Many 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 [...]
Posts under ‘Sociability’
Eight types of friendship
In 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 helped [...]
We don’t have one group of “friends”
This 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 [...]
Why “Liking” is about more than just liking
Why 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, but because [...]
Social networks need phone companies to create good advertising models
Social 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 advertising [...]
Sharing is a means to an end. Design for the end.
Adding 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 in order [...]
The absence of mental models on social networks
I’m a big believer in mental models and often structure research questions around them. From understanding news to finance to communication, I try to understand what people’s mental models are, and how we might better support them through design. Recently however, I’ve observed something that I hadn’t experienced before: the absence of a mental model.
As [...]
Four steps to a meaningful Social Web
Our real life relationships are not bounded by accepting/ignoring/blocking/following, they are far more complicated than that. The social web is still very early in its development and is likely to take years to mature.
We’re only yet building Connections and Groups. Relationships are starting to form in places as systems learn from people’s interactions (email, IM, [...]
The local maximum of social media
Tara Hunt as published a nice presentation on how people need to “forget about social media strategies, and think about customer-centric business strategies”. I’ll add another layer of complexity. They also need to stop thinking about what people do on the web, and start thinking about how the web fits into the rest of people’s [...]
Why Twitter is not 40% “pointless babble”
Pear Analytics just published a whitepaper stating that 40% of tweets are “pointless babble”. This research has been captured by the mainstream media, as well as many blogs.
The main conclusion I took from this research is that I won’t be hiring Pear Analytics anytime soon. The research method is so poor that any conclusions are [...]