Category: Social Networks

Your Social Graph Is Autistic
Much has been made of social graphs as filters for discovering new content, to the extent that many are now challenging the view that a social filter is even remotely indicative of interest – "…who you know doesn't always translate into what you like"
I'm not convinced that there's such a thing as an "interest graph" – as suggested in the recent Social Graphs Vs. Interest Graphs – but I do believe there are useful intent or interest models, that can be extrapolated from an individual's behaviour.
Flipboard, ShowYou and others aggregate media based on your friends' articulated sharing; this can result in many false positives, with inferences drawn from a semi-autistic social model; our articualted social graphs are driven by liquid affinities and etiquettes.
What's perhaps more insightful is the notion of aggregating media, based on what you own and use… collected artefacts thoroughly riddled with your tastes, memories, aesthetic choices and emotions.
The recently launched Bandito for iOS is an useful illustration of this – Bandito examines the content of your iTunes collection and suggests news items based on your tastes. Curiously, Bandito is a collaboration between a music licensing marketplace and music data provider - suggesting some novel, emerging value chains for the music industry.

Conversley, the wonderfully serendepitous and sublime Shuffler.fm aggregates music from curated news sources into musical genres which also present the news item in its original context along with each track. "Playing" music blogs as continuous mixes implies a kind of social graph, but that's a contrivance – it's simply a collection of editorial and an act of curation. Curation is a little more deliberate than shotgun sharing.
Whether acquired though piracy, digital stores or signals rippling through your social graph, what you collect - not who you know - defines your media genome. Your social graph – as it stands today – is autistic, lacking the subtlety, nuance and fidelty to articulate what you like; indeed, it simply broadcasts what others like.
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I have a hypothesis that time and place can be as influential as a collection… but more on that another time 😉
October 4, 2011
FriendFade

A pair of recent articles – Scott Brown's Facebook Friendonomics and Mashable's 12 Great Tales of De-Friending – have raised some interesting questions on the longevity and sustainability of relationships established within social networks.
Brown speculates around the problematic notion of never losing touch with anyone in environments such as Facebook. Most notably losing the 'right to lose touch' and maintaining the convenience of a clever address book albeit the inanity of one that constantly talks back at you…
Over a half decade into the life of the social web, services still represent 'friending' autistically, preventing us from ascribing the subtlety and meaning of real relationships to their digital counterparts. The dynamic and changing semantics of a relationship are intrinsic to our existence and yet most services are content to flatten them all into a simple 'friend soup', diminishing them all and stripping each of its unique values.
Services should understand that certain people are more important to me that others, based on the history of a relationship – whether that's proximity, temporal distance, frequency of contact, family connections or shared work histories. Right now, users have to do that heavy-lifting themselves, but Brown's notion of a Fade Utility for digital relationships isn't so far fetched…
Stevenn Blyth's Social Fabric project began to explore how to represent the decay of a relationship over time and distance by visualising the relative 'healthiness' of your relationships. The emotional representation of a friend's avatar would subtley signal whether that relationship needed your care and attention.
Perhaps in the age of iPhones and the emergence of federated social networks its now possible to concieve of a user experience that not as rich as Social Fabric, but one that can understand your actual activity – email, phone calls, messages, events, travel plans – and make some guesses about whom in your social networks you're neglecting, which relationships need some attention and let others face into the background with less prominence.
FriendFade?
November 27, 2008
Murdoch buys Myspace.com
Cait says…
The news that Mr Murdoch has invested $580 million basically to purchase myspace.com highlights once again that this is the space to be playing in.
Murdoch’s advisors have been wise enough to recognise that the riches here are to be made in purchasing an existing community, with a proven track record of sticky, oft returning behaviour (the quality of the product’s not too bad either).
It will be fascinating to see where the TV angle takes the network. I’ve had many thoughts in terms of how to utilise the cross-media arena (mostly ripped off from other proven and beautiful concepts, it has to be said 😉 and the average conversation with Imran here at FT/Orange/Wanadoo tends to throw up extraordinary, bonkers and rather beautiful concepts (pop up video style Flickr notes for online shows?). If Murdoch’s advisors are still who I think they are, then that kind of thinking will be at the forefront of what they will want to achieve.
A sign of the times also that *at last* Murdoch has officially set up an intenet division, instead of trying ad-hoc investments in this and that over the years.
Will it spread to Europe and Sky? Will they launch the Myspace community strongly in the UK? It’s a strong moneymaking market for Murdoch. It makes sense to.
July 19, 2005
taga.licio.us
Folksonomies and tagsonomies continue to inspire new services with the launch of grat.uito.us – which, ironically, I discovered from Joshua Schacter’s del.icio.us bookmarks!
grat.uito.us lets users compile a wishlist of tagged items that they’d like to receive as gifts. Their lists can be kept private or shared using RSS and limited social network features…I inaugurated my grat.uito.us wish list with a Powerbook 🙂
I’ve often thought of del.icio.us as a social filing system with a single file format – the bookmark; elsewhere Flickr has done the same for images, 43 Things for personal goals, Ta-da List for tasks…
Each of these services has reinvented an otherwise prosaic application or file format – a social filing system that could support any data format, coupled with the social networking and syndication features we have come to expect, could prove to be a fluid, powerful and intuitive alternative to the upcoming Apple Spotlight and Microsoft WinFS filing systems.
Indeed Google, Yahoo and others may be better placed than traditional OS vendors in shaping the next generation of file storage and retrieval…perhaps I should add a Social Filing System to my grat.uito.us wish list 🙂
April 13, 2005