When I talk about how how social networks are structured, certain things always resonate with people. One of these is that although the average Facebook user has 130 friends, they only communicate directly with four of those people in any given week. Direct communication includes likes and comments on their posts, posts on their wall, [...]
Archive for the ‘Sociability’ Category
December 13, 2011
7
We communicate with four, but consume from many more.
By Paul Adams in Sociability
July 3, 2011
41
This is just the beginning
By Paul Adams in SociabilityDisclaimer reminder: I currently work at Facebook and worked on Google+ up until the end of 2010. This post does not reflect anything I did at Google, or anything I’m doing at Facebook, and is simply my personal opinion about the state of the world. Since Google+ launched last week, many people have been asking [...]
November 15, 2010
1
Kik and creating a sense of place
By Paul Adams in Communities, SociabilityYou can walk into any bar on any street and immediately make conclusions about whether it is for you. How bright or dark is it? How clean or dirty is it? What’s on tap, Budweiser or India Pale Ale? What’s on the walls? Who is in there? What age are they? What are they wearing? [...]
Tags: Kik
October 7, 2010
4
What do early adopters of social web applications look like?
By Paul Adams in Musing, SociabilityI’m sure we’re all familiar with the model that includes early adopters and laggards. Some people embrace your new product early and evangelize it to their connections. Others wait, and adopt it once there is a critical mass. Many think of early adopters as having certain characteristics. We think of them as people who have [...]
Tags: Diffusion
July 22, 2010
26
The data behind The Real Life Social Network
By Paul Adams in Book, SociabilityMany people have asked me about some of the references for my Real Life Social Network talk. So here they are. I’m truly standing on the shoulders of others. For the most part, I’ve taken other people’s research and synthesized it, looking for patterns and trying to figure out how it all relates together. I [...]
April 14, 2010
23
Eight types of friendship
By Paul Adams in Book, SociabilityIn their book on friendship, Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl identified 8 different types (based on their research). Associates were people who only shared a common activity, like a hobby or a sport. Useful contacts were people who shared information and advice, typically related to work or advancing ones career. Favor friends were people who [...]
Tags: friendship
March 13, 2010
4
We don’t have one group of “friends”
By Paul Adams in Book, SociabilityThis is a draft excerpt from my upcoming book ‘Social Circles’. I’d love to get feedback on it. This excerpt is from the middle of chapter 2: “The Real Life Social Network”. The plan is for each section in the book to broken up like this – multiple sub-sections, followed by a section with ideas [...]
November 18, 2009
4
Why “Liking” is about more than just liking
By Paul Adams in Advertising, SociabilityWhy do people ‘like’ things on social networks? It would be easy for us to assume that it is because they liked the content. But it is a bit more complicated than that. It’s a combination of the content, and the person who posted it. People sometimes ‘like’ content, not because they actually like it, [...]
Tags: Liking
October 26, 2009
0
Social networks need phone companies to create good advertising models
By Paul Adams in Advertising, SociabilitySocial networks are a minority of communication, and great behavioral advertising strategies will need to think beyond them, out into the world of phones and face-to-face interactions. Social networks plan to target advertising at people by first understanding where groups of friends exist, and then figuring out who is most influential within that group. By [...]
October 13, 2009
1
Sharing is a means to an end. Design for the end.
By Paul Adams in SociabilityAdding sharing functionality to everything is all the rage these days. I often hear people ask “How can we make our product social?”, or suggest that we “Add a share button“. Focusing on sharing misses the point. None of your users’ goal is “to share”. Sharing is a means to an end. They are sharing [...]
Tags: Sharing
