Posts under ‘Sociability’

Last year, my colleague Karen Groenink and I were doing some work around social software and put together a theory we called ‘Personal Analytics’.
The problem we had observed was that in the most popular social software sites, there were very few feedback loops for the people publishing content. On top of that, these sites were [...]

Top English footballer Darren Bent just got himself in trouble for Tweeting his feelings about his proposed transfer to another club. There is something the same and different about this.
Same: Famous people say stupid things in public all the time. This is no different than saying things you will regret in TV interviews or in [...]

For some time now, many, many people have spoken about how email is on the way out as a primary communication channel, and how young people don’t use email unless it is for communicating with “old people”.
I think this way of looking at our changing world is a red herring. It assumes that email as [...]

Homophily on Wikipedia
Homophily (i.e., love of the same) is the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. The presence of homophily has been discovered in a vast array of network studies. Within their extensive review paper, McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook (2001) cite over one hundred studies that have observed homophily in some [...]

Stowe Boyd over at /Message writes a nice post questioning some Twitter metrics and analysis being thrown around.
I have suggested for a longtime that to ‘get’ Twitter you need to follow 100 people at least, for several weeks. This cursory recitation of stats suggests that there are thousands of users out there happily communing with [...]

Every evening you will see taxis lined up at the end of Chelsea Bridge in London. It is not a taxi rank, the drivers are visiting a van selling coffee, tea and burgers. The question is whether they are there for the food and drink, or to participate in a micro-community. I think the latter, [...]

One thing I’ve seen bubbling up in various research studies is the notion of “Social Obligation”. Here’s an example:
“I received a friend request on Facebook from a guy called Tom. He’s a friend of a good friend of mine but I don’t really know him. To be honest, I’m not sure I like him, and [...]

Messy reality 1: Perceived effort outweighs perceived benefit
I’m on Twitter, have been for ages, and have lots of friends and followers. The problem is that out of the 30 people I care about most in the world, only 1 is on Twitter. Out of those 30, almost all use personal email everyday, are online, and [...]