Social and conversational implications of cross-referenced activity streams

Efforts are currently underway to link up @names and @replies in Buzz and make them share-able across networks using activity streams. If successful, this would mean that naming a user in one service would surface the message elsewhere. A buzz post containing an @twitter_username would resolve to the user's twitter profile. And the mention could be surfaced within that user's twitter stream.

At this point in time the technical challenges are not simple. So the scenario I am exploring here is conjectural. But worth speculating on, if for no other reason than the probability that sharing across activity streams seems in ways inevitable. Note that the points I raise are not criticisms of the effort, but observations intended to spark discussion.

Let's contemplate the implications of conversation across activity streams. Implications involve not only the facilitation of communication between networks, but other factors too, including redundancy, notifications, noise, spam, context, and quite possibly, an increased burden on users to meet conversational expectations. Each of these is a matter of social interaction design — user experience of networked talk and relationships among users maintained in social media tools and applications. I will address these in no particular order.

For simplicity's sake, let's just assume that a single user is named in a single post authored in Buzz, and avoid contemplating multiple username mentions.

Redundancy
Sharing @mentions across networks would increase message redundancy. Our sample message would appear in twitter as an @reply. If it were longer than 140 characters, it would be truncated to fit twitter's format. Alternatively, it might appear as a system notification. For example: "@username You were mentioned by @googleprofilename in Buzz http://link". Or: "I liked what @username said" by@googleprofilename from Buzz. Formatting issues would of course have to be addressed.

Redundancy would accrue according to the number of participating networks our @username belonged to. Each would reprint the Buzz post mention. Our @username would see duplicate notifications in each network, and potentially would receive email notifications of these messages from some networks also. The result: a lot of additional notifications proliferating from that one Buzz mention.

Noise
This notification redundancy, which some might find useful, would be noise to others. My email account is already a bucketful of notifications. Which is ironic insofar as email is already meant for communication. That so much of this communication notifies me of communication gets to be noisy.

Audiences
Each network is also an audience. Users are invested in their audiences, in terms of status; posting habits; engagement with a private, social, or public presence; relationships and the expectations those entail; attention paid to message flow, awareness of audience members (services have different social uses); and more.

In other words, each of us turns to an audience for certain kinds of engagement and according to our individual habits of use. For example, Buzz for peer conversation and discussion, twitter for maintaining a profile, Facebook for friends, and so on (blogs and commenting included). Because these audiences are different and have different meanings for us, the appearance of @username messages originating in one network on other networks may lead to at least two kinds of ambiguity.

The first kind of ambiguity pertains to the appearance of the message. Do I want to see it here? Does it transgress boundaries I might perceive between each network, and more personally, to how I see myself within each one? I may, for example, engage in different kinds of conversation within each network, and prefer to have those boundaries constrain my obligations to participation in each.

The second kind of ambiguity pertains to my responses. There are two distinct issues here.

• The first concerns effectiveness. Which network is best for me to respond in, given my understanding of an author's habits of use. I may want to respond in the network preferred by that user. That's where my response is most likely to receive attention. (Many of us do this already between twitter and Facebook, knowing our friends' and colleagues' engagement styles with each.)
• The second concerns my own preferences for being seen responding to others. In contrast to effectiveness of communication, this has to do with self-perception. I may see myself differently in each network, and am aware of how I (believe) I am seen by others. This reflects on my activity and is taken into account (unconsciously or consciously) as I reply or mention others within each "space" or social context.

Not only are audiences a reflection on our self-image and self-perception within a network, they are constructed differently, too. This follows from the manner in which specific features have been deployed within the network, as well as its population, social practices, and cultures. Audiences have a sociality and are unique to each service. We can even observe tacit norms of use and conventions emerging and then passing in each network. These social dynamics affect use of @replies and @mentions. For example, the twitter practice of using multiple @names to loop users into an exchange, is not a convention (yet?) in Buzz.

A great number of these particular practices could be upset by sharing @names across streams. Others might become confusing, if, for example, @names proliferated so excessively that conventions simply broke down as a result of degradation.

Context
All talk is contextual. It establishes and creates context of its own, as meaning provided by what participants say. It refers to more than what is actually said, too, and so has social context, context supplied by references, connotations, and social significations. It has context according to who participates (including those individuals' reputations, credibility, authority etc). Increasingly, there is context supplied by location, and the different axes of relevance along which mobile checkins and posts are useful. And, of course, context obtained from the social media tool or service in which the talk appears (this informs our understanding of what participants are doing by talking.)

Contextuality will be disrupted by the sharing of @names across social networks. Not only is the originally-authored post reproduced in a new context, but any follow-on messaging will re-contextualize it in ways just described.

This disruption of context may have significant consequences for shared stream mentions simply because context provides so much of the meaning not of the message but around it also. Its references, history, and authors — these implicit cues are invaluable to interpreting (reading) what's being said and what's going on. (Talk in social media is more than what's communicated as content, but is a social activity.)

Loss of original context and re-contextualization within new streams and networks creates confusion. Confusion concerning what a message means, confusion regarding what to do with it, and now confusion about where to continue the conversation. And distributed and disaggregated messaging can mean that each of these steps in the conversational "chain" only further proliferates the branching of the series. Multiple series could conceivably take shape within new network streams. Which brings us to the next problem: expectations.

Expectations and obligations
There is no meta-data supplied with the activity post that indicates the author's desire for responses and replies. We can do this in face to face communication just by looking at each other. But artifacted (text) messages lack this intentional cue.

It is up to users to choose to respond to a message, and with shared stream posts it will be up to users to make choices in more places and in conditions of greater ambiguity. For some, I suspect this will be too demanding. Users who think about what it means to be seen replying to others, and those who might dwell on silences and may wonder if they are being ignored, will suffer the most.

The author of the original post may find the additional demands of tracking and monitoring posts proliferating across networks to be too much. Those mentioned in the post may want for a clear sense of what's expected, if anything, by ways of a reply (and where).

Loss of context robs the original post of some of the implicit and tacit expectation it solicits for responses by audiences. Where users pay attention to and are engaged by this, their perceived expectations and obligations of reciprocity and mutual recognition fail as a means of orienting their behavior.

Conclusions
I have not exhausted the implications of cross-references in activity streams. Multiple @username mentions, message length (Buzz and Facebook posts are not limited to 140 characters), commenting permitted in Buzz and Facebook but not in twitter, realtime search, and geolocation are but some of the practices that would further complicate matters.

But insofar as the technical effort to resolve identity according to some shared protocol, enabling decentralized posting within separate networks to become cross-referential, presents a clear opportunity for engineering success, social and practical ramifications are worth considering. I have only scratched the surface here. So I look forward to where this goes.


The efforts mentioned were kicked off in this post on Buzz:
Envisioning decentralized @replies and notifications with WebFinger.


Related:

• Breaking down the Gbuzz
• If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?
• Google Buzz v twitter: more on micro-commentary
• May I have your buzz, please?

Social media's third law: designing for communication

The third law of social interaction design is that communication is transformed by the medium, which separates what is said from the saying of it. In everyday face-to-face encounters, we say something by speaking.

But in mediated communication, speech is captured and produced only with the help of technology. It is then distributed: as a post, be it text, video, audio, or something else (e.g. virtual worlds, games, etc, which involve a specific kind of communication).

Communication in social media is talk, and social media are "talk technologies." True, updates are written, but writing is the just the form. This is a particular kind of communication, and we need to unwrap it if we are to understand the social media design issues specific to it.

Our first observation is that the communicative form of the status update is that it is always new. It is neither writing, text, nor literature, in spite of how it is captured and published. It is a form of speaking; for each update is a new update. Even a retweet or pass-along is an act of authorship.

Because it is new, it attracts attention. It is attention-getting because we pay attention to new things, and to news of things new.

Updates are made by individuals. As a form of talk, the status update is some kind of self-narration, some kind of telling, telling to and telling about. It is personal, that is, it comes from the person doing the talking. The person posting the update must be able to reflect on him or herself, think of something that can be said online, and then post it. She or he must have a sense for what is worth saying, for what might get attention, responses, and so on.

All of this might seem obvious, but it is important in that it places status updating squarely within a user-centric framework.

This means, first of all, that talk means something to the person who talks. There is a payoff for the user who does the talking. Seen from a design perspective, the user action is: talking. Now, talking in-and-of-itself is not yet communication. Communication requires at a minimum one more user.

If one user says something and no other user catches it, only one user experience is involved (and it's a poor one at that). Still, one user talking who believes s/he is being listened to is still one (somewhat) satisfied user.

Communication is a system of statements and responses using language, or some kind of symbolic form. Because it involves people, it involves what's said and to whom. The statements themselves may be considered the content of communication; the relationship between users can be considered meta-communication.

In face-to-face encounters, meta communication has access to gestures, body language, and more. A lot is accomplished just by looking at and looking back. indeed, a sense of "understanding" is often accomplished not by means of saying things, but by interacting.

We can now make a distinction between interaction and communication, and between saying things with gestures and saying things with words. Here's where things get interesting. Communication doesn't produce its own meta contents or meta communication. Meta is possible only by means of observing the communication. In other words, one cannot say something and also say something about what is being said at the same time.

Unless one were to use body language, gestures, or some other non-linguistic means of expression... Which is of course what we do all the time in face-to-face interactions. "Facework" is the work done alongside speaking and saying things -- and it gives us wit, sincerity, irony, and all other kinds of layered communication.

Recognizing now that the act of saying things doesn't say everything we mean, we can see why communicating online may be neither a) the easiest way to make oneself understood nor b) the easiest way to reach an understanding.

Being understood is not the same as being in agreement. The latter assumes the former; but the former may sometimes be good enough. Both of these conditions, however, are complicated by the use of media. Use of the face, and of expressions, tone, and looking/looking back do seem critical to the kind of being together that is involved in a shared understanding.

To summarize where we are, we now can say that communication online is unique because:

• it is a form of user action
  
• it can suffice as user activity even if nobody responds
  
• it is only truly communication if another user does respond (or take it up)
  
• communication is more than just saying things the medium doesn't do meta communication well
  
• nor does it allow use of facework or gestures, body language, and so on
  
• it creates challenges to making oneself understood and to reaching understanding with another person
  

We are now ready for the next step.

Online communication creates ambiguity. For the reasons mentioned above. Ambiguity in what is said, what is meant, who it is meant for, whether it is understood, whether it is agreed with -- we have seen above how each of these kinds of ambiguity can arise strictly because communication is mediated. (There are more, unique to gaming, dating, and other kinds of coded or ritualized communication).

What is the status of ambiguity? Is it all bad? Is ambiguity the absence of meaning? Noise or confusion? Is it the lack of understanding? Not at all. Ambiguity is the engine of communication -- it is why communication happens. If we understood each other perfectly and at all times, we wouldn't need to communicate other than to instruct one another or express ourselves. Ambiguity is that which we seek to resolve, or sustain, when there is more to say.

Ambiguity, while not providing a clear message, signals that more communication is necessary. Communication, on the other hand, indicates what is an appropriate response. But mediated communication is accompanied by the ambiguity of intent, tone, and feeling. Mediated communication actually creates ambiguity.

Is it possible that ambiguity created by social media might be one of the reasons it is a compelling experience? Is it possible that ambiguity can make it sticky? Is it possible that because communication is the simplest way to create ambiguity, and the only way to resolve it, communication is the engine of all user activity on social media?

Let's consider this, because it could be very important. We have talked about the challenge that online presents to full and rich communication -- as a result of what the medium takes away. But what of all that is added by the medium?

We have focused so far on communication as a form of talk. But communication also includes printed and distributed communication -- as in "the age of communication." We have already mentioned that for communication to become interaction it must be taken up by another person. Online communication may reduce the possibilities of reaching an understanding with somebody; but it also increases the possibilities that communication is taken up.

Linking to a person, @replying to a tweet, is taking up their communication (yes, differently, but still). And communicating online provides infinite possibilities of distribution. Face to face communication, on the other hand, is very limited in space and time (barring use of a megaphone).

The fact that online communication requires some form of recording or reproduction, while decreasing the potential for direct understanding, increases the potential for indirect communication. It may not feel as good, but online, one can communicate without talking. And one's communication can be picked up at any point in time and by anyone who chooses to take it up.

This means that there are two possibilities for understanding the user action of communication: the action of the "speaker," which is to express; and the action of the "listener," which is to act on what's communicated. Two actors who would normally bind in a face-to-face exchange now act separately. Two people are still involved, but not in creating a shared sense of time and presence; rather each acts separately.

The speaker is more aware of what s/he intended; the listener is more aware of what s/he understood. Between the two is a gulf of ambiguity, but it is narrow enough to create both a sense of communication and wide enough to open up the possibilities of what happens next.

As a system, online communication leaves more possibilities open. It is a future-oriented type of communication, aligned to the kind of opportunity that rarely exists in face-to-face interactions. I don't think we yet understand the significance of this: that the online communication system is a kind of communication for future possibilities much more than any kind of face-to-face communication can be. I don't think we understand how important time is to social media.

We relate to the future through anticipation and expectation. I suspect, but don't yet have a theory for it, that social media are a means of organizing ourselves and our relationships in time and in anticipated time -- and that much of what drives our use o social media is a "future pull" as much as a "being here."

(Note: In the interest of space and time, we will cover the corollaries in the next post.)

Related:Paradoxes of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and status culture
Social media's first law: user centric design
Social media's second law: it's a verb, not a noun
Social Interaction Design: Primer



Social Interaction Design Primer II

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.

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.