Rethinking thin: social relationships in social media

In a recent post titled The Social Media Bubble, Umair Haque raises some provocative questions concerning the value of the relationships we form on the internet. His post has drawn some attention, and I'd like to quickly throw in my two cents.

Haque wites:

"I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships."

Now I don't have a quarrel so much with some of his conclusions. I have an argument with how the issue is framed.

I don't believe that we should be thinking in terms of relationships. Rather, I believe the issue should be framed in terms of communication. My reasons are fairly straightforward. If we focus on relationships, we attribute to the relationship what actually belongs to communication. We call them thick or thin, we describe them as strong or weak ties, and we measure the value of connectivity in terms of network density and connectedness. We place emphasis on the tie, rather than on the subjects (people) knitted together.

My issue with this is twofold. First, I think it's a mistaken transposition of the logic and analytic of social network analysis to the attributes and qualities of human relationships and social organization that social network analysis doesn't really address. In social network analysis, the tie is privileged over the node, that is, the connection over the subject (person). But all ties are not equal. And ties are not really relationships.

I cannot imagine a psychologist inquiring as to a client's network density, Dunbar number management issues, or presentation of negative Facebook connectedness symptoms. Ties, used in social network analysis, are a means to abstract and diagram the connectedness of a number of nodes/individuals deemed to be connected. It's got nothing to do with the experience of relationships, the depth of human commitments, feelings of isolation or involvement, not to mention the substantial domain of emotional and communicative wealth that is transacted daily in the form of civil social conduct.

If we are interested in the meaning of social networking at the human scale of experience, then ties are the wrong way to think of it. The social network analysis model of social is an abstraction. It neither lays claim to causal explanation of interpersonal communication and meaning, nor to a properly humanistic observation of the emotional and lived life of members of a society. What it can do is abstract the number, density, and connectedness of members of a bounded network. And in that, surface patterns. But to mistake the tie for an intersubjective relationship, or to subordinate the tie to the mode of its reproduction -- which is communication -- is a mistake.

And this is where we trip ourselves up. For when we talk about social relationships and the social web, we inevitably turn to our own experiences. We rally in defense of the thin tie, the weak tie, follower numbers, connectedness, and what have you, in arguments based on personal experience. But of course! Social networks, and social tools of talk, as I prefer to call them, are quite simply a new means of mediating communication and interaction in a manner that captures and preserves interactions on a publicly accessible medium. Ties are not the explanation, communication is.

My second issue with the misuse of ties-as-relationships has to do with relationships in general. They don't exist. We relate to each other, and in our communication and interaction, express and "exchange" the content of communication and the meta-contents of emotional and affective interests. We are relational; society is relational. But never and in no social theory that I know of are relations reducible to this notion of a tie such that subjective human experiences can be described adequately by the tie. There is no tie -- there are two or more subjects committed for a stretch of time to pay attention to one another, take interest in each others' interests, handle the interaction in an acceptable fashion, and to some degree commit to communicate again. If, in social networking, we exchange tweets with one another for just a moment, but never again, then we have had a passing interaction. It's that simple. Ties and relationships don't have to be brought into the equation.

The medium facilitates asynchronous communication between people whose mutual connectedness online can make them present to one another in a fashion that transcends the limitations of physical co-presence. And which, for its capture and storage of that communication in the form of a digital textual artifact, renders this communication in a way that, within the medium only, lends it some persistence and durability. All of which leaves behind content for later use, re-use, recontextualization, and what have you. That's what it's good at: mediated communication and interaction.

While I suspect that our tendency to use social networking metaphors as descriptions of "the social" owes to the fact that we as much technologists as we are sociologists, the whole matter of social relationships has been a matter of some cultural concern for a while now. It's perhaps a post post-modern thing. Or a technology and disconnection thing. We have seen it in pop culture for years. Movies like Crash, Babel, Amelie, and countless others take up social relations and society -- as characters are brought together over seemingly arbitrary and random events and connections. In TV shows like The Wire and LOST the theme is explored in terms of the multi-layered interdependence of different social classes and institutions, or in the formation of communities out of nothing but a random event. And these shows are direct descendants of earlier works by Altman, Godard, Fellini, even Fritz Lang (M) and so many others.

The organization of the social is a perennial interest. We want to know what relates us and how we relate. We want to know what a commitment is, what trust means, and how loyalties and friendships are created, sustained, and preserved. Technologies of communication are a means -- in this day and age of communication, they are a means of production. A means and mode of the production of communication. And for this reason, a contributing factor in the organization of the social. But they are not a metaphor for the social, are not an abstraction of society's connected architecture, or an explanation of social byproducts and human experiences such as friendship, intimacy, groups, or communities.

Relationships are maintained by communication. Interactions frame the possibilities for communication between subjects whose attention is focused on the shared experience of a social situation. Social tools change the nature and modality of both interaction and communication, simply because they permit both to occur disembedded for time and place. It's not the tie that is the relationship, it's mediated social action by means of which communication is used to relate. And as we all know, and have experienced, the meaning of relating to one another online comes in all forms and shades of significance. Furthermore, relations may be unilateral and one directional, bidirectional, or triangulating and mediating. They have affect and real human interests: we like each other, admire each other, pay attention to, support, encourage, quote, refer, include, remember, and forget each other. These are our experiences and in our experiences are how we relate.

The tie has no such attributes, and in social network analysis, may not even capture directionality. Ties are not mutually affirmed or reciprocated. Communication and interaction is. What's more, the tie may falsely sustain the appearance of a bind that exists. But as we live our friendships and communities, and use our social tools as means of communicating, we pass in and out of attention as well as through different periods of interest and engagement. Much of this is even just social observation; where is the tie and how would it be captured when the act of being involved is an informal and somewhat haphazard habit of following twitter. The experience of social observation is hardly counted in social networking, for the simple reason that our tools can only capture actions.

It is easy to undersell the value of social tools on the basis of relationships. But to conflate relationships with the processes and practices of communication and interaction is a mistake, and places the cart before the horse. Relationships form out of communication and are sustained and reproduced during stretches of interaction -- stretches that include periods of passive engagement and un-involved social presence. That these aspects of subjective experience cannot be captured and represented in the form of a tie is just the misapprehension of human relationships in the form of abstract models of connectedness. Social life is transactional.

Related:
Social Media in Isolation is Useless to Government, to Business, and to You Mark Drapeau

Umair Haque Is Another New Spatialist Stowe Boyd

Geosocial filter failure

I have been off blogging for a couple weeks while taking time to make headway on a book on the principles of social interaction design. I don't like being away from blogging this long. It can precipitate lifestyle changes in the offline department, which when combined with the recent stretch of fine Bay area weather we have been having, can becoming self-reinforcing. Pro-social in an offline way, anti-social in an online way.

Today's the day that I reflect on the book, come up with examples, and look over the rough cut to get a sense for what's still missing. I was doing this a few minutes ago when I drifted into thinking about Clay Shirky's concept of filter failure. I had been searching for what to say about geolocation services. And something jumped out at me that I think merits a quick post.

In news of SXSW recently, geolocation services (primarily Foursquare and Gowalla) were cited as the geek habit du jour (or make that week). Several attendees blogged that Foursquare had replaced twitter as the means by which to find friends and coordinate meetups. Of course this was how twitter was used at SXSW a few years ago. Both tweets and Foursquare checkins, if they are used to signal one's location, effectively do the same thing. Tweeting is then reduced to its signaling function; and Foursquare subordinates location checkins to user location signaling.

This is interesting if you dig into it a bit, and not only only because in each use case the primary function of the tool is subverted to its event-specific use case. (Live socializing changes uses of all social tools in that attention and audience are now both focused and directed on a social occasion. The sociality of networked audiences is replaced by a physically co-present sociality, or situtation, in whose service social tools can now simply provide communication and signaling functions. Interesting, eh?) For twitter, subversion of the application occurs when tweeting is used to signal, or in other words, when talk is subordinated to posting one's location. And in Foursquare, the subversion of the application occurs when users, instead of checking in to a place, use places to post their location.

Twitter at SXSW = linguistic statement communicates position. The tweet, rather than being conversational, is used to coordinate meetups and to be find-able during the course of the event. The linguistic statement loses its expressive function in favor of signaling.

Foursquare at SXSW = checkin to place inverts relationship between person and place. The business or establishment is not as important as the location of the user; the user's interest is in sharing his/her location, and the checkin serves as a somewhat arbitrarily chosen means of saying "I'm here." The Foursquare checkin loses the its function as a means of capturing the value in where people go, in effect to be used for signaling location rather than declaring affinity for places frequently visited.

Now, clearly, geolocation services and applications are useful for different reasons and in different ways, when used during live events. As is the case often with twitter, be it to find friends nearby or to tweet during presentations, etc. But the most common use case for Foursquare is not the live event. It is, I think, in capturing local habits of its users, surfaced in where users go. We all know from checking in that doing so does not mean "find me here" or "I'm free, let's hang out." The checkin does not signal social availability here and now. Some have observed that Foursquare's approach to friending is in contrast with following on twitter primarily for this reason. We neither want to be followed in real life as we are on twitter, nor mean to suggest by our checkins that we are free to meet up.

This suggests that there might be a problem ahead for Foursquare, if it wants to move from point-based checkins to some kind of higher value social utility. And here's where I am somewhat confused about how geolocation services fit into the social media landscape.

Ideally, a social application extracts and captures some kind of value from a user's activity, builds relations between the user's selections and content, and makes those available for others (e.g. the majority of non-participating users) to navigate by and reuse. User checkins with Foursquare really ought to do more than locate users, or provide them with points and badges. They ought to layer taste and preference mapping onto physical maps, thus socializing the otherwise asocial world of place and location (maps). And it would seem that Foursquare, in working with businesses, sees this Yelp-like opportunity quite clearly.

But does the checkin capture any of that relation? Besides habits of frequenting particular places, and aside from the assumption made that a person checks in because she or he likes (vouches for) the place, what value can be extracted from the act of checking in? Checkins are not modified by ratings, are not accompanied by mood icons, or presence-availability signals (eg Free, Do not disturb, party time!). All checkins are equal. As a system that should be adding value to location by extracting subjective preferences and habits, the checkin model is too simple. (The whole point thing is another matter altogether, and certainly adds bias that may later look to have been a mistake. Good for viral adoption; bad to turn location services into game-like experiences. Though points may be put to use by businesses, in which case Foursquare will face other troubles ahead.)

I want to return now to the filter failure comment by Clay Shirky. For in the context of information overload, filter failure may be part of the problem (and solution). But all social web content is not just information. Much of it is communication, and some of it is relational -- interpersonally, or socially. And filters applied to communication and to relational interests perform notably poorly.

Filters applied to information, as search results, subtract "unwanted" results per criteria selected or saved by the user. The filter is meant to eliminate and sort out information that's noisy. The implication being that information overload can be solved by application standing criteria. I want more of this, less of that. But the relation between me and the information I want is only unilateral. And unless I am willing to adjust my filters regularly, I am going to have to choose standing interests and preferences. And when applied to communication and social relationships, standing interests and preferences simply fail to reflect the transactionality and dynamics of social talk and interaction.

Now it occurred to me that there might be a different way to think of filters. I take Shirky's comment at face value and so to mean filters on content. So, terms, phrases, authors (sources), and perhaps other meta data (time period or recency, trend or popularity, etc). Criteria applied to the data format, or to the information value of the content. Filters would be one-sided, or individual. Each users sets his or her filters according to his or her own preferences.

But the problem of information overload in social is solved by capturing value in relations between users and content (places included), and of resurfacing that value for use in social interaction and communication. It's intrinsically a two-sided problem, not a one-sided problem. Communication and social relations are each reciprocal and mutually-interested forms of action. Information filters are monological. Social filters would be dialogical. The distinguishing feature of value in social is that it is shared. Shared interest distinguishes social content from the unilateral tastes and preferences I might apply by means of filters. I want multi-polar social filtering, not just an upgrade of the types of filters I use for search.

In the action streams proposal I wrote up and posted recently, the critical difference between activity and action streams was the two-sidedness of the system. I proposed that stream posts be capable of coupling, and that with coupling, posts would be capable of conduction social action. An invitation post carrying buttons for accept/maybe/decline, for example, would be an action stream post used for invitations. This two-sidedness that comes with post coupling permits social interaction because it enables reciprocation.

I wonder if the same issue may be at hand for social tools. If, for example, no granularity in filtering will be good enough to solve the social problems surfaced by geolocation services, unless they are two-sided, reciprocating, and mutually shared. Social filters would then permit us to use relationships to filter information, and would capture real social value from shared interests (mutually recognized interests).

I have thoughts on what this would look like. But I wanted to get this out because it struck me from SXSW commentaries that when social is live and located, as it is in the case of events, social filters are in effect and systems work well. Shared and mutual interests in themes, topics, meeting places, and being found for face to face interaction are tacitly and implicitly approved by those who checkin using Foursquare during an event. Not so, when we drift about town and occasionally check in to a cafe, restaurant, bookstore, or bar. One sided filters won't suffice here. We need to know more than what we know we like -- we need to know what others like. Including, of course, whether they are available to hang out and if so, interested in doing so with us.

Interestingly, I think many of us use twitter to check each others' availability in this Foursquare use case. Which just goes to prove the point that communication is two-sided, and that social and relational content exceeds the handling capacities of one-sided information filtering. The question "hey, want to have coffee?" is way of ascertaining mutual interest. But of course dm'ing or tweeting that is to risk a "no." And that's where a two-sided signaling model might come in handy.

Eleven tips on how to apply social interaction design thinking

One of the key social interaction design deliverables is the social interaction design requirements document. Like the market requirements document, this spec covers social needs and requirements. Social needs of the product, of users, and of course, the business served by each. And its value applies equally to social media startups, campaigns, enterprise applications.

Writing a social requirements spec, much like the MRD, involves organizational and company goals. What are your business interests in social media? What kind of audience are you assembling — and how? What's the engagement model? How is content, in the form of interaction and communication, captured and returned to participants and non-participants alike? And of course, how do you help and add value to your social media audience?

This requirements document serves startups in the social media space as well as brands or companies using social media for "campaign" purposes. For it is important to identify end-user goals and interests in order to best serve them with social media. Principally, because interactions between members of an audience will not only result in compelling experiences but also leave behind content that can be consumed by those who don't participate.

The social interaction design requirements spec thus wants to address user diversity. Users have different needs and interests — in terms of social media participation and use habits. Users have different ways of engaging in social media, too. And they are likely to interact with other users for a great variety of reasons.

I thought I would share some of my own insights and approaches, in a roundup of simple tips. I write this in the spirit of sharing a look into how best to apply social interaction design thinking. Social interaction design is, as I approach it, not what is on the screen but what happens off it. The emphasis is on social, less so design. And design is as much about our own frames and perspectives, as it is in the products and experiences we create.

This list is not exhaustive, and for many of you it will seem basic. But sometimes we forget the basics, myself included. Oh, and this list goes to eleven.

1. What moves your users?
Social is all about putting people in motion. And people move each other as they are also moved. So what kind of audience are you assembling? Is it a public, a crowd, an attentive audience, a gathering of individuals? Is it groups, passersby, or players playing social games?
Audiences have different psychologies and are moved in different ways, according to their collective sense of presence and involvement, and their individual sense of participation. So think first about what kind of audience you are assembling, and how it is moved.

2. All content is communication
All content in the world of web 2.0 is communication. Yes, it is information and it informs. But it is created and left behind by countless individual acts of communication — with the intent to communicate. If you view social web content as information you're still in web 1.0. The talkies are here.

So consider the interests of your audience members, and read and listen for what they are communicating and to whom they are communicating. Communication does not just want to speak. It wants to be seen and heard. And people don't just talk about stuff, they talk to other people. So how do you help users get from talking at to talking with?

3. What's the user's investment?
You have made an investment in social media. Well so too have your users. So what's their investment, and how are they invested? Consider the things that reflect on people, provide them with responses and feedback, with impressions and a sense of being involved and valued. Are they here to build a reputation, to talk, to maintain friendships, to contribute and feel acknowledged? Likely they are.

We all are in this because we are invested, personally, in what our experiences return. Reflect on what your own investment is. Do you track your progress and are you invested in your own success? Speaking honestly and for myself, I know that I will look at traffic I get from this post. That's one of the ways in which I am invested. And likely, you do the same — whether for your own company, campaign, or that of a client. So you have yourself in mind — as do I when I check the numbers. And that's precisely the point: your audience thinks the same. So get past your own investment and have your audience in mind. What's their investment?

4. What are your users' individual motives?
Users are people too, like you and I. So they have motives of their own, and they participate in social media because they want to, and because it involves things they are good at. So think about what motivates people you know. I try to as much as possible.

When constructing my social personality types I built a list of a few dozen friends and put myself in their place, emotionally, mentally, and habitually. I tried to think through their experiences and habits on social media. To get out of my own experience and to enrich my palette and understanding. Who would invite friends to events? Who would check twitter by phone? Who cared most about pageviews or follower numbers? Try doing the same. We are all different, and we recognize only what we know. But the greater your grasp of these differences between people, the more user experiences you can recognize and accommodate.

5. Embrace ambiguity
All social interaction and communication is ambiguous. Embrace it. For ambiguity is precisely the unresolved, the unknown, and the unacknowledged of human exchanges that keeps all interaction and communication going. We interact because it's never finished. We keep talking because there's more to say.

Social software is not regular software. It is not comprised of discrete transactions and well-defined tasks. It's an open state of talk in which transactions always sustain the possibility for more. So consider the ambiguities that both sustain interaction and communication around your service. And which provide for ongoing interests expressed and exchanged by people never completely in the know.

6. Change your frame
It's not about you but about them. Success in social media comes when you shift your frame of perspective, and take your user's interests to heart. This change of frame is as much about thinking less in terms of your own product or service, as it is thinking from the user's perspective and experience.

We think too much about what we are trying to achieve, about what we have designed or built, and thus in terms of what it does or should do. That leads us to think in terms of controlling outcomes, or tweaking features for new behaviors. All well and good, but those engender a product and design-centric view of what's going on. Social is happening out there, and your users do not have you or your product in mind, but their own experiences and those they share them with. Change your frame.

7. Know your blindspot
We all have a limited perspective and understanding of the world, and that includes our interpersonal and social relationships. We build this into our products and services because we tend to want to confirm our own views. Users are not taking a drive in your car — they are going someplace.

Know your blindspots. Reflect on what matters to you and to what and how you seem most inclined. Then fill in, as much as possible, what's in your blindspot. Self awareness and humility will return generously.

8. What's your surplus value?
What surplus value do you capture and extract from your social, and how does it add value to the experience for all? We live in a system of excess information, of noise, redundancy, and a collective clamor for attention. How are you designing your product or service to provide surplus value to the experience?

All social media is about interested users — interested in other people and interested in their contributions. Interests are preferences, tastes. And social media are about tastes: capturing tastes, reflecting tastes, making tastes. And tastes are individual, social, and cultural. So what do you do that offers a view or experience of collective participation that no single user can see and enjoy?

9. Help users help each other
Facilitate random acts of kindness. We are all kind, and an exchange of kindness is the spark that lights up the social like no other. Think less about what people want, and less about what you (think) you have to offer them. Think instead about the moments and opportunities you might design through which users might experience spontaneous and serendipitous kindness. The virtuosity of kindness needs no architecture, and its spark needs only connectedness and a gap to bridge.

10. What differences make a difference?
We talk a lot about identity online, but identity really only matters because there is difference. We are all different and all becoming different by differentiating ourselves. Even when we identify with somebody, or with a brand or idea, we differentiate ourselves in doing so. Difference matters most in social, not identity. So consider how your social allows differences to make a difference. Think about how you encourage and enable people to be different. How you capture and represent social differentiation. And how these differences might add some interesting facets to the differences that make our identity what it is: different.

11. Don't lose yourself in metrics and numbers
You are better than that, and to lose the forest for the trees is to undermine your own knowledge, skills, and effectiveness. Social is in the heart as it is in the head. It's about everything you already know and all that you would still like to learn. That goes for your users as it does for you. So disregard the numbers when you sense they are a comfort or distraction. Objectify your social, and your users will be stats and numbers. They should count more than that.

Social dynamics and agile social design

The launch of any new social tool is a moment of high anticipation and anxiety for any development team. Try as they might, through internal use and limited alpha testing, engineers and designers must hold their collective breath for what happens when their product goes live. There's nothing like the real world for final proof of concept.

As pregnant as this moment is for the vendors and creators of the full spectrum of social applications — blogs, wikis, communities, apps, games, you name it — it need not be filled entirely with speculation alone. And it would be a poor reflection on designers if the launch event were subject to complete uncertainty. But in the world of social tools, design can neither regulate nor legislate social outcomes. Social behaviors are not a reflection of design, but are an appropriation of design: design put to (social) use.

This may fly in the face of some design thinking, but in social media it's simply a reality. And I need not point to the unexpected reception that even some of the most highly-funded and well-engineered social products have received of late (Buzz, Facebook's public status updates). Not to mention the efforts of a one-man shop like ChatRoulette.

For the uses to which social media are put hang on the dynamics of actual users, not the architectural blueprints and feature specs of designers and engineers. Users look to other users for an indication of what a tool or service is good for. And what they notice first is neither design nor features, but the communication left behind by other users.

But even if launching a new social application is not entirely unlike the grand opening of a new bar or restaurant, hostage to the whim and fancy of passers-by whose decision to enter follows a critically ambivalent period of nose-to-the-window peering and contemplation, there must surely be common social patterns and conventions by means of which social interaction designers might anticipate early outcomes. If not predictive and regulative, design can, at least, anticipate.

So before you hand over the keys, let's consider some of the early social practices new social tools are often subjected to.

Population dynamics most likely play a large role in the early growth trajectory of social media startups. Though it would be very great to have research on this, I don't know of any myself. Anecdotal evidence existed for Orkut and Friendster, and does so probably for other services, suggesting that membership composition of a service early on can affect scaling. Friendster in the Philippines, Orkut in Brazil. And more recently, Wave, Buzz, Foursquare, among others, provide more current reference points.

Consider the likelihood that early social practices shape the direction of growth and use in social media. If we could better understand how these population dynamics shape a social tool in its beginning stages, we could potentially leverage some of them for more pronounced effect. Social system design would then include mechanisms of soft dynamic social regulation.

• What aspects of a population lead to culture? Follower numbers? Heavy use? Viral invitations and connections? Social discovery? Communication?
• What balance, or mix, of features that support top users as well as incentivize casual users benefits certain social outcomes?
• Does the design allow activity, uses, and practices, to stick?
• How does it surface and present these such that their use is reflected back into the social system?
• What options do designers have to adjust emphasis of social activity to reinforce some activities and demote others?
• What would be the social interaction design methods for such early interventions?

Early developments
Social applications and services develop practices early on according to the activities and behaviors of their first users. At this stage, behaviors and practices reinforce themselves, and initial signs of common practices and culture emerge. All of this happens by means of the tool or application, but on the basis of interactions among users. Their observations of what's going on inform their expectations of how the service works, how to proceed, and what to do with whom.

Nascent sociality emerges around several cultural and social forces. The social interaction designer can delineate these to better identify and monitor them. (Note that top users often embrace a tool first, test it well and thoroughly, and publicly, and leave behind a substantial amount of communication in the process. This can, in cases like Buzz, dominate the experience for casual users. And the feedback provided by these top users should not be mistaken for global feedback, product feedback, or normative feedback: top users are not every user, have their own interests in mind for the product, and are not necessarily the best judge of what most people want to do.)

Salient early social forces and practices include:

• Users and their individual interests and habits: what users want from a tool and what they do with it, and with others
• Individual user activity and behavior: how users user the tool or service
• Communication between users: made specific by the tool's means of capturing and representing communication
• Interaction structured by means of system elements, navigation and other features of social architecture
• Temporal rhythms based on speed and frequency of user activity
• Early social differentiation among users, resulting in notable users, relegation of experiences of casual users and marginal users
• Stylistic and cultural specificity, in which tone, etiquette, self-restraint, and other aspects of regard and care become soft but recognizable social norms, leading to a kind of arrangement of social furniture
• Topical sedimentation as collective cultural themes emerge around the specific user interests, communication, and interaction that gain early traction

We can take a closer look at these separately. Each of the following lists describes some (not all) of the social and cultural factors at play in developing social practices.

Early adopters
Early adopters shape the population growth of a service or campaign, in part by attracting friends, colleagues, and like-minded people (location included). These early adopters:

• Set the style and tone for others
• Spread the word among friends and colleagues
• Tend to use the tools and services in ways that best meet their needs and interests, thus creating more content and activity around certain features in particular
• Set the bar, high and low, for participation and activity levels

Member connections made
Early adopters will inevitably make introductions to other new members. How this is done will depend on the styles of those early members but possibly begin to take the form of social convention. According to the ways in which a tool reflects the practices of early adopters, and of top users in particular (e.g. Buzz, which preserves and amplifies top user activity) connections may aggregate to individuals. Alternately, connections may be established more diffusely (twitter following). These early social connections are necessary for social density, grouping, social differentiation, and more. Connections happen between people, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly facilitated by a social activity. They are identifiable by their use of:

• Private messaging to directly communicate interest
• Public messaging such as blogging and commenting
• Status updating to solicit interest
• Following
• Use of symbolic tokens (social objects) to suggest or attract interest
• Matchmaking and introductions
• Helping
• Promoting
• Karmic offerings, gifts, etc
• Personal but socially visible (public) compliments, testimonials, vouching and so on

Social differentiation
Participation by early adopters sets expectations for activity and participation. In any service that surfaces users for their contributions, visibility and distinction are earned. How they are earned could establish trends early on, for example, around differentiating factors like:

• Looks and appearance
• Behavior
• Activity volume and frequency
• Friends made, and their social status
• Stats, points, and other socially signifying quantities
• Communication style, personality, and character
• And more

Activities
Social activities transmit a lot of social and cultural information. Users observe and take lead from what others are doing, particularly when it seems successful. Thus early activities will establish expectations and possibly become self-reinforcing:

• Status updating to solicit connections and interest
• Public writing such as blogging, articles, comments
• Content contributions using content inside or outside the site
• Competitions for points and game-like distinctions
• Status pursuits by means of system incentives (featured member, most active, etc)
• Status pursuits by means of social incentives (elite, mayor, etc)
• Voting and rating to qualify content or users
• Tagging or categorizing to identify content or users
• And so on

Rhythms
Social participation will vary in speed and frequency, time of day, and regularity. Early users will shape expectations for the participation and engagement of others over time. The site or service will reflect frequency and regularity of participation according to how it captures and represents activity over time. Furthermore, use of messaging in public and private, including realtime status updating, will shape expectations around user responsiveness. For example:

• Status updating will speed up site participation for those available to it
• Direct and private messaging will bury the responsiveness of member activity
• Blog and commenting responsiveness will establish visible social rhythms
• Changes to tags, news, featured content and members, and other content lists can be made in real time, or by slower updating schedules
• And so on

Conclusion
These and other factors shape emerging social practices and culture in social media. They can be attributed to users interacting with and through social technologies, mediated by constraining and enabling design features and choices. In this way social practices do reflect technical architecture. But if adoption develops into regular use, if not committed participation, more "purely social" forces emerge.

We can understand these forces as reflections of individual users, their communication, interactions, and collective social practices. Technology then becomes transparent and social practices supplant design as the primary organizing principles of activity. Close observation of these dynamics can suggest ways of intervening in them — and of steering the development of your social.

Good research on this would be interesting to conduct and have, for the reason that managing population growth early on could in fact be a mission-critical task in social media growth and campaigns. There's an understandable tendency in the development of new social apps to push for widespread adoption early on, after which agile development (=tweaking), responsiveness to user feedback, and community management might avail companies of limited steering mechanisms.

But there's as of yet no such thing as agile social development. Which would mean, in my view, phased release of architectural add-ons and features on an as-needed basis — as populations scale, social practices emerge, and cultures and communities of users coalesce.

Agile social would suggest that growing communities, shaping populations, and steering practices might in fact be in the designer's purview. That not every social tool should be launched fully-dressed, or with the full set of accommodations that its architectural plan includes. But rather, as communities themselves grow from campfire to city only over time, agile social anticipates architecturally and is socially responsive and dynamic.

In contrast to the world of real world products, social applications really only get started when they are brought to market. They are not finished. Why then should the designer's role be done and over with? The skills involved in seeing a social tool to market and beyond, through its early stages of use, may not be among the pages of most design textbooks. But it seems to me that designing the social is a much what happens after launch as it is what happens before.

From followers and game mechanics to more valuable social functionality

Some interesting perspectives appeared this week on game mechanics in social media and the corrupting devaluation of social systems, user experience, and metrics that seems to accompany follower counts, foursquare check-ins, and other numerical incentives to use.

I just want to throw in my two cents from a social interaction design perspective. I agree that the simplicity of incentive models predicated on growing your numbers (and status) exist. (What I've called the apparency problem in social media: the apparent appearance of social status and relevance.)

But I think these are systemic outcomes and not necessarily a reflection of human nature alone — as is often argued.

I'll start with context, and with brief excerpts from Peter Michaud, Dare Obasanjo, and Louis Gray. And begin with a status update from Alex Payne of twitter. (Contrast with this recently from Craig Newmark: "Design and esthetics don't solve problems")

"Game mechanics aren't going to fix your product and they aren't making people's lives better. Great essay: http://j.mp/aN66i8" Alex Payne, twitter

Peter Michaud, in an aptly titled post on Achievement Porn, writes:

1. Our society is set up to make us feel as though we must always achieve and grow. That’s true because individuals growing tend to bolster the power and creature comforts of the groups they belong to with inventions, innovations, and impressive grandstanding (Go Team!).
2. Because of this pressure to grow, there’s another incentive to make growth easier. More perversely, to make growth seem easier.

Dare Obasanjo, reflecting on Peter's piece in Achievements, Game Mechanics and Social Software, agrees that game mechanics should not be used as an easy fix but notes their marketing appeal:

"I will say game mechanics can more than “fix” a social software product, they can make it a massive success that it’s users are obsessed with.
....
Finally, is it better for me as a person to have traded achievement treadmills where I have little control over the achievements (i.e. number of blog subscribers, number of people who download a desktop RSS reader, etc) for one where I have complete control of the achievements as long as I dedicate the time?"

Finally, Louis Gray, writing yesterday in an un-related about followers, addresses the metrics, value, meaning, and bias problems:
The Followers Game Is So 2008. Time for New Metrics.

"Humans have this innate sense of need to be ahead of all others, to measure themselves, and deliver some level of self-assigned worth thanks to what are questionably valuable statistics.
....
We have got to achieve more accurate ratings of influence that determine value.
....
How would social networks be improved if we just hid them away entirely, and stopped looking at growth or relative sizes? My value is still the same, in terms of quality, whether I have an audience of 2,000 or 20,000, especially if I have the right people."



I think there are several points worth making here from a perspective of social interaction design.

First, it's not humans or human nature that are the cause of this. It's systems and the design of social experiences and systems. To attribute the follower incentive and achievement reward dynamics to human nature I think falsely attributes outcomes to essential human values. Social theory tells me that individuals of any society will choose and reflect values validated socially. And viewed empirically, societies around the world are organized in wonderfully different ways, manifest in a tremendous range of culturally diverse traditions and pastimes.

So I think this is a matter of social organization and not of individual human nature.

Secondly, we need to consider not only the outcomes for social systems — those being a devolution of interaction and a devaluation of meaningful differences — but also the user experience and user actions the system enables.

Social outcomes, including those that characterize the dysfunctional if not failing state of many social media designs, reflect aggregate individual user choices and selections. Users can only do what the system permits them to do. And in the case of social design, user choices are a reflection of individual nature and interest only on the first order of interaction — where users engage through UI and features.

At the second order of social interaction, where aggregated individual activities are presented back to the population and used to thematically distinguish the tool as a social experience, system choices lend bias and weight to activities that matter and privilege those that make the most difference.

Social media are intrinsically socially diffuse and the social activities possible in them are for the most part only loosely coupled. Given that a user's interest in a social system is a reflection not only of his or her interests but of his or her social position, actions and activities that make the most social difference readily stand out.

Actions like following and follower numbers matter because system designers choose to surface these numbers as an individual difference made that makes social differentiation possible.

The problem is in the simplicity of these social models or mechanics. Following is a unilateral action. It may solicit reciprocity but is successful, as an action, without it. That's Michaud's easy achievement but stripped down to the basics: acts that make a social difference. (We don't need to attribute the act to human interest in achievements and a cultural inclination for success. For we could refer back to psychological validation, interpersonal recognition, or many other motivations just as equally.)

Furthermore, following serves as a gesture of interest, of one user in another. But as a form of communication it lays no burden on the one followed to engage or participate. So in a blind social regime like twitter, it offers a low-risk means of connecting precisely because it's asymmetrical. And in a disconnected social order like twitter, connection is the first step to social relations.

That we pay attention to this stuff, as we all are profoundly aware of, is testimony to the fact that these systems have successfully provided one metric by which to measure social value. But it is clearly an underwhelming and uninspiring metric, when viewed from the perspective of user acts and not overall influence or status. The attention accrued to status achieved by means of numbers and counts betrays the user's interest in deeper and more meaningful interpersonal or social engagement.

In other words, the value surfaced and valued by the system is not very valuable from the perspective of attention paid and sustained by users, or value derived from use and experience. Consequently, our social uses of social media (the micro) suffer devaluation at the hands of system values (the macro). It's a bit like being in a country that continually devalues its currency.

Social systems can function technically and operationally even when they are dysfunctional socially. In ways our entire social order grinds along in spite of or perhaps because of fundamental and internal dysfunctionalities. It would be hard to tell the difference in fact between a social system that reproduces itself in order to fix its problems from one that reproduces itself because it is successful and growing.

The challenge ahead for open and distributed social media is, I think, in coming up with better and more well understood social dynamics. Acts and actions that satisfy on the first order of user experience but which result in more compelling, meaningful, and socially interesting system dynamics and outcomes. Ambiguity needs to be our friend, numbers less so.

All social systems can handle more information as they complexify internally. So our information problem may be an internal complexity problem. But if so, then one to be addressed by differentiating the ways in which communication communicates and makes a social difference. This, not coincidentally, at a time when social media encourage ever increasing amounts of communication.

Greater differentiation of social activities and better social design at the presentation layer will permit more user behaviors and activities to make a difference. And when that happens, social complexity and differentiation will engage more, better, and with richer and more diverse results.

I see us moving forward from a phase in which basic and open socially networked communication tools established early and basic practices, like following, and now begin to integrate more and different types of social interactions. If this pans out, simple means of getting attention will fade in value and be replaced by activities that are genuinely more interesting.


Related:
Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews
Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard
Social media: the attention economy explained