often background the chat but not actually leave the room (for reasons of etiquette). So there can be a lot of waiting in chat. And a lot of wondering what to talk about.

It would be interesting to think about use cases where going to chat makes sense -- has some purpose and topic. Chat is a lot faster than twitter. But it's a lot more contingent on other users: who they are, how they are related to you, and what they are interested in talking about.

Chat works best when it is bound by a context -- and over twitter it is difficult to create context. As long as tinychat is available to whoever wants to show up, or until tinychat can set up uses and contexts, it's likely to feel like randoms in a waiting room to most.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social media's second law: it's a verb, not a noun

This post is a follow up to the First law. There are two more coming.

The second law of social interaction design is that the functionality of social media is contingent on social practices that use them. Notice that there's a double contingency there. Social media functionality is contingent on use by users; use by users is contingent on the technologies required for use to be possible. This double contingency means that social tools are inseparable from the users, and the use by users inseparable from the tools. It is not a matter of which comes first, or of how technologies structure interactions, for interactions shape technologies. And as all of us in the "beta" community know, social media design is iterative because it constantly observes its own use.

What this means is that social practices absorb and assume the burden of structuring interaction, and of organizing and coordinating activity where tools make that a possibility. The less that is "designed," the more that is handled by people. Chat, and in some ways Twitter, are among the least designed of social media tools. It is conversation, talk, and communication that organize them.

Asking of a social media tool not what it does, but what it is capable of, is an empowering shift of attitude. It gets closer to the grail of social media design, which is, in the context of mediated interactions, What are people capable of? In the real world, audiences are assembled for all manner of reasons and purposes, and their behaviors are as diverse as those of mobs, gangs, queues, gatherings, marches, protests, and so on.

Audience sizes do not scale linearly, groups becoming audiences becoming crowds becoming masses. Purposes may organize the disposition, expectations, the duration, activity, and even spatial orientation of real-world assemblies. In all cases, one can ask What are the people capable of, and get a different answer. They are capable of waiting, of rushing, of dispersing, coalescing, rampaging, blocking, in silence or with sound and fury. By asking What are the people capable of, we recognize that there is some kind of order and organization, in space and time, and often without the barest of architecture or other bounding.

Because the communities built around social media are for the most part asynchronous, they are framed in time, over time, as much as they are by tools themselves. Audiences exist because users return. For every established online community or user base there are many individual users making a regular practice or habit of use.


This gives us our first corollary, which is that social practices emerge out of aggregate individual user practices. There is no "one" social practice, but several, and experienced by each user uniquely. On tools like Twitter, for example, these practices include various kinds of talk and messaging. They include announcing one's location, one's feelings, one's activities, and one's plans. Practices that require two or more users include brief rounds (or conversations), replies, retweets, and a variety of types of commenting.

Commenting, in contrast with conversation, is not reciprocal. On Twitter we find people referencing a user who has followed them; referencing a user who has mentioned him/her; referencing individuals, auto-replies, and topics by referencing individuals. These comments may solicit responses, but do not directly respond to those in question. Other social practices include fights, marketing offers, event invitations, application invites, and more. Combined, they represent the growing set of practices to which Twitter is suited, from a core set on out to those at the margins.


We have seen already that the use value of social media is not simply one of utility. Given that each user brings his or her own set of values, and ways of valuing experiences on social media, we have the corollary that social practices need not have any utility. The users engaged in an observable practice may each have their own reasons, and thus reasons for use, hence making it impossible to ascribe one use value to the practice.

This may contradict those who believe that there are in fact collective uses of social media. But if those exist, they exist only in theory -- they don't correspond to user experiences and thus can only be argued on the basis of some other system of measure. Are social media democratizing, or are they subject to crowd psychology? Are they informing, or are they given to gossip and opinion? These are perspectives, beliefs, debates, and controversies, and while of course interesting, lay no claim to user centric design principles or insights. The social practices seen on social media are just that, and any "business" or application of social practices to market opportunities is epiphenomenal to the forms of talk it is based on.


This leads us to a third corollary, that social practices are emergent. In chaos theory terms, emergent phenomena are auto-poetic. That is, they "write" themselves. They are the product of forces that, in observing themselves, reproduce themselves without any particular genetic design, external guidance, or intrinsic goal. To the social media designer, this creates a problem. For the best a designer can do is supply architecture that, when populated, is most likely to result in anticipated or desired social practices.

There are no direct steering mechanisms available in social interaction design; only the educated and informed use of features, design elements, and other design choices intended to enable and extend commonly occurring practices. Here, again, the designer is best equipped who also grasps the psychology of users and the phenomena that occur when they are introduced to one another. This explains the widespread use of best practices in web design and architecture, as well as the sudden and surprising successes of the small few who innovate well.


A fourth corollary of the law of social practices creates a real challenge for social media design: users engage in a practice when they feel like it. This could belong to the law of user centricity, but it has implications for social practices. Face to face social encounters bind participants in time and space, and again through interaction and communication handling and negotiation. There is no binding of users in time and space on social media. It must be handled entirely by actions and communication. Actions are what the user does; communication is what the user says. (Note that in social media, communication can be performed by means of writing, recording and uploading video, audio, getting on webcam, and more.)

It's for the lack of binding in time and space that we call social media discontinuous, de-coupled, disaggregated, dis-embedded, and so on. The binding that does happen is not an event, as it is in face-to-face situations. It has no situation, and no duration in time. Rather, it is a sustained commitment taken unilaterally by individual users which can produce the effect, and thus the experience, of bound and mutually-framed experience. Being next to one another is possible, in a way, but being with is not. This thwarts the possibility of individuals sharing in each other's "stream of consciousness" -- which is to say the emotional and empathic coupling of activity and presence that makes us seek out social interaction to begin with.


We're now at our last corollary of design by social practice, and it embraces the previous one: the more open and simple the social tool, the more uses it has for more users. And you may have guessed it already, but this one also presents a design challenge. For while open-ness in structure and design may engender a greater number of uses, too many uses may render the tool useless. Like the blog, Twitter exhibits design simplicity in the extreme. Any user can write whatever s/he wants, whenever s/he wants, and from wherever s/he wants. But unlike the blog, audience members have no control at all over what they read.

The asymmetry of experience returns -- and now the creative flexibility of the application results in undifferentiated talk and messaging for the consumer. The user interest satisfied in reading and following Twitter is undirected and unstructured. The experience of the reading user depends entirely on whatever happens to have been posted by whomever happened to have posted it, that the user is following. This kind of arbitrariness and randomness of news and messages would be death in any other medium. The 140 character limit survives as a necessary constraint on the noise level -- even though it can contribute nothing to raising the signal level.


We have covered just two laws of social interaction design. Our next, communication, will get at the interaction type that drives status culture and talk-based applications. Can talk be designed?



Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Short post on unstructured vs structured social media

This is a short post I want to put out there to get discussion going on structure in social media. As I'm still thinking about talk tools, and short-form messaging ("status culture") in particular, I'm having to contend with some tricky conceptual stuff around structured user experiences. Facebook and other social networks are much more structured than twitter, status updates, and short-form messaging. From a Ui and user experience perspective, these tools bring a lot of order and organization to user actions and interactions. That has the benefit of limiting noise and of creating a lot of different sub-system of user actions. Games, gifts, leaderboards, rankings, ratings, post vs comment types, tags, social navigation, what have you. Stuff I and others have written about in terms of pattern languages and design approaches.

Twitter and its kin are unstructured. I've come up with the proposition that when structure is under-determined in site/system architecture, social practices handle the organization of experience. The burden of structure is shifted from architecture to interaction handling.

Different types of talk are well documented. Erving Goffman's symbolic interaction has made huge contributions to our understanding of forms of talk as "framed" encounters. Framing happens in time, in positioning of actors, in turn-taking, "keying" and "footing" changes related to statements and what they mean. But facework is critical to his analyses. Not to mention use of body language, eye contact, tone of voice and so on.

What are the possibilities of open systems of talk? I've begun thinking about this from the perspective of multiple personality types and frankly it's getting ugly. How does a socializer relate to a pundit? What kind of twitter activity attracts a harmnonizer? Does an inviter look for retweets? It's simple with a single user model, but more realistic if we can account for the different kinds of user personalities and what they are competent and interesting at doing online.

Since social practices emerge on social media without any directed guidance and only through the undirected participation of users who each have their own reasons for doing what they do, the challenge of designing for emergent practices is a tough nut indeed. Where is the threshold for the emergence of a particular practice? And what's the upper limit for an open tool's population -- the limit point beyond which it drowns in its own unstructured noise?

I was thinking last night about some cool things to do on twitter, for example. But which I haven't seen. There are four ways to contextualize a tweet: the accountname, pic, @name, and hashtag (#). The rest is the tweet statement itself. So I know a tweet from /bbcnews is news. Or it could be indicated #worldnews. Or the pic could be the bbc logo.

Given these limited means of contextualizing a tweet -- that is, providing cues to the reader as how to read it -- there is still a lot that one could do.

Eg.

--Use an #clickmypic as a clue. Create a user pic that is legible only in orig size (viewed on profile page). Embed a message or clue in the pic. Tweets could then be created that were:

• trivia pursuit questions: the pic is the category
  
• save the planet: the pic is a question, e.g. what's your contribution this wk? Response is whatever small thing you're doing this wk to save the planet
  
• coupons/discounts -- viewable only if you expand the pic size
  
• movie character -- the reply should be the movie the tweeted movie quote comes from:
  

--A #tagyourit game. Self explanatory

--#onethingyoudontknowabout me. ditto

--#soundtrack (what i'm listening to)

--#flixsterquiz (never-ending flixster movie quiz question)

There could be tons of these small twitter games, with @naming for pass along. I'd like to see a brand try something like this out. It seems to me that the creative possibilities for open or unstructured talk tools are huge -- all that's needed is the creative, and a simple-enough or familiar enough game structure to make it fairly obvious how to play. (The game rules supply structure, tweets become the game's "moves".)

To return briefly my problem of personality types, and whether we can find personality in tweets, and twitter (and status update) use practices that correlate with personality types, I think the answer is yes. But it's neither foolproof nor straightforward. We update and tweet on whim and fancy, mood, and conversationally. Those are practices that fall outside of personality type-casting. I've managed to find strong consistencies in how a lot of people update:

• people who tend to describe feelings, moods, or activities (Self-oriented)
  
• people who solicit a response, address someone else, frequently @name (Other-oriented)
  
• people who multiply @name, who tweet events they're at, who they're with (Relationship/activity-oriented)
  

I've found some fairly consistent example of updates and messages that include:

• identifying with something a person is into (Self is attributed a pastime, goal)
  
• identifying with a value, cause, political theme (Self is associated with a value) 
  
• identifying with a group, practice, or status sign (Self is attributed desired status)
  
• positioning and location (indirectly soliciting contact and making Self available)
  
• third person comment (Self is reflected upon, "judged" or joked about)
  
• event-specific (what Self is doing)
  
• mood or feeling (how Self is feeling)
  
• etc
  

These and other kinds of status updates and messages seem consistent with the user's personality type. Now, theoretically, a functioning social system would reveal that personality types that go well together can actually be seen forming networks. Those who like activity should be found with those who are active. Those who identify with attributes of others should be found with those others. Those who em-cee should be seen mentioning those people they find interesting (em-cees can spot the rockstars, tend to talk about them more than their own Selves). And so on. Many many natural couplings and sets of users whose personalities should produce emergent social practices.

I'm very interested in doing this in collaboration with psychologists and have started doing so. Interestingly, social media tends to be a field for social psychologists -- and this is more a matter of personality (even clinical) psychologists. Social psych takes on status, social hierarchy, roles and positions -- the kinds of things that are common to community. My approach here is to find personality-based combinations and their practices, which is a different tack (is also more user-experience based).

That's what's on my mind. Designing and building successful social media tools, applications, and uses around open systems and especially talk-based systems is creating more challenges for design methodology than did the web-based social networks. I think it can be done, but it's going to be a lot more sociological and psychological than most design approaches are used to.

Collaborateurs are welcome!


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

A short post on discovery vs creation, relating to social media

I was thinking last night about an essay Michel Foucault once wrote about two competing concepts of the Self in major world religions. It's been so long that I don't now recall which essay it was. Foucault is known for theoretical "archaeology" of western thought. And for his work on the the birth of the "Subject" (read: individual). As in, when did the subject, the sovereign person, emerge in thought and culture? And more specifically, when did the Subject become the locus of truth? (He read this through the inquisition, the practice of confessions, and so on).

Anyways, in this essay he compared two views of the Self: the Self that is discovered and known through some kind of religious quest and search. And the Self that is created, invented, through free will, action, choice (and so on).

It occurred to me that a similar bifurcation exists in social media. We have a lot of discovery engines and techniques. Techniques once used to find related documents and data, but now often used to find compatible or similar people. This is an approach that ascribes attributes and qualities to the identity (person, user). They might be interests, demographic data, age, gender, location, even social graph/friend relations. It's an approach used ultimately to help us find people we might like. Based on the idea that when two things are alike, their shared likeness might lead to further relationships.

But there's an interesting flaw in the logic. That two things are alike might be liked by one person is fine. But that the two people who like those things might like each other, makes a leap of faith. It rests on the idea that the relationship between two things can be extended to the two people who relate to those things in like ways. We don't know that this is an extensible logic or idea. Do similar people automatically like each other? Really? If so, aren't the similarities that would make us compatible, make us friends and friendly, just as likely to be something other than what interests us -- our style or personality?

I'm reminded of the logic of dating sites -- that a match is a basis for meeting. Anyone who's tried online dating knows that the first meeting is where chemistry either seals the affair, or dissolves the whole run up into an awkward and disappointing mess.

The logic of long tail can work on objects and things because they are stable. Attributes used to describe them are values that can be shared. They belong to each thing (a movie is documentary) because the two things each share that attribute. The more attributes in common, the more alike they are (these movies are documentaries about penguins).

But is the approach extensible? Do we like each other because we share attributes?

There's another approach taken in social media -- the social graph. This version uses Granovetter's weak link theory and suggests that the friend of a friend is the most important relationship -- because it can introduce us to people who are not one, but two or thee degrees away. We get access to people who aren't our friends but are closely linked. It's assumed that trust is extensible from the first degree (I trust you) to the second (I trust someone you know). Not the most convincing idea, but good enough to make friend recommendations.

But in each case, we have only a system of things and attributes.

Human relationships aren't build on similarity or identity of attributes. They're a result of interaction, of understanding, of the things we do that move us and by which we move one another.

Our industry needs a richer understanding of the creative acts and the productive aspects of social media use. Of what is required, and what happens, when a connection becomes meaningful to the people connected through what they do, not have in common, with each other. We need to think more about drama. about stories, about conversations and pastimes. About the things and people we anticipate, expect, and wait for. About what time is like, and times are like, online -- short and long times, ongoing times, choppy and interrupted times, rhythmic times and times that are over. About how all the dynamics of interaction are transformed but somehow retained and adapted to the way things work online.

Yes, discovery can be produced by searching among common attributes. But the really productive stuff comes out of social practices. Social media may be a means of production. But we are still the production of means.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social media's first law: user centric design

The first law of social interaction design is the law of user centric design. The user centricity of social media is obvious. Social media are voluntary, and they mean to their users what their users put in and take out of them. Users are interested users, not needy or obliged users. Even users who can claim to have goals and objectives are motivated to participate, contribute, even just read and lurk, because they want to. Compelling social media do not compel users -- users become compelled, for whatever short or long-term interest it is that compels them.

That said, we recognize that social media are highly psychological. The reasons that motivate any given user may be rational, or not, may be task or goal-oriented, or may be a reflection of distraction, compulsion, or even "addiction." The fact that social media use involves psychological interests has a couple implications for designers, builders, and users. First, it means that we cannot know the reasons for a user's use, or by extension, the reasons that an application is used. Second, we cannot even assume that a user knows those reasons. I like to say that to know what a social media application does, turn it off. We will soon know why and how we use an application by what we miss.

This leads us to a corollary of the first law: the value of social media is specific to the user. Ask any user why he or she uses it and you will get an answer specific to that individual. Reasons for use are not generic, and are not generalizable. The social media application is individuated by its users -- that is, it accrues uses and reasons for use as it accrues users. Furthermore, ask any user what he or she uses it for, and you will get uses specific to that user. The value of social media is a combination of how a user uses it, and what reasons s/he can provide for using it. Value is in the eyes of the beholder. It is subjective, individual, and non-generalizable. We cannot ascribe one value to a social media application, and should approach any claims about an application's value with caution. (They are likely to reflect the value perceived by that person, given the context and interests of his or her use of it.)

A second corollary obtains from the first law: users use social media based on existing and past experiences with other media. Users do not invent uses for social media wholesale, but rather use new applications to extend their current habits and uses of other media. A user who chats will likely use Twitter differently from a user who blogs. A user who uses IM will likely use Twitter differently than a user who is a Facebook addict. And so on. Research is not required to prove the claim that we blog, update, comment, post, upload, review, rate, recommend, IM, chat, email, and tweet very differently. I'm not likely to suddenly start commenting in all caps on Youtube tomorrow, any more than a heavy chatter is to suddenly switch to Twitter for conversation. Each of us is a bundle of habits and repetitions. And we use social media according to how we can each see them fitting into what we tend to do.

A third corollary follows, and it is that we cannot know what the user is doing and experiencing. The web as biased in favor of the affirmative, meaning, it captures action but not inaction. Clicks are recorded, but not reading. We know only when a user does something, and that something is captured as an affirmation. There are no "contradictory" or "negative" acts counted online. An act of opposition would look the same to the web server as a an act of affirmation. All actions are, in communication theory terms, a "yes." The inability to know what user's experience confounds all media, but it is complicated online by the fact that we can track and measure some things. And we focus mightily on them. In the case of Twitter and in the culture of status updating, however, we have no means by which to know what and how much is being read. It takes a retweet, a comment, or a reply to publicize and manifest the reader's attention to a message. This is, of course, why we count our followers. Their number is a substitute for attention and visibility, meaning relevance and acknowledgment. Each and every tweet solicits a response, and in its loneliness is one of the small moments of irrelevance we suffer through daily in our contract with social media. There is no way of showing others that we are paying attention without making it obvious -- by saying so.

A fourth corollary follows, and we have suggested it already: to show that s/he is paying attention, the user must act. Communication is not just the performance of a statement; that would just be expression. Communication occurs when that statement is accepted or rejected. This "yes or no" response is what transforms expression into communication, what makes of it an action system. Designers know of actions. But in communication, the action is on either the message or its author. It is this possibility, that we can respond to what is said or to who said it, that implicates relationships in social media. And the ambiguity of which was intended that can often subsist in social media use fuels the engine for further participation.


Social media professionals can do no better than to keep the first law in mind. And to bear in mind, also, that users are different. For designers, this should mean occasionally forgoing standards or conventions for something else. Tools designed for writing and publishing online, for example, need not be the basis for fast messaging and lifestreaming. Page layouts common to text-oriented applications will miss out on users who watch and see (some desktop Twitter apps now emphasize visualizing the stream of users over and instead of their posts). For marketers, it is unlikely that top influencers are the ones to reach on Twitter -- other kinds of users are more motivated to retweet and promote. And for inventors, solving some of the big problems, such as awareness and attention, or addressing use cases that involve under-served user types, can offer compelling opportunities.

The law of user centricity tells us that we cannot know what we might do, nor can we know what can be done. But that in all cases we should ask, what is it capable of? We will address this in the second law.


Social media's second law: it's a verb, not a noun

Social media's third law: designing for communication



Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Paradoxes of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and status culture

All social media work only because we use them. And thus it's a given that the social technologies that attract and get the most use tell us something about what works: from a technical standpoint as well as from a cultural standpoint. The "status culture" that now exists around use of twitter, facebook's status updates, and a myriad of related tools for talk clearly shows us where the action is. And in social media, it's all about activity. Activity now occurs not only through the use of these tools, but in tracking, monitoring, measuring, and otherwise attending to the activity served by these tools.

Those of us in the business of social media, because we are ourselves users, share an interest not only in using the tools but in knowing what makes them useful. It's our profession to know more than our own experience of the tools, and to understand how others use them, what for, and why. If we are forward-looking, we want to be able to speak intelligently about how these tools can be improved, about how they can be co-opted, assimilated to other uses, extended, and of course what might come next. But the very fact that each of us is a user can easily distort our understanding, insofar as what we get out of a tool is only one user's perspective. We would like to be able to talk about social media objectively. But there is a difficulty in that: we lack an established framework, and good research is hard to come by.

Conventional software design has a framework. It is based on the utility of software and its use. Use of non-social software has value to the user that can be grasped as "use value." Users use software for the value of its uses: hence the value of utility. Software that does stuff. And what simplifies the design frameworks (user interface design, interaction design, user experience design) is that utility can be framed with a reasonable degree of objectivity. Success and failure of software can then be designed for, and evaluated, on the basis of the software's ability to meet expectations of user needs and objectives. In short, use and utility go hand in hand: use validates uitility, utiliity is the primary reason for use.

But in social media, the social interaction designer's challenge is a different one. Each of us has uses for social media, and they vary greatly. They may vary in terms of habits of use, expectations of use, distracted uses, strategic uses, and so on. Each of us has our own subjective experience of social media -- and taken together they do not produce an objective description, but rather a myriad of unique perspectives. Objectivity and objective descriptions of software in the social media domain simply don't exist, for the reason that they are tools used for subjective reasons, satisfying individual interests, and according to each user's personal and interpersonal competencies. Social utility, if there were such a thing, would offer a false promise, were we to set it as a design and experience goal. Use of social software is not utilitarian. We have to accept that in social media, use is not measured in terms of utility. What then, is it? And how do we, as professionals, estimate even the most simple questions addressed to social media: what is it, what is it used for, who uses it, and why? For if we can't answer these questions, we would have to admit to ourselves that there are no design principles for social media, that in all likelihood its evolution is uncontrollable and chaotic, that successes are impossible to predict, and that users simply do what they want with them in ways that are impossible to anticipate or predict. Not a good basis for design and engineering professionals -- let alone the markets hungry to uncork the power of social media!

We can take on the first question, What is it? by dismissing the question outright. Yes, social media are technologies, are tools, are applications, sites, and so on -- they exist materially in the real world, and have features that function and structure experience. But they are not objective events -- the social interactions and personal uses that animate them subjectivize them.
Social media are not objective media, but subjective media. Used by subjects to interact with other subjects, they are best thought of as verbs, not as nouns. So the question is moot: "What is it" is a noun phrase -- a misaligned and misguided question in matters of social activity.

Better would be to ask What do people do with it? That focuses the question on activities and uses. Social media involve users in socio-technical practices, that is, doings that are possible only by means of a technology. They are not doing what the technology does, but are using the technology for what they want to do. Hence the awkward but more accurate term "socio-technical" practices. If we rephrase the question Who uses it? we are even better aligned. For we are now focused on the user of the technology.

User centricity founds the social interaction designer's perspective, as it does the conventional software design. But in social media design, we know that nothing happens without a community of users. So we extend user centricity to the social, and to the social practices that emerge when many users use a social media application. Now we're getting to the heart of the matter. For good social media require that many different users, each an individual with unique interests and expectations, social competencies, "share" some common experience that is rewarding enough that they continue to do so. Nobody forces us to use social media -- each and every user is an interested user.

But is every user interested in the technology? Not really. And this raises a common misunderstanding among those who fund, develop, and run social media. Users by definition use a tool for their own reasons. And these may vary greatly from the reasons the funders and builders created the technology. In answer to the question Who owns social media, it's clearly the users who own it. They may not own the application, but they own their experience.

We now face a bit of a conundrum. If the technology is a real and functioning "thing," but its functionality and use lies in subjective experiences, where does a social interaction designer even begin to formalize the design constraints and feature specs of social media? If architecture is not materials, mass, volume, and space but is people coming and going, what's the design language? What does it talk about, and what can it say?

Social interaction design needs to take one more step away from the technology, away from hard definitions and into the soft of software. The "you" and "I" need to be restored to UI. More, even, for the user interface, really, is better thought of as a social interface.

Which brings us back finally to where we started. This time, however, more properly attuned to the matters at hand. Status culture, or the set of practices that have emerged around social media designed for short-form messaging, micro-blogging, and feeds of personal news and activities, involves new forms of talk. As new forms of talk, the uses of twitter and other feed-based applications engender new ways of communication, new formats of communication, and new experiences of communication. In social terms, talk and communication serve purposes of activity, of reaching understanding, of coordinating actions, of maintaining relationships.

These social media represent new personal experiences of new ways of being social. The tools enable users to contribute and participate for their own reasons -- and produce, at the other end, a record of user-created content. Individual uses and habits, and experiences, are de-coupled from the byproduct, which can again be used by others (searched, quoted, linked to, embedded, and so on). This de-coupling of the act from the product, of the talking from content, and of social "performance" from the social artifacts left behind, defines the tools' essential functionality.

But how, if the use of social media involves a fundamental de-coupling and dis-embedding of talk and communication from the product and content of talk and communication, is this a design-able experience? How, if tools limit and constrain the experiences they enable, do we accommodate the fact that the uses of the tool are limited also by social practices? Can social interactions be engineered? Can talk be structured? How would a social interaction designer go about "improving" the user experience?

To demonstrate just how strange this problem can be for the social media designer, let's take Twitter as an example. The tool was conceived of as a means of passing sms messages to the web. it has become something completely different (though it retains its 140 character limit -- a hard technical constraint that has become an arbitrary stylistic necessity of writing on twitter). Twitter features a couple of unusual, and strictly defined, design "flaws." But these flaws are essential to its appeal. First, the river of tweets each of us sees includes our own tweets among those of -- not those we're tweeting to -- but those we're listening to. Thus each of use sees an illusion: there is no conversation occurring between us and those whose tweets we see. The users who are listening to us are not the ones we see around our own tweets. A more accurate view would require two panels -- one, our own tweets and those following us; the other, those we're following.

This design sleight of hand creates a false impression and illusion -- of being listened to, or of being in conversation with, the wrong audience. it works on facebook, because status updates are pulled from the same audience we update to. There is only one audience on Facebook: your friends. But on twitter there are two. And this is the second design "flaw" that engendered rapid adoption. One could appear to be popular, by follower count, simply by following people. The unilateral and asymmetrical relationships that define twitter's audience aggregation method, like its river presentation, creates an illusion of visibility and relevance. An entire industry exists to measure not the content of what twitter users say, but the envelope of their activity and the impression of their social relevance.

My point is not to denigrate twitter or twitter culture, but to illustrate that in social media, dysfunctional design can be socially functional. If the individual user can make sense of the application's design, and if these experiences scale, social practices can take hold that can make a social media tool successful (from that perspective -- to say nothing of business models).

Twitter offers up further examples for social media designers. Twitter's simplicity and lack of structure stands out. For a tool as stripped-down as it is, a remarkable amount of culture has grown out of Twitter. This, even, in spite of the fact that so many people continue to say "I don't get it." There are applications out there that people don't like, or that they think are a waste of time. But there are few about which so many have claimed that they don't see the point. This may or may not suggest a serious challenge for twitter in the months ahead — if it turns out that many users are simply trying out what they've heard everyone talking about; and if this combination of novelty and churn results in social noise and spammy misuses. Nevertheless, there is a lesson for social interaction design in Twitter's simplicity: the fewer the design constraints, the more uses and users.

Restraint in design itself, reflected in a tendency to "under design" the interface, the user experience, and interactions, opens up and sustains a greater number of possible uses. Furthermore, the less designed a social media application is, the more types of users will find uses for it. This is an architectural lesson. For while architecture delimits and constrains human experience in order to enable and facilitate some (desired, intended) experiences, it by the same token excludes and eliminates others. Twitter's open approach to interface, experience and interaction design shifts the burden of framing the experience from application design to social practice. Where architecture is open, social practices absorb and form the constraints on experience and interaction. Social experiences need "framing" to achieve the consistency required if they are to be sustained. Twitter shows us that social practices will fill in when design does not.

If this constitutes a principle of social interaction design, it has a serious consequence. The more open and un-structured the design, the more open and flexible the user experiences and uses. We have mentioned that social media work by framing experience and engendering social practices. But the wider the range of individual experiences on the way in, the greater the chance of noise and rubbish on the way out. The user motive for Twitter may be described as "Whenever I feel like it." If that describes when the user uses Twitter, the benefit gained by a tool that can be used anytime, anywhere, for whatever reason is mitigated by the challenge in getting more out of the aggregation of uses. Content produced on a "whenever, whatever" application may tend towards the lowest common denominator, and may want for the connectivity, continuity, and sustained threads that characterize higher quality conversation. Furthermore, the asymmetry that exists between creating and consuming in all social media is never higher than when a user can use the tool for whatever reason, whenever s/he wants. Tighter and more structured tools may limit their own appeal, but gain from a sense of common purpose and commonality of experience.

There is much more to cover yet, but we'll take a break before this post becomes so long that it kills its own audience. In the next installment we will take a look at forms of talk, and lay out some basic laws of talk-oriented social media. These will include user centricity, social practices, communication, and mediation. And we will raise some design challenges created by the implication that for social media, social practices bear the burden of framing the experience.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Status culture: facebook, twitter, and what they mean

In a series of posts over on JohnnyHolland.org I recently made an attempt at teasing out social interaction design issues specific to lifestreaming. Lifestreaming was last year, and the year before, the sort of rich media, flow-based newcomer to interaction models. Lifestreaming looks like serial blogging, tweeted perhaps instead of blogged, and including pictures, videos, and other rich media (seesmic?). But like all information streams and flow apps, its navigation is limited. The more I thought about it, the more complicated matters became.

The reason was simple, and wasn't really a matter of design at all. It was more a recognition that we are increasingly in the business of applying design to speech, architecture to talk, navigation not only across conversations but plumbing the depths and past of conversation and speech also.

Twitter is the culprit of the 140 character limit, but the social networks (Yahoo 360, Friendster, then of course Facebook) get much of the blame for the status update. Facebook had always been more utilitarian than its chatty and teeny kin. A swiss army knife to the crazy straws and party cups more representative of etiquette on MySpace, Tribe, Friendster, and Orkut, Facebook wisely saw that individual user activity could be made social after the fact if it were printed to a running news and activity roll.

With this, users could look active without having to make the awkward declaration of what they were doing on Facebook, all the time. Users could be seen by others without having to draw attention to themselves. Most importantly, users could seem to be talking even when they weren't.

I find this fascinating. If there's one nugget of social interaction that really needs to be mined and understood — for the purposes of design improvements and next generation social media — this is it for me. Not only the practice of posting status updates (and their variations), but also their supporting practices: following, reading, retweeting, commenting, and so on.

Understanding what "status culture" means seems to me central not only to grasping how our talk tools and services are changing — but also how our communication is changing.

For the next several days I hope to post on "status culture." I will take a different angle on it with each post. The facets I have chosen include:

• the culture of writing wide, of posting the self, of self-talk in front of others, and of saying little to nobody in particular
• the design challenge of the user who uses it "whenever I feel like it," of the challenges of designing social interactions for de-coupled structures and unilateralism and asymmetry in speaking and using
• interpretations of status updating and tweeting from the linguistic and communication theoretical perspectives, including the art of speaking in the third person, of speaking to be seen, of speaking to be found, and of speaking another's words
• the meaning of status updates and short messaging to different kinds of users, using my social media personality types as a starting point
• the sociology and anthropology of status updating, including of course influence, social capital, and society as side effect and special effect
• the psychology of updates, and of the peculiar reversals, projections, passive aggressions and mistaken meanings common to living as sentenced, by sentencing, and by face
  

This might all seem like overkill, a reading of the 140 character phenomenon that's too close, too analytical, too "too" to be worth the effort. But that would be to take the undertaking too literally. I think it would be fair to say that of all the social practices to emerge since the profile and the social network/graph, this not-so-little ritual has crossed the tipping point and as such indicates what is to come. Social media is leaving the page, conversation is changing, and communication is possibly becoming a symbolic culture in its own right.

Which would be to suggest that communication is no longer just for communicating, that is, reaching understanding with somebody else about something said. For if communication, in the form of short messaging in front of discontinuous audiences, is a new form of symbolic interaction, it is no longer just about the claims raised and resolved by interlocutors (speaking subjects). It is also a means of presencing the self, of self-presentation, of being visible and localizable, of expression but also projection, indication, reference, social inclusion, and much more. In short, a mode of production, not just of the self or subject, but of culture.

And in that, of course, it necessarily attracts commercial interests. Whose attempts to converse, and to be found in conversation, will likely both threaten and extend the possibilities of the form, and the viability of tools and services designed to support it.

I hope you will join me in this project.

Note; This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social Interaction Design Primer II

I'm publishing a six-part update to last year's Social Interaction Design Primer on JohnnyHolland.org, where I am a contributing blogger. Jeroen Van Geel has been doing a fantastic job since launching this interaction design community blog, and I'm happy to contribute to conversations unfolding in the design community about social media there. In this primer, I attempt to sketch how a framework that accounts for social action might be applied to the forms of experience and interaction design common to one category of social media: lifestreaming. Please join in!

http://johnnyholland.org/