by Adrian Chan and Andreas Weigend

This post has been translated into German (GDI Impuls 2/2010), Spanish, and Chinese (simplified).

The social data revolution

We live in an age in which social data has become the air we live and breathe. As individuals, our actions, preferences, habits, and even friendships, leave behind a wake of data. Not only data about us, but data that captures our communication and connections. Even our conversations are now data. Conversations that can be captured, stored, and re-distributed as data. Data that connects to us, and is shared with companies and brands with whom we have relationships. Like it or not, the social data revolution is the new business environment. Smart analysis of this social data demands a new mindset.

Business in this new environment has already been profoundly affected by the new datascape. Adaptation is an imperative. But for those who will do more than survive and actually thrive in this environment, the question is not one of adaptation. It is a matter of how best to respond to the world of social data, how to metabolize it, and incorporate it as if it belonged to the very company DNA.

If social data powers the new business ecosystem, then we must ask how it affects company fortunes. The business climate today is tough. It is highly competitive, customers have more choices than ever before, and loyalty is fickle, if it exists at all. Power has moved to the consumer side of the equation. Purchases and consumer power are no longer a matter of branding and brand image, but a matter of customer choice and decision-making. Consumers drive company fortunes today, and they do so with the help of an open marketplace that is overflowing with information. Consumers are empowered by their knowledge.

If we live in an era of social data, it is in part confirmation that the original age of information is behind us. Our technologies have evolved, and with this evolution, what we know and how we know it have changed. Where in the past we produced information, we now produce communication. The history of the information age began with information processing. It continued with machine connectivity, and then document connectivity. Today, it is not only machines and documents that are connected, but people. Information alone may be informative, good for discrete transactions and closed systems. Today, it is conversational, deeply relational, and open.

Self-constructed identity

The era of social data era is marked by a self-empowered consumer, and a consumption-empowered Self. Self, not society, is the new social construct. So the individual today is no longer simply a reflection of social currents and trends, a walking manifesto of cultural forces or a tidy representative of social norms and values.

The self is not an externally-constructed identity, a reflection of social forces, but is a self-constructed identity. The Self of today discloses, shares, contributes, and creates. The value produced by the individual today is visible, is public, is social, and conversational.

Society may be made up of individuals, but the great paradigm shift in consumer trends today is not manifest in the steady march of consumers falling in line with mainstream trends. Individuals are not socialized. Society is now individualized.

Social data is data socialized

The consumer is empowered by the knowledge with which to make his or her own decisions, to share them with friends, and become a public and social identity through them. In sharing, today’s consumers validate their social relevance and capture the attention of friends and peers. These and other efforts facilitated by the use of social media center on the individual. Social data is not data about the social. It is data socialized. Data that may represent social interests, but always starting as individual selections and interests. Data become social through actions and choices shared across social connections.

Brands, businesses, and institutions no longer control their own markets or messaging. They are not even in control of their brand image. All of these belong to and are defined increasingly by the consumer. For the consumer knows as much as he or she needs to know about the brand already. And connected communities know more about company products than many companies do themselves.

GetSatisfaction is an example of a site that handles customer feedback, comments, and questions. It is a site on which consumers tell brands what to do to improve and repair their products, reputations, and even their values. It is an example of how power has shifted to the consumer – for on GetSatisfaction, reputation has moved to the medium.

Transactional media

Transactions that used to entail a high cost of production and distribution, both of products and information, now take place over a medium that is virtually frictionless. We could say that where physical transactions used to distribute consumer media, consumer media today conduct transactions. Social media are the production and distribution of brand image, messaging, of product, and even its consumption.

In the age of social data, the distance between production and consumption collapses because both occur in the same place: online. Music is discovered, purchased, played, and recommended, all in the same place. Television, movies, and videos are discovered, rented, viewed, and shared in the same place. Content is also consumed in more places than in the past, when sound and image were bound to the physical medium on which they were pressed.

We might say that media today are media of transactions, and mean it as a metaphor. But we mean it literally and very concretely indeed. Media that in the past were the physical storage of content mass produced and consumed compete today with an entirely new mode of mediation. Social media not only capture and transmit content, but mediate the social connections along which it is so often distributed. The medium is not only the message. It is the messenger, too.

Content today can be consumed immediately after its production. This is one source of the transformative power over which social media presides. Note that we say “immediately.” Content available immediately is content already here – delivery is not an obstacle. Mediated transactions provide immediacy: what we want, when we want it, here, and now.

Attention is interest

Of course not all consumption occurs online. But even offline, the social data revolution is driving a transformation. Because what the consumer wants, starts not with your brand or its image, your products or their utility, but with the interests that frame the consumer’s decision-making. If it is said that social media create an attention economy, it is because consumers pay attention to what interests them. They pay for the brand experience with their attention, and on terms that are theirs alone to negotiate.

Consumers have the choice, and the consumer is always right. Interest and attention precede the discovery, precede the comparison, the sale, and the relationship. All of these are anchored in the consumer and the consuming Self: interested, engaged, rational, irrational. But most importantly to us, connected.

What matters to today’s consumer is this freedom of self-determination. An ethos of choice, and an ethic of freedom, for an age in which companies no longer drive their markets. Consumers do the driving. Companies today are driven by customer demands, expressed through social data. This is to say that the enormous power harnessed by connecting machines to machines, documents to documents, and people to people – in short, the socialization of data – now presents us with an indisputable paradigm shift.

Everything changes: the consumer produces, impressions express intentions, brand image has become talk, segments are individuals, communication is listening, sales is service, and transactions are conversation.

The relational economy

At the heart of the social data revolution is the relation. For the new rules of the social data economy are relational. Data in the social age does not just capture value, it captures a relation. By its connections with the intentions, attention, and conversations through which it is shared and distributed, data has is socially connected.

Companies did not bring this about, consumers did. Consumers chose to share, to connect, and to communicate. And on this basis, we can say that the relational economy is the choice of consumers to express themselves not as market segments, but as individuals.

In the relational economy, relations that matter to consumers express interests. Social data captures the interests consumers relate to. Interested, engaged, and knowledgeable consumers relate to what they want, what they like, and what their friends like. They relate because it is through communication and shared connections that they build and maintain relationships.

If an individual wants to share his or her credit card purchases through a site like Blippy, then this is not because they are just a fanatic for sharing data. It is because in sharing data, and in socializing it, they relate. Atomic actions, perhaps, in the form of discrete purchases and transactions. But atomic actions with the valence of social bonding. No company will be as smart at designing the relational bonds among products and brands that matter to a consumer, as the individual consumer is in expressing those relations in the first place.

Consumers disclose their interests and relate their preferences in actions captured in realtime. Forty-thousand tweets per minute, half a million items on Facebook, four million searches on Google. At a rate that doubles every one and a half years, consumers produce enough data about themselves to soon dwarf everything that has until now been so carefully studied by marketers, analysts, and researchers. The bullhorn has flipped, and if there’s any marketing message worth paying attention to, it is the one bellowed by the connected consumer.

The new mode of production

Conversation is the new marketing. Markets are no longer made by the brand, around brand image, and by means of brand messaging. Markets are made by consumers, through their connections, and interests as related in conversation. Distribution through conversation is the new mode of production.

Markets do not make conversation, conversation makes markets. Again, the social data revolution inverts and reverses the relationship of brand and consumer, placing the burden now on brands to behave transparently, honestly, and on terms that interest the consumer. To this end, we encourage brands to listen. To listen to what consumers have to tell them, and to get engaged with what consumers are saying to each other.

It used to be the case that brands had to struggle to supply consumers with information. But the coming age of the internet practically erased the cost of communication. What was once scarce – information – is now available in surplus. Through online access, a vast web of product names, sites, pages, reviews, and other searchable results, consumers face little difficulty learning about the products that meet their needs and interests.

Conversational marketing

The new marketing, then, listens to the conversations in which consumers express and share their interests through social data. It listens not just for mentions of itself, hoping to see itself and its brand reflected in the consumer. It listens to what consumers share about themselves, in how consumers brand themselves and their identities. The new marketing recognizes the power in helping consumers see themselves reflected in the brand. This is not about image, it’s about interaction. For consumers will recognize themselves in brands that repay their attention and reciprocate their interest.

The social graph and the many sites that tie into it are where much of this interaction is possible. Examples are numerous, from Facebook Connect and its new Open Graph, to twitter, realtime search and more. All of these point to an ever-expanding distributed conversation. One in which the mode of distribution is friends talking to their friends, and brand engagement is mutual, genuine, and reciprocal.

This is not just a matter of the eyeballs having turned from one screen, the TV, to another. It’s not just a matter of changing medium – it’s about talking now instead of looking. And this is new, even still, to many brands. Of course brands like to see themselves mentioned and reflected in consumer opinion. But then so, too, do consumers. Consumers are the new brands, and they do their branding in person. Conversation is the highest form of shared value, individually produced, and mutually engaging.

Conversation is the new marketing because it is the right way to engage with the medium. Indeed, social media carry so much conversation that it is the consumer’s attention that presents the new bottleneck. We have left the old paradigm, in which information presented the bottleneck for its scarcity and unavailability – a problem now solved by search. Today’s paradigm is marked by the scarcity of consumer attention. So much information is now available, in the form of blogs, comments, reviews, recommendations, status messages, and tweets, that the greatest challenge facing the marketer is capturing the consumer’s attention.

Consumers do the branding

When conversation replaces image-making and messaging as the new marketing, old techniques of market segmentation and targeting fall by the wayside. Communication becomes relational. Social networks and online social spaces, including those carved out by streaming applications for status and short messaging, replace display spaces and screens. Marcom and online social interaction are fundamentally different. They engage consumers by means of the interests that consumers take up in brands and companies. Products valued not just for image or function, but for the values expressed by the companies that make them.

In any marketplace, sharing is of the essence. Sharing builds relations that communicate to friends and across social circles. Shared values, interests, and pastimes spark and engender conversations that are more meaningful to consumers than at any time in the past. Because what consumers share is always within a context that is relevant to them, through a medium that has become a daily habit, and at a time when it counts. Consumers create conversation around their tastes and interests that is rich in social utility. The ways that consumers identify themselves in their talk weaves a web of personal and social interests in which the relationships in data can be deeply human and meaningful.

It is the brand that now wants to be seen in the proximity of the consumer, not the consumer who desires to identify with the brand. The social self is now so self-constructed and socially connected that consumers expect to see themselves reflected in the brands they relate to. Consumers make brands in their own image, revealing this in their own words and interests. Brands that adopt a conversational approach to marketing will benefit from this shift the most. For it is then that brands can best anticipate, respond to, and engage with consumers.

The relational economy comes to life across the many screens and through the many channels that social media make available today. At the present time, mobile devices promise perhaps the greatest set of new opportunities. Mobile devices belong firmly in the hands of the consumer, and involve deeply personal and habitual uses and practices. They are the closest to the consumer and provide honest and accurate social data. Increasingly, this data tells us where a consumer is, and what he or she is doing, and sometimes even with whom. Conversations held in public and across services like Foursquare will soon unfold across and around Facebook and twitter.

Join the revolution

With the participation of savvy merchants and brands, consumers embrace deals and offers that they receive dynamically, socially, and situationally. Situational awareness in fact represents an entirely new frontier to the socialized brand. For it provides the opportunity for the salesperson to greet consumers before they have even stepped into the store. Street-aware marketing, not on the basis of the guerrilla tactics of past viral agencies, but using relational and personal sensibility. Imagine a day when marketing may not have to approach the consumer, because it will instead be able to anticipate the consumer’s approach. Many consumers may willingly disclose that they are on their way, with products on their mind, and with a little company from their friends.

If service is the new sales, helping customers serve themselves is the new customer service. With social media today providing consumers the means to get their satisfaction, brands are realizing that the new consumer not only helps him or herself, but helps others, too. Service is leaving the call center and joining the web, driven not by corporate headquarters, but by consumers themselves. Service of this kind happens whether you like it or not, for it is in helping others that proactive consumers find their motivation. Smart brands will connect these consumers, will listen in, and provide expertise when needed and gratitude when it is not.

Mobile devices will bridge the digital divide between off and online, providing a view of the customer rich in dynamic perspectives onto their interests and interactions. In such a realtime environment, the challenge of social data becomes not one of how to obtain it, but of how to extract meaning from it. Yesterday was the best time to start learning from this data. Today is too late, and tomorrow will belong to your competitors. Data sourcing and measurement, data analysis and metrics, these are the new marketplace. Success will come to those companies that have learned how to use it.

So join the social data revolution. This one, for sure, will not be televised.

Andreas Weigend is former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, and teaches at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

Techcrunch this week posted a copy of a social gaming playdeck used by SCVNGR. Social gaming is indeed hot these days. But there’s some confusion around game mechanics and social gaming dynamics. I don’t see any social in the playdeck provided below. So I’ve added my own commentary to each of the deck’s 47 points.

My apologies to its author, but the descriptions completely and entirely miss the socio-logical factors that make social gaming what it is. The deck, instead, describes individiual game play and spectacularly misinterprets connections between game play and player behavior. It reads as a Pavlovian exercise in attributing behaviors directly to a small number of game design elements, expanded here unnecessarily into distinctions that are redundant, disorganized (in fact they’re alphabetical), anti-social, illogical, and hopelessly blind.

In fact the disclosure of a deck such as this one might cause one to wonder just who the hell designs our social tools — and whether they are even qualified to execute on the subtleties of social interaction and shared online practices. A deck such as this one demonstrates quite clearly the inadequacies in social thinking and is a testament to the object and reward paradigm that seems to have taken over many game-like social platforms. These are nearing mythical status now as game-ification is installed as the new organizing principle for the design of social tools. A welcome counterpoint to which is the recent revelation from Foursquare that tips and recommendations will feature more prominently in their redesign (at last, we may have a real reason to checkin!).

Where, in this document, is presence? Where is reputation? Where is credibility? Where is there any sensitivity to the many different types of users, whose motives and motivations vary by personality and whose styles and habits of using social tools are distinct? Where is the recognition that social tools are embedded in real social practices? In fact, where’s the user-centric appreciation of experience that has served us so well in the past? At what point did we become so invested in design that began to view user behaviors (and presumably social outcomes) as a direct response to product features? But I digress. I’ll let you be the judge.

From SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck, with my commentary added.

1. Achievement

Definition: A virtual or physical representation of having accomplished something. These are often viewed as rewards in and of themselves.

Example: a badge, a level, a reward, points, really anything defined as a reward can be a reward.

My commentary: Achievement is but one of the relations users form to reward representations. In fact, achievement-reward is tautological. It belongs to the very definition of reward that it proves achievement.

At stake is how does the user relate to the representation. Note that these involve relations not captured as achievement, but having meaning for the user nonetheless. Also note that the meaning of these for users may be social: they are a reflection of the user’s sense of his/her social position, status, rank, membership, etc — all of which are validating but which bestow meaning not just for reasons of achievement. In fact some of the highest forms of validation result from receiving gifts, from recognition by peers, and other attributions obtained not from direct achievement but from indirect acknowledgment by community.

• The user may identify with it: user is a winner, a mayor, an expert, number 1.
• The user may feel s/he possesses it: the representation is a thing, a quality, an attribute of personality, a sign of social status, a symbol of membership, etc.
• The user may identify with the group the representation symbolizes: the user now feels a sense of membership and belonging, as in a fan-team insignia relation.
• The user may want it or aspire to it: the user relates to a reward because it represents an image of what the user wishes for, including wishes to be perceived as. Luxury goods represent social status to individuals, allowing them to feel “rich” even if they are not.

Achievement is an accurate description of one type of activity-response relation, but only one. It misses the social dimensions of partnered and social play (two or more players). It misses the motivations associated with beating an opponent, and fails to distinguish between the “reward” of beating one’s own game play vs beating the game. It assigns too much of the experience to a linear and direct outcome of individual activity, where in social gaming much of the pleasure and motivation comes from activity mediated by social perceptions and dynamically changing social orders.

2. Appointment Dynamic

Definition: A dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action. Appointment dynamics are often deeply related to interval based reward schedules or avoidance dyanmics.

Example: Cafe World and Farmville where if you return at a set time to do something you get something good, and if you don’t something bad happens.

My commentary: This is not a dynamic, but a basic form of episodic framing. It states, simply, that in framed activities, some actions may be coupled to temporal intervals or to episodic markers. “Time” as mentioned here actually should be subdivided: time as in a specific point in time (friday, noon) and time as in sequence (after steps 1, 2, 3 have been completed). (All games are an experiential frame: they are structured and organized, have rules constraining behavior, enabling participation, and shaping both imagined, real, and expected outcomes.)

There is no social dynamic suggested here. Nor is there a behavioral dynamic, such that there’s no motivation explained or observed. Just a user’s necessary response to a temporal or sequential contingency. All games take time and all game events happen in order as set by game rules and design.

3. Avoidance

Definition: The act of inducing player behavior not by giving a reward, but by not instituting a punishment. Produces consistent level of activity, timed around the schedule.

Example: Press a lever every 30 seconds to not get shocked.

My commentary: I take umbrage at the claim that behavior is induced by the withholding of game rewards and punishments. Player behavior is sustained by user interest and that interest belongs to the user. In social games, activity levels of other users can be as compelling to users as the provision of game rewards. Among many other factors that may explain why a player plays, and with what degree of conscious and subconscious interest. Avoidance is a non-rule and explains nothing.

4. Behavioral Contrast

Definition: The theory defining how behavior can shift greatly based on changed expectations.

Example: A monkey presses a lever and is given lettuce. The monkey is happy and continues to press the lever. Then it gets a grape one time. The monkey is delighted. The next time it presses the lever it gets lettuce again. Rather than being happy, as it was before, it goes ballistic throwing the lettuce at the experimenter. (In some experiments, a second monkey is placed in the cage, but tied to a rope so it can’t access the lettuce or lever. After the grape reward is removed, the first monkey beats up the second monkey even though it obviously had nothing to do with the removal. The anger is truly irrational.)

My commentary: This one is also tautological. Behavior is the manifestation of psychology. Behavior is expectations. To say that behavior changes with changed expectations is making up a rule where there’s nothing but what’s already perfectly obvious. It’s like saying that people make new choices when they change their minds.

5. Behavioral Momentum

Definition: The tendency of players to keep doing what they have been doing.

Example: From Jesse Schell’s awesome Dice talk: “I have spent ten hours playing Farmville. I am a smart person and wouldn’t spend 10 hours on something unless it was useful. Therefore this must be useful, so I can keep doing it.”

My commentary: Again, a platitude of a rule. There’s no game rule in the observation that sometimes people continue to do what they’ve been doing. Habit would be a better term, and would permit one to at least account for game playing habit, social habit and pastime, routine, addiction, and distraction. Those, at least, are behaviorally differentiated and user-centric.

6. Blissful Productivity

Definition: The idea that playing in a game makes you happier working hard, than you would be relaxing. Essentially, we’re optimized as human beings by working hard, and doing meaningful and rewarding work.

Example: From Jane McGonical’s Ted Talk wherein she discusses how World of Warcraft players play on average 22 hours / week (a part time job), often after a full days work. They’re willing to work hard, perhaps harder than in real life, because of their blissful productivity in the game world.

My commentary: Who says we are optimized by working hard? Are we then confused by distraction? How about when we get lost in distraction? And can’t distraction be unproductively compelling? This makes no sense to me at all, and worse, makes a grand claim to human psychology that is at once deeply biased, culturally insensitive, non-specific (to psychological and personality differences), assigns personal motives to game participation, and even manages to establish a contradiction between what is work and what is play.

7. Cascading Information Theory

Definition: The theory that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.

Example: showing basic actions first, unlocking more as you progress through levels. Making building on SCVNGR a simple but staged process to avoid information overload.

My commentary: Ridiculous, and ignores everything we have learned from narrative/story theory, besides which it also insults learning theory, learning modes, and conflates all game events to “snippets of information.” Information provided to a game player that s/he has leveled, has been awarded points, has a new team role, is being attacked are each meaningful only in context. Context, not information, frames the meaning of information, and defines what and how much information serves the purpose of sustaining game involvement. Information provided within a game is a game event.

8. Chain Schedules

Definition: the practice of linking a reward to a series of contingencies. Players tend to treat these as simply the individual contingencies. Unlocking one step in the contingency is often viewed as an individual reward by the player.

Example: Kill 10 orcs to get into the dragons cave, every 30 minutes the dragon appears.

My commentary: Besides being redundant (both “chain” and “schedule” imply serialized activity or events), this rule seems to say that players understand game play sequences. I think we got that when we were toddlers. All game play engages users in serialized activity for which there are proximate actions and contingent events. That’s the nature of a game — it’s a fiction understood. Game players may like to know what happens, or may welcome surprises. In social gaming, the involvement of others, especially when their communication is part of the play, adds to the experience. And communication cannot be accounted for by scheduling.

9. Communal Discovery

Definition: The game dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a riddle, a problem or a challenge. Immensely viral and very fun.

Example: DARPA balloon challenge, the cottage industries that appear around McDonalds monopoly to find “Boardwalk”

My commentary: Episodic involvement of an audience, or part of an audience, is explained best on sociological grounds, not by means of the discovery concept. What is discovery for some is mob rule, action, suspense, or teamwork to others.

10. Companion Gaming

Definition: Games that can be played across multiple platforms

Example: Games that be played on iphone, facebook, xbox with completely seamless cross platform gameplay.

My commentary: No comment but that it’s poorly named, since “companion” suggests partnered play. In either case this is a product feature, not a dynamic.

11. Contingency

Definition: The problem that the player must overcome in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.

Example: 10 orcs block your path

My commentary: All activity that hasn’t finished is contingent. Better would be to differentiate among contingencies. Those would include coupling (of user action to response); proximate contingency (what’s next); distant contingency (what happens later); social contingency (change affecting all players); etc.

12. Countdown

Definition: The dynamic in which players are only given a certain amount of time to do something. This will create an activity graph that causes increased initial activity increasing frenetically until time runs out, which is a forced extinction.

Example: Bejeweled Blitz with 30 seconds to get as many points as you can. Bonus rounds. Timed levels

My commentary: Time constraint. That players behave increasingly frenetically is a supposition suggesting a relation between user experience (frenetic) and activity intensity (speed of activity). I don’t think we all experience time constraints in the same way. Some potential players may in fact avoid games because of the stress-inducing panic that comes at the end; others may live for it. Again, not a dynamic, just a game design choice to involve a clock and to constrain the play to a set time frame.

13. Cross Situational Leader-boards

Definition: This occurs when one ranking mechanism is applied across multiple (unequal and isolated) gaming scenarios. Players often perceive that these ranking scenarios are unfair as not all players were presented with an “equal” opportunity to win.

Example: Players are arbitrarily sent into one of three paths. The winner is determined by the top scorer overall (i.e. across the paths). Since the players can only do one path (and can’t pick), they will perceive inequity in the game scenario and get upset.

My commentary: Awkwardly phrased but accurately observed. Perhaps the perceived or experienced social inequality could be captured in the dynamic as intentional unfairness. Still, this is less a dynamic than a reporting problem: game state or status can be reported equitably to its players, or not. At issue is whether design or reporting creates advantage. Advantage can itself be structured into game play as a form of reward (as in qualifying rounds in many sports that reward players with advantageous starting positions).

14. Disincentives

Definition: a game element that uses a penalty (or altered situation) to induce behavioral shift

Example: losing health points, amazon’s checkout line removing all links to tunnel the buyer to purchase, speeding traps

My commentary: Disincentives are used in game mechanics, but are not the same as punishments. Punishments would be better called “penalties.” What matters more than the disincentive (what happens if you’re bad) is the rule that articulates the right and wrong ways to play. These rules should accommodate individual experience of play as well as game design and also the society of players. Red cards for tackling in soccer protect players from injury as well as disincentivize hacking tackles as well as improve play for soccer players and fans overall. Ask what function the disincentive plays and at what level of game play.

15. Endless Games

Definition: Games that do not have an explicit end. Most applicable to casual games that can refresh their content or games where a static (but positive) state is a reward of its own.

Example: Farmville (static state is its own victory), SCVNGR (challenges constantly are being built by the community to refresh content)

My commentary: I prefer the term “open” to describe frames that are open ended. Endless suggests a tedium. This dynamic risks missing the user experience, wherein “endless” may just be a fun personal habit. (I’m playing again. I like it.)

16. Envy

Definition: The desire to have what others have. In order for this to be effective seeing what other people have (voyeurism) must be employed.

Example: my friend has this item and I want it!

My commentary: Envy is undifferentiated here. Envy is the relation of Subject : Subject (Attribute). Voyeurism is entirely different and not needed here. All that’s needed is a value system that attributes value to the Attribute which gives envy its pitch and tone. In this way we become envious of wealth, looks, power, ability, and what have you. All are different and all are explained as much by what the observer relates to (desires) as by what the perceived possesses. I do not envy political power and a politician does not make me envious. Voyeurism is a distinctly different social relation comprising parts anonymity, privacy, ethical norms, fantasy, and image.

17. Epic Meaning

Definition: players will be highly motivated if they believe they are working to achieve something great, something awe-inspiring, something bigger than themselves.

Example: From Jane McGonical’s Ted Talk where she discusses Warcraft’s ongoing story line and “epic meaning” that involves each individual has motivated players to participate outside the game and create the second largest wiki in the world to help them achieve their individual quests and collectively their epic meanings.

My commentary: I like the term and I have a lot of respect for McGonigal (misspelled above). But this could be differentiated further. There is no epic meaning. There may be situations in which players are highly motivated by a higher cause or calling; or by crowd psychology (action, thrill, spectacle, synchronicity); or by abstract principles (doing right, being good, giving back); and so on.

Meaning may be meaningful because it is spontaneous, or because it responds to a situation. The concept of epic as grand narrative arc normally involves a situation that calls an individual to exceed him/herself in their response as action. But may also be the emergence of higher power within the individual. This is epic as England winning the world cup in 66 or epic as in Gandhi.

18. Extinction

Definition: Extinction is the term used to refer to the action of stopping providing a reward. This tends to create anger in players as they feel betrayed by no longer receiving the reward they have come to expect. It generally induces negative behavioral momentum.

Example: killing 10 orcs no longer gets you a level up

My commentary: Woah. I think this one describes what happens when players quit. That players quit is obvious, but hopefully we’re a bit more sophisticated than the Pavlovian description here suggests. Some try again. Some create new accounts and user name and play even harder next time. I guess they’d have to be described by the Lazarus dynamic. Also known as the Resurrection dynamic, and not to be confused with the Easter Egg.

19. Fixed Interval Reward Schedules

Definition: Fixed interval schedules provide a reward after a fixed amount of time, say 30 minutes. This tends to create a low engagement after a reward, and then gradually increasing activity until a reward is given, followed by another lull in engagement.

Example: Farmville, wait 30 minutes, crops have appeared

My commentary: Why not cal them timed rewards and scratch the part that tries to explain rhythm as a directly-induced behavioral response to timed game intervals.

20. Fixed Ratio Reward Schedule

Definition: A fixed ratio schedule provides rewards after a fixed number of actions. This creates cyclical nadirs of engagement (because the first action will not create any reward so incentive is low) and then bursts of activity as the reward gets closer and closer.

Example: kill 20 ships, get a level up, visit five locations, get a badge

My commentary: I’m beginning to wonder if the author of these game mechanics is OCD, ADD, or both.

21. Free Lunch

Definition: A dynamic in which a player feels that they are getting something for free due to someone else having done work. It’s critical that work is perceived to have been done (just not by the player in question) to avoid breaching trust in the scenario. The player must feel that they’ve “lucked” into something.

Example: Groupon. By virtue of 100 other people having bought the deal, you get it for cheap. There is no sketchiness b/c you recognize work has been done (100 people are spending money) but you yourself didn’t have to do it.

My commentary: This one could be differentiated further. There are serendipitous events which may be well described as a free lunch. But there are also gifts. There are also shared benefits. There are targets achieved by means of collaboration (in which work is often not equally shared and results not equally deserved). The dynamic seems to want to identify a relation between effort and conscience, but if this is the case then social factors have to be considered.

22. Fun Once, Fun Always

Definition: The concept that an action in enjoyable to repeat all the time. Generally this has to do with simple actions. There is often also a limitation to the total level of enjoyment of the action.

Example: the theory behind the check-in everywhere and the check-in and the default challenges on SCVNGR.

My commentary: I’m thinking OCD. But the focus on simple actions still has me wondering if it’s ADD. The somewhat poignant remark at the end about a limited total level of enjoyment has me thinking OCD. Possibly a game tester.

23. Interval Reward Schedules

Definition: Interval based reward schedules provide a reward after a certain amount of time. There are two flavors: variable and fixed.

Example: wait N minutes, collect rent

My commentary: I’m beginning to sense a real problem with this author’s experience of time. But it does seem that he or she has figured out when the rewards come. That’s good. Because apparently these games are completely lacking in content and other people.

24. Lottery

Definition: A game dynamic in which the winner is determined solely by chance. This creates a high level of anticipation. The fairness is often suspect, however winners will generally continue to play indefinitely while losers will quickly abandon the game, despite the random nature of the distinction between the two.

Example: many forms of gambling, scratch tickets.

My commentary: Oops I spoke too soon. Add to fixed and variable: surprising. And there are other people now, too. It’s nice to know that their behaviors predictably group them into winners and losers (those being people who play and those who quit). I have to agree that fairness is suspect. Nothing’s fair. You’re playing and playing and it’s regular and timed and then it gets a bit more rhythmic and suddenly BLAMO the lottery rule delivers a punishing blow. Sigh.

25. Loyalty

Definition: The concept of feeling a positive sustained connection to an entity leading to a feeling of partial ownership. Often reinforced with a visual representation.

Example: fealty in WOW, achieving status at physical places (mayorship, being on the wall of favorite customers)

My commentary: Loyalty is not related to ownership any more than betrayal is an attribute of the dispossessed. If loyalty is reinforced with a graphic or icon then something is represented. If something is represented it must have been achieved (rule 1). If it was achieved, there is no loyalty, but only an individual sense of achievement (rule 1) owing probably to extended bouts of serialized game play sustained by varying levels of intense anticipation of fixed and/or variable rewards obtained by the successful selection of contingencies. The word “addict” as substitute for loyalty comes to mind.

26. Meta Game

Definition: a game which exists layered within another game. These generally are discovered rather than explained (lest they cause confusion) and tend to appeal to ~2% of the total game-playing audience. They are dangerous as they can induce confusion (if made too overt) but are powerful as they’re greatly satisfying to those who find them.

Example: hidden questions / achievements within world of warcraft that require you to do special (and hard to discover) activities as you go through other quests

My commentary: It’s the trap door in LOST. He’s down there pushing the button every 108 minutes. Here’s a meta game for you. Sports on tv are played by players whose skill playing the game is required by their teams to play the game which is watched by fans for whom it’s a game and by tv audiences at home, who listen to the game play narrated by commentators who often play games with their analyses. About 98% of the people who enjoy sports get this. Any frame can be embedded in other frames. Re-framing is what makes social games fun to play with friends: the game is played as a game (player against himself/herself and the game) as well as against others as well as having meta social meaning for its being a social pastime.

27. Micro Leader-boards

Definition: The rankings of all individuals in a micro-set. Often great for distributed game dynamics where you want many micro-competitions or desire to induce loyalty.

Example: Be the top scorers at Joe’s bar this week and get a free appetizer

My commentary: Micro is unnecessary but I like the idea of sets.

28. Modifiers

Definition: An item that when used affects other actions. Generally modifiers are earned after having completed a series of challenges or core functions.

Example: A X2 modifier that doubles the points on the next action you take.

My commentary: Not a dynamic but a game rule.

29. Moral Hazard of Game Play

Definition: The risk that by rewarding people manipulatively in a game you remove the actual moral value of the action and replace it with an ersatz game-based reward. The risk that by providing too many incentives to take an action, the incentive of actually enjoying the action taken is lost. The corollary to this is that if the points or rewards are taken away, then the person loses all motivation to take the (initially fun on its own) action.

Example: Paraphrased from Jesse Schell “If I give you points every time you brush your teeth, you’ll stop brushing your teeth b/c it’s good for you and then only do it for the points. If the points stop flowing, your teeth will decay.”

My commentary: Some confusion here manifest in whether players play for the game play, or for the outcomes of game play. Both are always worth taking into account. But I fail to see how this becomes moral hazard.

30. Ownership

Definition: The act of controlling something, having it be *your* property.

Example: Ownership is interesting on a number of levels, from taking over places, to controlling a slot, to simply owning popularity by having a digital representation of many friends.

My commentary: You guys with me on this? *One ring to rule them all*? Yes? I’m glad to see it finally confirmed that Wall St is a game.

31. Pride

Definition: the feeling of ownership and joy at an accomplishment

Example: I have ten badges. I own them. They are mine. There are many like them, but these are mine. Hooray.

My commentary: Three things that are themselves distinct, two of which are already defined here as dynamics (rule 1, rule 30), inversely related to rule 16, possibly as precondition for rule 25? Completely ignores the social recognition conventionally associated with pride. But perhaps that social recognition is mediated by means of rewards and representations. In which case we would have a nice attachment theory of mediated social recognition, achieved not through interaction but through substitutes: socially visible representations and awards.

32. Privacy

Definition: The concept that certain information is private, not for public distribution. This can be a demotivator (I won’t take an action because I don’t want to share this) or a motivator (by sharing this I reinforce my own actions).

Example: Scales the publish your daily weight onto Twitter (these are real and are proven positive motivator for staying on your diet). Or having your location publicly broadcast anytime you do anything (which is invasive and can should be avoided).

My commentary: Not a dynamic, but a system constraint. Visibility of players and play is a product choice. Its influence on player experience and play will be explained by the user’s personal and social investments. In either case, the act of sharing one’s play socially is not for the reinforcement of one’s own actions. That would be anti-social.

33. Progression Dynamic

Definition: a dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks.

Example: a progress bar, leveling up from paladin level 1 to paladin level 60

My commentary: not a dynamic but a design choice.

34. Ratio Reward Schedules

Definition: Ratio schedules provide a reward after a number of actions. There are two flavors: variable and fixed.

Example: kill 10 orcs, get a power up.

My commentary: I’m beginning to think that instead of variable and fixed we just say regular/irregular. Either way we’ve got temporality covered here. More than covered. Completely nailed to the floor.

35. Real-time v. Delayed Mechanics

Definition: Realtime information flow is uninhibited by delay. Delayed information is only released after a certain interval.

Example: Realtime scores cause instant reaction (gratification or demotivation). Delayed causes ambiguity which can incent more action due to the lack of certainty of ranking.

My commentary: See prior comment.

36. Reinforcer

Definition: The reward given if the expected action is carried out in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.

Example: receiving a level up after killing 10 orcs.

My commentary: See prior comment on rule 31.

37. Response

Definition: The expected action from the player in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.

Example: the player takes the action to kill 10 orcs

My commentary: Ditto.

38. Reward Schedules

Definition: the timeframe and delivery mechanisms through which rewards (points, prizes, level ups) are delivered. Three main parts exist in a reward schedule; contingency, response and reinforcer.

Example: getting a level up for killing 10 orcs, clearing a row in Tetris, getting fresh crops in Farmville

My commentary: Help me, I’m melting.

39. Rolling Physical Goods

Definition: A physical good (one with real value) that can be won by anyone on an ongoing basis as long as they meet some characteristic. However, that characteristic rolls from player to player.

Example: top scorer deals, mayor deals

My commentary: Complete mental paralysis threatens as I try to distinguish between goods and rewards, and between the pride of ownership and the reward structure of having an actual physical good (real value).

40. Shell Game

Definition: a game in which the player is presented with the illusion of choice but is actually in a situation that guides them to the desired outcome of the operator.

Example: 3 Card Monty, lotteries, gambling

My commentary: Not a dynamic, but basic game design. The game player will always experience choice as choosing. The designer has designed the game’s play, its rules, and outcomes. Illusion doesn’t enter the picture because we’re talking here about playing games.

41. Social Fabric of Games

Definition: the idea that people like one another better after they’ve played games with them, have a higher level of trust and a great willingness to work together.

Example: From Jane McGonicgal’s TED talk where she suggests that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone because you need them to spend their time with you, play by the same rules, shoot for the same goals.

My commentary: Games are a social pastime. Glad to see that noted, even if it took 40 preceding rules to get to it. It should be noted that in 1969 El Salvador and Honduras went to war for 106 hours after playing each other in a soccer match. It is known as the soccer war.

42. Status

Definition: The rank or level of a player. Players are often motivated by trying to reach a higher level or status.

Example: white paladin level 20 in WOW.

My commentary: Rank is fine. “Status” is unnecessary and in the day and age of status updates, confusing. Possibly explained by rule 31.

43. Urgent Optimism

Definition: Extreme self motivation. The desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.

Example: From Jane McGonical’s TED talk. The idea that in proper games an “epic win” or just “win” is possible and therefore always worth acting for.

My commentary: Neither a dynamic nor an accurate description of human affect. Cautious optimism better modifies optimism. Urgency is useful in characterizing need. Would be difficult to distinguish from “desperately hopeful.”

44. Variable Interval Reward Schedules

Definition: Variable interval reward schedules provide a reward after a roughly consistent amount of time. This tends to create a reasonably high level of activity over time, as the player could receive a reward at any time but never the burst as created under a fixed schedule. This system is also more immune to the nadir right after the receiving of a reward, but also lacks the zenith of activity before a reward in unlocked due to high levels of ambiguity.

Example: Wait roughly 30 minutes, a new weapon appears. Check back as often as you want but that won’t speed it up. Generally players are bad at realizing that.

My commentary: Totally redundant with rule 23, and conflates the two kinds of time: duration and sequential (time it takes for Z to happen, and sequential ordering of X,Y,Z).

45. Variable Ratio Reward Schedule

Definition: A variable ratio reward schedule provides rewards after a roughly consistent but unknown amount of actions. This creates a relatively high consistent rate of activity (as there could always be a reward after the next action) with a slight increase as the expected reward threshold is reached, but never the huge burst of a fixed ratio schedule. It’s also more immune to nadirs in engagement after a reward is acheived.

Example: kill something like 20 ships, get a level up. Visit a couple locations (roughly five) get a badge

My commentary: Again, conflates the two kinds of time. An “unknown amount of actions” simply states that the sequence is unknown. Is a again a game rule.

46. Viral Game Mechanics

Definition: A game element that requires multiple people to play (or that can be played better with multiple people)

Example: Farmville making you more successful in the game if you invite your friends, the social check-in

My commentary: Completely misses viral distribution dynamics, which are part distribution system, part communication, and part social graph.

47. Virtual Items

Definition: Digital prizes, rewards, objects found or taken within the course of a game. Often these can be traded or given away.

Example: Gowalla’s items, Facebook gifts, badges

My commentary: And I think we’re back to rule 1.

Many have noted the decline and fall of print and professional journalism. Some point their fingers at social media, or at the internet in general. There’s truth to this, although there are economic and business reasons, too (for which the internet gets some share of blame).

But if social media, and the internet in general, have sped up and socialized news distribution, rendering print a relative dinosaur in an age of accelerated media consumption, we should ask the deeper cultural question: What value is created by social media’s role in the production and distribution of news? What is the value, social and cultural, of faster news, of the vast system of headlines and citations (e.g. sharing, retweeting, etc), of one-click votes and Likes, and of realtime awareness?

I have written on this in the past, but not with an eye to the relationship between news and knowledge. Not with an eye to the role played by social media in the production of information and the transformation, by social means, of information into a stock of cultural knowledge.

Social media, because they distribute news by means of social activity (thin as it may be, and self-centered as it often is), transforms information into talk. But there are may kinds of talk, from gossip and hearsay to discussion and even argumentation. The world of social media is a very affirmative world — Likes but no Dislikes; votes but a bias to the trending and the popular; comments but little conversation.

The intrinsic relationship of talk on social media to the attention seeking efforts of its users introduces a bias: a bias mitigated by the brand authority of print, and the separation of journalism from the business of circulation. In social media these are conflated. The very act of tweeting is at the same time an act seeking circulation.

Does this bias undermine the medium’s ability to create value, to make us smarter, wiser, or more knowledegable? Does it undermine our ability to think, or better, to relate our thoughts, conceive of new ideas, and most importantly, make the decisions that result in a higher quality of life, and a culture that nourishes it?

….

The acceleration of news delivery towards its degree zero — instantaneity — is a historical and technical inevitability. It belongs to the very reality of news itself. The newest news is the news that just arrived now. No news could be sooner, or faster, than this news now. Now is the zero point of news. When it comes to news, realtime is just another way of saying Now.

News seeks ever faster speeds. “This just in” announces new news, redundant as it may sound. Our culture, for better or worse, places a high value on the novelty of news, the newness of news, the “newsworthiness of now.” As the media’s staple ingredient, however, it’s an empty calorie. Fuel good enough for baseline metabolic functioning, but little more.

News value begins by selecting information that is newsworthy. When deemed to be newsworthy, news is issued as news and its novelty makes it so. In this way a piece of information acquires an additional value, a cultural valence (it’s news!), from which it attracts attention and by order of which it is set into distribution. The audience — that’s us — which receives or observes news, circulates it further, in a fashion as old as the art of storytelling itself.

In the mass media, this news has authority, as news told by news-making authorities. It is not truth, goodness, virtue, help, or some other value that makes it authoritative (worth attending to, and accepting as real and valuable). But in social media, this news becomes social fact. It becomes a piece of content (information) whose additional value is its social facticity: a claim raised by means of mediated speech or talk, but just that — a factual claim.

A social fact is information that, by being news validated socially (by its travels through social media), exists as fact because it has been observed. Social observation online involves posting, tweeting, re-tweeting, linking, and so on — but first, observation (paying attention). Social facts come into existence in this way — and once in existence, can accrue a life story according to their ability to survive and persist past being new news.

The social fact established in social media makes no claim to authority but instead, having been spoken (tweeted), inherits the value added by its speaker. This is why we believe in influence, as followers or as those invested in having it.

Media, by definition, create reality. They do this in part by covering real events, of course, but in their coverage they produce a reality of their own. One that is observed, interpreted, and narrated by the medium in the course of production. And observed, interpreted and narrated in turn by audiences tuned in.

The question then becomes: If mass and social media both serve to produce and circulate news in realtime (their respective means of doing so being increasingly less distinct), what is knowledge? What is it to be informed, and what is the relationship between information, being informed, and being knowledgeable? Having more information does not make us better informed. Having more information sooner only makes us more quickly informed, but again, not necessarily better.

At what point then does a culture produce knowledge from information? How is knowledge created from news?

It would seem that knowledge should be more than fact, more than news. That it ought to have validity for what it claims. That it make a claim upon the individual on the basis of being valid, for reasons that connect to more than what has been claimed. This is a philosophical point, and if you don’t believe in the value of rational thought, is but a footnote.

Speaking philosophically, however, the value of a claim raised is in its validity for speaker and listener. The validity of a claim to which speaker and listener accept, if not agree to, the reasons that validate the claim, not only results in an acceptable fact. It results in a relationship between speaker and listener. This is immeasurably valuable, for it raises talk from idle chit chat to a form of interaction that can bind its participants to one another. It makes the magical art of conversation.

Only claims that can be accepted or rejected as being agreeable fall into this category — statements not of fact (which are true or false), but of validity (which are right or wrong). Knowledge would be information that is not just true, but which is useful because it can bind people by means of agreement about something beyond the recognition of fact.

That something is the mutual recognition of individuals engaged in a tradition without which we would wither: talk that not only creates its content but which also supplies feelings exchanged voluntarily between people who agree to spend some time giving each other their attention.

This experience is not merely valuable because it is social. In binding people for a stretch of time, and in producing a sense of mutual acceptance (if the claims are valid, speaker and listener are validated also — hence the magic), the interpersonal and social relations formed accrue value valid in the future. We create a future, project our hopes, anticipations, and expectations, and involve others in them, because of this. Not because of information, content, or fact. But because of a kind of claim (to shared validity) by means of which we can now make choices.

This is all there is to society. Individuals capable of getting along, on the basis of what they know, knowing too that others can accept what they know and thus accept them, too. All of this comes about by means of communication, or talk.

If talk is essential to society and its reproduction, does the talk enabled by social media raise the value of of shared cultural stock of knowledge? The stuff in which we trade in order to also maintain our relationships? The stuff whose value not only makes us a specific society, and its cultures and subcultures, but also the all important trust and respect that make us capable of choosing and acting?

In the midst of the realtime revolution, and the rapid acceleration of news, do we become more knowledgeable? Does the realtime web accelerate the production of knowledge? Or does it just speed up the distribution of news, and lend a hand in surfacing and establishing what constitutes the social facts of our online worlds?

We might conjecture that realtime detracts from the sustained attention and effort demanded of knowledge production, by distraction as well as by sheer noise and confusion. Or we might suppose that realtime is simply the power law at work, and a means in some cases of vetting and surfacing the social facts that matter — after which perhaps knowledge forms along the tail.

This is an open question, and I don’t take sides and can see the merits of either perspective. But there is also a third possibility. It is that the distribution of news in realtime, rapidly and broadly laying down layer upon layer of social sediment not only grounds mediated social realities but also supplies communication with opportunities for connection. It would then be the case that connections among social media users matter as much as what they talk about. The question would then be: how strong are the connections? For the question to raise about any audience is always: How can it be moved, and what is it capable of?

Perhaps, by means of this third possibility, social news serves as a vehicle for relating and connecting. A common stock of information with which to discuss the stuff that really matters. The notion would then be that news has value as a form, for it is helping to build a shared cultural language — a requirement all the more acute in open and diversified populations like those of social media. Such that when events and of consequence occur, communication already has its legs.

But it is also possible that social media creates its own reality, one valuable for those engaged with it, marginally valuable to those who don’t, and worth observing by mass media and institutions for whom general and topical news needs to be monitored. Personally, I would be more comfortable with what we have built if there were more “real” conversation. And if the medium were designed to sustain this.

The bias introduced by the medium’s unique way of engaging and separating us in the sustained activity of paying each other attention can get in the way. This may be a passing phase, a consequence of how today’s tools function (twitter, in particular), and one that we are moving through as connectivity and mediated interaction become ubiquitous. But if this is the case, new tools are needed, and prior to that, demand for them must exist.

The inviter

This is in lieu of a theoretical description, analytical observation, or research summary. It will read as fiction, but any resemblance to real people is entirely intentional. I will attempt a kind of genetic writing, hoping to conjure the essence and personality of just one kind of social media user from within the details of experience. I can write only a vignette, but if this works, further vignettes already suggest themselves for additional kinds of users. I have more than a dozen of these personas in mind and online as a kind of personas 2.0.

This is an experiment.

….

We entered the club to the dark thump of a set well on its way to epic. Voices rose as we clustered around the bar, jostling for position and plunging into pockets for the fresh ATM twenties that would serve to secure the bartender’s attention. There is no better way to get first in line than to make an offering of a twenty. It suggests a round in ways that a ten cannot, and promises surplus for tipping far above a five. Fives may work for a beer; but a fresh twenty is that much more.

Still leaning over the warm wet circles gathering quickly on the counter top, I caught Mel in my peripheral vision. Flyers in hand, she was cutting her way through the crowd towards us, a look of genuine enthusiasm pulling the smile wide on her face.

No sooner had I placed my order than she broke her way through the thoroughfare and foist upon me a handful of flyers. “Here take these this is going to go off Adrian You have to come Everyone’s going to be there What are you doing Saturday Here give these to your friends You have to come!” [It occurred to me that here was a girl who'd make a marketer's dream come true.]

“Saturday? But I’m here now Mel What are you doing Saturday Are you going to be there?” But she was onto my friends already, her fist rapidly emptying of its cargo of lurid party details, DJ names and locations set against disco balls with typefaces inclined and glowing just a bit too much for my taste but just right for the idiom.

My friends and I huddled to exchange glances and toasts, laughter ensuing over the bundles of cards we each now held clenched in our left hands, flyers enough to launch a club ourselves, numbering more than we could possibly give away, especially as we were all here now. But they print those things in quantities only a printer could fathom, ostensibly for purposes of economy of scale, but really just to litter the city with flat printed fantasies and soundless images of another epic night to come.

[It occurred to me that we would each that night make a deposit of flyers to a nearby garbage can, our inclinations being to set our Saturday plans no sooner than Saturday night, at which point we would collectively text one another in a disordered attempt to recall the time and location of the gig in question, hoping that one amongst us might preside over an unlimited plus one guest list option.]

Those parties may have each been designed and distributed one at a time, the thankless efforts of budding designers accumulating on the club floor like the edges of so many sheets of card stock trimmed to contain a four-sided bleed. But to us they were really one long party, a party repeated, a Saturday in never-ending recurrence — places, DJs, times were a blur and had they occurred back to back we’d have been hard pressed to tell the end of one set from the start of the next.

We had no need to keep them separate. Mel was always there for us with the deets for the next one. No party passed without the requisite stack of freshly-minted flyers announcing the one to follow. This was just how it worked. Her pleasure was in the organizing, setting the stage and building anticipation, always for the next one. Our pleasure was always now, a long now lasting nights and weekends of undifferentiated partying, each club and bar but a temporary place-holder for our roving group of sworn night owls.

Her pleasure was the next one, though for her, too, the next was the same as this one, for it mattered more that we were all there together than that new faces join the scene.

We had a family, a tribe of miscreants and misfits loose by the week and tight by weekend, no more troubled than many, no less dysfunctional than most. It was her pleasure that we knew where we were going, ours that she kept us organized. Had we been elsewhere, perhaps she would have captured a different crew. Had we been elsewhere, perhaps we would have found a different organizer. What worked for us must have worked similarly for many other groups and tribes.

….

Today, those flyers still come flying off the presses (in truth they’re lifted out of printer trays but the imagery lacks alacrity), but there is twitter and Facebook, too, to gather up friends and knit the happenings and plan ahead with. Securing the ambivalences of relations by means of scheduling the future is a pastime that escapes me, but which I see working well for many who are better organized than me. Me, I like spontaneity, and the weekend exists in order to bracket a stretch of open (like parentheses in a sentence, doing time).

I am best with my relations when they are concrete; abstractions confuse me and I become knotted in the tufts that blemish an otherwise smooth social fabric. I like conversation and the making it up of it all. I’m a shitty correspondent. [It occurred to me that for Mel, there was a shadow family in play, and that being at the center of events might have colluded with resolving past family roles and dynamics.]

It was a good thing to have Mel, and her skill at making sure there was a time and place for the rest of us to get lost in. I have yet to create an invite online, and I make a good host only on the occasion that a friend borrows my pad and does all the planning. My skills start when the first guests arrive; Mel’s in getting them there.

….

Mel is the Inviter. What she does naturally and for which she has a gift, satisfies in some ways both her sense of Self and helps to sustain her social relationships. She has standing and position, a reputation, and fans. While she puts in work, she seems to be deeply motivated, and she takes care to make it right for everyone. She does this not as a host, for once the party starts it’s as good as over for Mel. Rather, she creates the conditions and attends to the setting.

[And it more than just occurs to me that when the day and age of micro-targeting arrives, she will be the go-to person for event discounts, social announcements, and group and graph marketing. For her status among friends and peers lends her recommendations a credibility that far exceeds that of any brand or advertiser. And her relationships include a social obligation that costs nothing to meet, for it is properly contextualized, and naturally social.]

….

Social networking works when you can account for the diverse personality types that you, and any social media service, depend upon for active engagement. These types are real, and whether you know them by instinct, or consult professionals and research, building to meet the habits of their social skills, interests, and competencies is the only way to properly anticipate user experience considerations in social media.

I have been meaning to write about Likes and users interests for quite some time. But the matter is complicated. So rather than wait to write the perfect post, I’m going to lay down some cornerstones, sketch a few concepts and maybe develop some key arguments.

I’ll begin with a bit of the raison d’etre. Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookmarks — a simple expression of interest in a bit of social data. That is, a selection of one thing among many things, an expression simplified in order to communicate to an audience.

Let’s break this down somewhat. For the Like isn’t a clear and direct expression of the user’s interest, or like. The reasons for this are several-fold. (I have written on this in the past, but a brief summary can’t hurt.)

One gesture is not capable of capturing differences in degree. Clearly, when we like something, our like varies by degree

A one-word gesture is not a linguistic statement. This limits the expression of interest. There will be ambiguity in the selection itself, owing to:

• the reason for liking is not provided
• the kind of like is not provided
• the purpose of sharing the like is not stated
• the audience intended in sharing the like has some ambiguity (due to the medium)
• any interest in soliciting conversation or commentary is ambivalent

For example, liking a song is not the same as liking the band that performs the song. Liking a band is not the same as liking a genre, a time period, or a category of music. Liking a song online in order to save it for later, to share it with friends, to add it to one’s history, folders, or other collections, or even to solicit the interest of others — these are all differences.

We should be able to agree that the Like, as an online gesture of interest, reduces differences to a single degree. And there are yet more problems with the Like.

Liking online is a social act. Even when it’s an individual act of social bookmarking, it’s a act committed in front of an audience. Whether that audience pays attention doesn’t matter. Fact is, there are many individual Likes that are committed with the knowledge that others may see them.

If social action is intrinsic to the gesture of Liking, then we can agree that it is impossible to determine what’s intended by liking. The individual interest is compromised by the social action of sharing that interest.

This gets interesting if we think about the importance of social gestures to capturing and creating value in online social media. We have opted for the simplicity of user experience over the clarity of more differentiated symbolic system. That’s fine. But we need to now be aware of the consequences.

We have noted that the Like introduces ambiguities of intent, of degree, of relation (type), and of communication. The Like also introduce ambiguities into the quantity and quality of value created.

Consider that for many social systems, business models rest on capturing a user’s evaluation and selection of an object, or bit of content, such that user participation adds value to that content. That’s more or less the gist of most commercial social media. (It’s not the key value proposition of communication tools — their interest is in building habits of use, such that their activity can be paired to content experiences elsewhere or later.)

The value added, then, matters. Content is objective, has objective attributes that we can store and by means of which we can organize content (a store; taxonomies and categories, for search and findability). Social engagement with that content adds social evaluations.

These subjective selections and choices create taste. Taste is captured in trends — and can correspond to social groups and identities. Furthermore, popular tastes can be used to drive exposure to content. For better or worse, popularity alone is a reliable means of organizing and navigating content (and people).

I have seen — as have you — a number of systems built around interest pivoting. These use the interests captured from user participation to create navigation to users (e.g. members of a dating site); and to create contexts of interest for the purpose of advertising.

The notion of using interests (same as Likes) for social navigation would seem to make perfect sense. But there is the matter of: for what? If an interest captured says something about my taste, the next question must be: in what contexts do I wish my social interactions to be an extension of my interests or tastes?

In dating, for example, I may (not) want to find somebody like me. I may (not) want to find somebody who likes what I like. I may (not) want to find somebody who likes exactly this (book, song, band, movie, actor, tv show…). Where interests are used as pivots and views of a system’s membership, differences of degree and type matter quite a bit.

The dating site is but one example. I suspect that many companies in the social space are betting on the value add of user interests captured within a social context. The promises of reviews, recommendations, social and realtime filtering, social search, and more invest heavily in the assumption that social commerce trumps conventional commerce. Social commerce extracts the distinctions of tastes; non-social commerce relies on uitility, functionality, price, and other “objective” measure of value.

What’s more, any decent brand knows that it has no choice but to go social. For it’s in social commerce that branding communicates (socially); becomes socially relevant, and accrues the narrative and imagistic benefits of socialized taste-making.

I can return us now briefly to the gesture of the Like. We now have a more differentiated understanding of what the Like represents and means. We can see that it is a unique type of sign that signifies value and interest in ways mission critical to social media. We know, too, that the Like alone does not capture, convey, or communicate all of its distinctions.

We can see that some of these may be supplied by means of interactions and practices — in short contexts in which gestures of interest are captured or presented, used to organize results, to filter among content sources, or used to frame views of people and content.

We can see, in other words, that the gesture and expression alone are inadequate to either capture or represent a user’s interests. And we can see what we will need to explore next: the ways in which social interactions and practices may clarify the value of the value added.

I’ve been doing an awful lot of talking to potential clients in the past weeks. As a consequence, my social interaction design pitch has tightened up. I’m going to attempt a brief and concise (un-Chan-like) summary of why it is that I believe social media startups and services ought to know their social interaction design requirements.

I think that all companies involved in social media should have an interaction and communication model. This applies to those building end user experiences using social media, as well as those using social media for branding, service, sales, or other campaigns.

This model captures what users (will) do with the service. It identifies social elements, activities, content, and much more — all of which are provided by user participation. There’s no understating the importance of this: the process and outcome of your interaction model definitions will center your efforts on user-centric requirements, and cement your internal guidelines on paths forward through scale and population dynamics.

Interaction models are necessary because features and functionalities alone are just dead operations performed on information, data, and other bits of content.
The social value added to any system is added by users.

It’s added by virtue of their interests — which vary by personality and social habits. It’s added by virtue of these interests being social — they are meaningful to others, and are visible, too.

It’s added by virtue of these activities being captured and represented — users see their own actions reflected back to them, and so their individual presence becomes socially relevant.

And it’s added because social activities communicate — this tells us that activities take audiences into account, and that audiences create context in which social participation is grounded.

Your social interaction model will articulate what users will do. Not just in terms of interacting with your site or application, but interacting with others. In fact the crux of social interaction design is the recognition that in social media, the interaction is among users, not between the user and the interface.

While it is an abstraction, it will reflect coherent social practices in which presence, situations, contexts of action, turns of communication, arrangements of users and audiences, and distribution of attention all can be accounted for. It will be able to relate an individual user’s interests, personally and socially, to a number of relevant activities. And it will account for the social practices that can develop around use of a tool; and anticipate the interactions and content that result from the social outcomes of participation by users.

Whether you fashion your social interaction model by means of meetings and whiteboarding, copying others, or shooting for the moon is up to you. But just as you know the benefits of a marketing requirements doc and product requirements doc, so too, the social interaction design requirements capture and codify your company’s social aims and expectations.

More akin to the MRD, which tends to focus on use cases and scenarios, than the PRD, which identifies product feature requirements, the SxD doc is aggressively user-centric. This owes to the simple fact that we have little but our own observations of user behavior, and our understanding of what people do with social tools, for and in front of whom, and why, with which to identify user interests.

We need to build on the basis of interests because social tool use is deeply personal, and being social, often strays from the “needs, goals, and objectives” that govern conventional software use. Users engage voluntarily. We need not know exactly why — many users couldn’t tell you this anyways, and would fib about some cases. They are interested. That’s all that matters — because as long as we have this in mind, we will be thinking from the user’s perspective. And that’s what counts — thinking from user, not product, not business, not brand, not company, not feature perspectives.

(Transferring funds from savings to checking: a discrete transaction for which software is reliably efficient and in which the user experience is measurably successful or not, and the software performance effective, or not.)

Knowing your social interaction model focuses your mind, aligns it with user interests, and attunes it to the social outcomes that emerge from interaction. It’s as relevant and critical for its role in orienting your efforts as it is capturing social use cases.

Let’s say, for example, that you need to create trust. Trust among a user and a brand. Or between a user and another user. Trust is not a quantity, not a thing, and is not possessed by either a brand or a user. Trust describes a relation. It can be extended and given, just as it can be withdrawn and canceled. It is built on the basis of risk, for without risk, trust is unnecessary. It can be offloaded to system properties and mechanisms, where it functions as reliability, confidence, and dependability.

It can be represented, as in a badge, points, or other status- and reputation-endowing icon. But then, the bias introduced by the representations themselves must be taken into account. For they will inform and shape the behaviors of some users. And when this occurs, trust leaks, and leaks can be toxic.

You may not want to represent trust, to leverage it as a value added by social participation to content (products, brands, people). You may, instead, want to build relational trust among users. You may, in other words, be a LinkedIn and not a Yelp. Trust built among users might be realized as a measure of reputation capital, in which case you are dealing with the perception of trust. If, however, you are an OKCupid and you wish to capture interpersonal trust, valid and reliable experiences matter more than peer perceptions.

And that’s just trust. There are many more social attributes cited as sought-after social value adds. (As well as many that companies wish to avoid.) In addition to trust (be it reputation and perception; experiential and interpersonal; systemic and functional…) there are: desire, competition, collaboration, affinity, buzz, popularity, and much more.

Each is a social attribute brought into existence only by virtue of participating, engaged, individuals. Channeled, captured, articulated, leveraged, protected, constrained and so on by your system, yes. But produced only because users tacitly understand and voluntarily (with interest) participate in collusion with your desired efforts.

This is not the kind of social engineering you achieve on the fly. And the high failure rate of social media startups is testimony to this. Millions have been thrown down the drain by entrepreneurs who could identify what they’d built their platform for, but who couldn’t tell you how it worked, socio-logically speaking.

Users are not all alike. And most of us do not amble about with multiple user types and differentiated social practices in mind. We assume that our users are like us. Well they’re not. They don’t think, want, express, interpret, respond, stick around, or leave like us. Just ask a few of them. They won’t see your product for what you want, won’t use it as you hoped, and won’t establish the same tight affinity for it as you have (out of necessity).

So how are you going to capture the fleeting and transient attention and interest of an audience already distracted? Only on the basis of the engagement of others. For which you have designed for experiences that are diverse and multi-faceted. Interactive and ongoing.

A final thought on the importance of your social interaction model. All systems are dynamic and changing. New user habits and social practices emerge as tools and technologies make them possible; others then pass and fade away. There’s an element, a strong one, of the event, to all social media.

As event planners know when to schedule the coffee break, and when to open the bar, so, too, your social roadmap should anticipate future developments. Even if you cannibalize early practices for the sake of shaping new ones. A good model will not be stiff and inflexbile, but rather agile and dynamic.

That’s probably enough on this for now. There’s a book in here. But it’s a Friday.

I’m back to ranting today, so I’ll keep this one as brief as possible. I was going to write about something completely different, until I took a peek at a tweet from friend and SNCR colleague Tom Foremski on influence. The fact that I clicked through proves to me that Tom has some influence. The fact that I retweeted his tweet confirms, according to the research he blogged about, that he has influence. If you read this and tweet about it, then I’ll have influence too.

Isn’t that simple and wonderful?

This influence thing gets under my skin. Twitter is a communications platform. For every tweet there’s effectively a speaker and listeners. Because it’s mediated, asynchronous, and because it’s twitter, the message isn’t always heard. Sometimes it’s heard much later. Sometimes, heard only because a number of folks say the same thing at roughly the same time. Sometimes it’s heard by those in the adjacent room, because somebody took the message down the hallway. Sometimes it’s heard because it’s picked up by media coverage.

In all cases, however, there is a speaker and a listener. So why then do so many of the industries that invest in social media insist on audience size (followers) as a means of measuring audience reach? And why is the more sophisitcated approach — influence, not absolute follower count — so often just a repackaging of the subscription/circulation model? Sure, retweets count, but when people talk and others listen, it’s never as simple as the measurement of what’s been quoted and cited.

When I did a small project with Klout on their influencer categories, we were able to go from four to sixteen. And we left some out! We found users who relate to twitter as if it were just a publishing medium. We found those who relate to their friends, and for whom tweeting is a kind of open, slow, chat.

We found users invested in their reputations and image as either social figures, experts, critics, and more. We found those for whom there was a strong degree of connecting peers and others socially — for whom twitter really is a social scene — and those for whom it was more a mini-Me-dium, capable of producing both the image of celebrity and its associated social capital.

in all cases we could have done more with more data, but it was clear even with what we had that users adopt very different habits of @naming, following, reciprocating, re-tweeting, listing, and more. All make sense from the user’s relationship to twitter. But none would provide the simplistic and reductionist formula of follower = popular, or influence = retweetability.

Those are measures, well, measures of measurements. They’re numbers and have as much meaning as they can reliably represent. Which, IMHO, is relatively little and possibly misleading. It’s easy to get followers. It’s also easy to get retweeted. There are bots and networks on twitter engaged in gaming both. But where’s the value, to a brand, in paying attention to those kinds of “influence” metrics?

If traffic slows on the freeway as rubber-necking turns its attention to a roadside accident, is that influence? Or how about the guy leading a small fleet of cops on a high-speed chase while eyewitness news feeds the whole thing back to the network? Is there influence in the crowd that forms in passing? A mob that runs riot down the street? How about the influence of a stadium crowd? And if the concert is streaming live, who’s influential — the band, the crowd in attendance, the band’s followers online, their retweeters, or ustream?

I just think the approach is over-simplified and a bit remedial. The fact of a crowd, eg audience number, tells us nothing about the reason for the gathering. It might be transient and owe all to crowd psychology. Or it might be the single most riveting event in human history. Say a moon landing or a world cup.

Or take the quote and citation that makes the rounds as a headline or a newsbite. It may indeed be of some import and significance. But it may also just be a bit of news. Fact is that from the numbers, traffic flow, distribution, rise and decay of this one retweet or citation, we don’t know.

How can a quantitative measure of audience size tell us about popularity, or a retweet count tell us about influence?

What is measured about audience in gross numerical terms; or sifted out of traffic as quotations, provides no insight into the intent or meaning created by speakers, or the consensus and agreement reached with listeners.

Perhaps some marketers just really need to segment audiences. Perhaps their reporting requires numbers and quantitive trends. Then they’ll get just that. But those metrics will say nothing about the motives and intentions of twitter users; will say naught of the reasons those users try to move their followers and readers (trust? expertise? admiration? pure celebrity? insight? newsworthiness?). And will say little about why their followers are moved to read, follow, or retweet.

In any communication system, “influence” is a relation, between speaker and listener. The speaker doesn’t have influence because she speaks or for what she says. It is only the listener’s attention and acceptance or rejection of what she says that results in what we call influence. It is always a coupled, doubly-dependent, reciprocating and mutually-influential system. And you cannot measure the value created and paid for with mutually sustained attention (yes, even twitter is mutually-sustained attention. It’s just really episodic and discontinuous.)

It takes two to tango. Or you can drop your partner and count the people in the room. Call it a hit.

I strayed far from the report in question, but here’s the conclusion, as cited by Tom:

“Given the mushrooming popularity of Social Media, vast efforts are devoted by individuals, governments and enterprises to getting attention to their ideas, policies, products,and commentary through social networks.

But the very large scale of the networks underlying Social Media makes it hard for any of these topics to get enough attention in order to rise to the most trending ones.

Given this constraint, there has been a natural shift on the part of the content generators towards targeting those individuals that are perceived as influential because of their large number of followers.

This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected.

This is a reflection of the fact that for information to prop-agate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.

Moreover, since our measure of influence is not specific to Twitter it is applicable to many other social networks.

This opens the possibility of discovering influential individuals within a network which can on average have a further reach than others in the same medium regardless of their popularity.”

from Influence and Passivity in Social Media – HP Labs Research

I’d like to mediate briefly on a topic that’s also a recurring interest of mine — and one relevant to social interaction design. It’s the matter of user behavior. It circulates now and then within the design community, and when it does, it seems to crash like a rogue asteroid tumbling through a beltway of unhinged rocks and streaking stars.

This occurs, I think, because in matters of behavior, there are two fundamentally opposed views. Those from the perspective of intention, motive, agency, and other user-centric explanations of behavior-as-activity. And those from the perspective of behavior as response, reaction, informed and shaped by architectures, features, functions, and other forms of planned organization.

We know from older debates on human agency that behavior can be an expression of individual meanings, or a response to situations and contexts. Both are accurate in their own way. Behavior does of course manifest the inner experience and life of the mind. But life lived in place and time is always situated, and as such our choices necessarily reflect our experiences of what we perceive and how we interpret.

What behavior is not — and this is my philosophical inclination, is automatic, reactive, and direct response to stimulation. It’s not a chemical, physical, or other kind of simple response. If it involves meaningful activity, it necessarily involves interpretation and awareness.

The matter of behavior in social media and social tools, then, can never be about getting users to do what we want them to do. It is never as simple as that. Firstly, we don’t have that kind of access: our users do what they do not in response to our designs, but in response to other users (from which they develop a sense of what it means to them and where they fit). Secondly, behavior is an inadequate concept for social interaction and communication. These are more complicated and more inter-subjective (that is, dynamic) than is suggested by the idea of behavior.

Consider a conversation. Which statement or response would you ascribe to what cause? What behavior — verbal, physical, gestural — is explained by what stimulus? It’s simply impossible to identity the behavior response because in communication and interaction, the activity is too complex to be treated reductively.

But if we need to think differently about our interest in user behavior, this only means that we relinquish the notion that behavior is ours to control. We can’t get the kids to sit down and pay attention. But we can put chairs in the room, and install a teacher and a blackboard at the helm. We can begin the period at a set time, end class at a later time, and repeat as necessary.

In short, we can engender habits, routines, and activities. We can’t create norms or practices out of thin air. But we can give them a pretty good chance.

in doing so, it’s important that we maintain our focus on the user. To continue with the analogy, we’re interested in students learning, not in education. Education is the abstraction of learning. Education will occur if we have designed for learning.

It’s the same in designing for social media. Trust will occur if we design for dynamics of risk and trust-building (there’s no trust without risk). Reputation will occur if we design to feature experts. Loyalty occurs if we design for ongoing communication and relationships.

While it’s not always simple and straightforward, designing towards the dynamics of social interaction embraces and leverages the forces that are of consequence to users. Users engage with people and meanings, acts and social contexts.

This is where Facebook Places is about to trump Foursquare. Badges will strike many users as an unnecessary and secondary activity when place-based actions become part of the Facebook newsfeed.

Yes, there will be users who continue to play for the sake of earning and wearing badges. but the social utility of Facebook’s Place checkins solves a far more substantial point of resistance to geo-location. Namely, the “who cares” problem. My friends are more likely to care than my followers. Facebook has more of my friends than Foursquare.

So the matter of user behavior is approached best in terms of social interaction and its contexts — not as response to onscreen features, functionalities, and design. I think that as a field, we have a ways to go yet in naming and organizing the field of observed behaviors and practices. And there are many not yet observed, but which we might anticipate when technologies make certain kind of interactions possible.

Likewise, I think many of our social tools and services could benefit from a close look at their interaction models. If not only to catalog and identify present behaviors and uses, to better set targets aligned to real user practices.

Andrew Keen was on a British TV program last night called Newsnight. They have recently hosted Clay Shirky, and I wasn’t surprised to see Andrew interviewed. Of course, he’s from the home country, too, so that fits nicely.

He was asked about his views on identity. Namely, Google’s Eric Schmidt’s declaration that some young ones may need to change their identities when they grow up. Simply to escape the bad press that trails behind them — or perhaps we should say, the bad search results.

Keen’s view, besides being terrified of a trend within tech circles for public identity and transparency, is that we have many identities. He loathes the notion that in the Facebook era we have but one identity (a statement made by Zuckerberg, it seems). And that Facebook, in particular, owns that identity.

I would disagree with Andrew that we have multiple identities. I think we have multiple relations, and in those relations may present a different face, may behave according to context and expectations, may play a role, and so on. Behavior is not identity. But I completely agree that in our social presence we’re more than just one “identity” — we’re multi-faceted and capable of playing many different parts.

If the question is whether or not we have one address online — that is one identity online — then of course this should be ours to own and to access, not Facebook’s.

But the conversation Eric Schmidt managed to poke is not about online identity. It’s about privacy and protections and the fact that many of us do not think about legacy from that point in the future when the social capital gained by partying is now a withering tattoo — an homage to youth best kept out of view.

Keen is right to be terrified. The culture of now is the culture of realtime talk and interaction — mediated yes, but still basically social talk. The culture of now is conversation, it’s not information. But it leaves information behind. And as far as we can tell those companies that make a living from the association of information and advertising have every reason in the world to capture realtime social content for its realtime business value.

One act of communication — one photo shared, one comment posted or location tweeted, creates two kinds of value. Value as conversational message; and value as information saved (to be mined, analyzed for semantic refs and sentiment, etc).

Are the consequences of the latter, where information drives the social web economy, the responsibility of the former, where people like us are simply using social web tools to commune and communicate? Or should the organizations that profit from realtime content protect rights and privacy of all those of us who use the medium — even though we use it, often, precisely because it creates partial public exposure?

There’s no social contract in place for this. And if history is any guide, tears will flow and lawyers will keep the couriers busy. It struck me as remarkably out of line that Schmidt would say such a thing of so many of his customers. But I had to agree.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I see it, social business and use of social tools in the enterprise remains a nut to be cracked. Promises bubbled up last year that the medium’s next frontier, and challenge to insanely great ideas, lay not in the open but in the semi-porous, if not closed spaces of the corporate world. Word was, from folks including yours truly, that social tools promised organizational transformation, if not learning, and ultimately, a new breed of knowledge management. Second opinion was that the tools might indeed produce ambient knowledge, informal learning, cross-functional collaboration, and much more of the sorts of organizational processes befitting a distributed, virtualized, and decentralized information economy.

But more than a year if not two, later, it’s clear that twitter in the enterprise, even if it’s called yammering, or chattering, or signalling, is not the best we can do.

Change comes not from by importing or transposing technologies and techniques from one context into another. New tools create change no more than new generals end conflicts. But we know this, fortunately, for we’re user-centric and inclined to understand user experience and social practices. Uses, scenarios, contexts — those are where change occurs.

Change occurs most readily as a response to rules. Rules are the simplest means by which to change behaviors and engineer new social practices. Because rules apply directly to action and communication — they serialize and sequence it; they couple it and create dependencies; they attach meanings to outcomes; and they define procedures. Rules are, according to sociologist Anthony Giddens, inherently transformative.

It is not in the technologies and tools then, but in organizational practices, relations, roles, positions, functions, and such-like that change may be brought into view and given real legs. I’d like to reflect briefly on one such use of rules, and point out, by means of a caveat, some of its limitations.

Before I do so, however, I’d like to take quick note of a few obvious approaches to the employment of social technologies in the enterprise. One is in the adoption of social communication tools; we mentioned Yammer and Chatter already. These reflect the natural interest of corporate technologists in status updating and tweeting. When new practices become popular, adopt them. I’ll write more about the limits to realtime culture in the enterprise some other time. But matters of audience and of publics, followings, and attention should be fairly obvious considerations.

Use of market and economic processes and systems is another approach taken by some to enterprise innovation and organizational culture. Use of social tools, and more creatively, adaptation of exchange systems and transactional processes for the purposes of idea markets (Spigit.com) makes good use of rules. It also shifts the burden of participation and communication from the user to system processes. The more that the system does, and the less the user needs to contribute, the greater the adoption and use.

If you want to engender change culture and management within an organization, you may need to embed social technologies closer to real individuals and their organizational roles and functions. It is there that you will want to use social tools to transform both employee perceptions/views and tasks; create new networks and channels of communication; and emphasize new and different, possibly indirect, outcomes. But this entails real change — not just behavioral change or technology-specific changes to participation.

A number of additional models, including use of individual incentives and use of cultural norms, may be identified also. But I wish to skip them here in order to return to my initial concern.

This concern is whether our use of synthetic, that is, artificial social relations, we get results that truly benefit organizations. There are two issues here. First, is whether or not use of synthetic rules engenders artificial or “non-serious” relations within which participants make unserious choices. Second, is whether or not the value created when rules of interaction and communication are synthetic is of value to the organization.

In other words, the first question is whether use of rule-based processes, systems, and mechanisms like games, markets, voting, and so on changes the way in which participants relate to the activity. The second question asks whether or not the value added by user participation is real organizational value, or is game value.

I don’t have a neat answer to this question. It’s been around with learning theorists for ever. Do lessons learned in one context transfer easily to another? Or is learning, and activity, context-specific? Kids given conflict-reduction games and collaborative exercises in which to build respect and trust will still get on each others’ within minutes of presenting their collaborative creations to the rest of the class.

If we design organizational “games,” or use game mechanics to promote participation among employees, do we get results that add value to the company and which reveal genuine employee interests and relations? Or do we get the value choices made by competitors in a spirited simulation, a resource-bound activity whose players choose according to artificial incentives and in a state of non-functional, extra-curricular play?

My gut sense tells me that we should add a caveat to the use of game mechanics in serious social enterprise platforms and tools. While games may incent participation, it’s not clear to me that they lead to results better than “serious” organizational change. The latter would require personal, and specific, implementation of social tools — agility in execution, if you will. Possible, but making use of community managers as much as IT and HR.

I would like to hear what you think. The social enterprise space seems wide open and at the same time remarkably promising. Socialities and relations, because they involve actual power, real authority, functions/roles/tasks, and employment. Use of social tools to unbuckle tacit and latent know hows and relations makes perfect sense. But the (understandably) natural resistance to social tools needs workarounds. Game mechanics strike me as an early bet — but probably not a lasting approach.

The manuscript that rests peacefully in a folder on this hard drive does not contain silly opening sentences such as this one. It’s a serious, perhaps too serious, work on social interaction design. In it I attempt to lay out a theory of relations: mental relations, psychological, and social relations, as preferred by social media. Relations to which the medium lends itself, and on which it relies to supply “compelling” user experiences.

It’s a notional book, insofar as there’s no research available to “prove” what I claim. A hundred years of self psychology, slightly fewer years of sociology and anthropology, and some fifty years of media theory. But no research. That may come next — I have the research questions outlined. But research costs and takes money, and I am not an academic nor do I have institutional funding.

The first hours of returning to twitter and to blogging were interesting. After a couple months away, I quite literally struggled to compose a tweet. I quite physically battled a sense of alienation and strangeness. Have you taken a couple months off before? If not, then it’s worth a try. (It’s good to quite drinking, quit coffee, start running, and many other things I’ve not yet sustained for two months…) The computer was a computer, not yet my social world. Tweets were written, not yet a simple act of expression.

Coming back from time away provided me with a rare chance to re-experience the novelty, strangeness, and distance that new users must come through — as if undergoing the personal and social transformation engendered by tribal initiation practices and rites of passage.

On the other side of tentative, just beyond hesitation and safely past trepidation, is a zone of comfort and familiarity, friendliness and ease, with both medium and friends who use it. I feel it now as I write this. Only this time I am remind myself that I am after all sitting alone at the kitchen counter with my laptop and a cup of coffee. And that all that I just experienced was as good as an illusion if not also as seductive as a mirage.

It is this individual act of world making that I want to touch on just briefly. Because it’s at the crux of my experience (yours also?), and is the basis of my relational theory of mediated social interaction. The confirmation, mental and physical, of this world making is possible only through distance and separation from habits and routines of media use. I had to become estranged in order to then find my way in again as if as a newbie, able however to recognize and name experiences of re-entry.

Did I say yet that social media design, social interaction design as I call it, is the ultimate user-centric discipline? It is. It is understood and practiced not on a series of design concepts. Those are too neat and tidy to be good analogs of actual social activity. And besides, we know that design concepts serve the purposes of designers, are there to help designers observe, describe, think, create, and ultimately communicate. Besides which, many of them are branded by agencies and little more than the long-winded gobbledy gook and keynote pitchspeak you always suspected it to be.

User behavior and social practices of social tools are not explained, either, by social norms. Social norms are of great service to sociologists, and moreso, anthropologists. But they explain individual behavior on the basis of collective force, cultural, traditional, or other authority (right, wrong, should, shouldn’t). They presume conformity with norms, even when used to describe resistance, subversion, and opposition (for behavior then is still bound by norms). But most of all, they depend on facework and co-presence to account for their force, and media simply raise too many obstacles to normative explanations. Is the self as s/he seems; what role attention seeking; what of anonymity and play; and many more.

But why use norms when you can explain social behavior and outcomes in terms of simple, though mediated, interaction and communication? The trouble is that communication theories, speech pragmatics (what we do when talking), semantics, among other linguistic theories, are also inadequate. Any social designer knows that while icons and graphical elements used for gesture, as gifts, as symbolic tokens (to represent, indicate, reference, or suggest), etc may have meaning, their meaning in a context owes much to their use. How used, for what, by whom. In this way the meaning of a smiley is both fixed and floating. Linguistics, semiotics, and pragmatics give us theories of meaning that describe semantic meanings, gestural indications, signs, and more — but they hail from a world that is written and abstract and representational, not one of social action.

Media theories of writing and recording systems are a big help, and go far to account for distortions and system effects unique to media. Clay Shirky writes convincingly about these kinds of things. But here too, the framework describes effects on a grand scale, and which couldn’t possibly account for the individual user experience in its intention, or in its interpretation. Yes, the internet makes everybody immediately available. Yes, the internet changes the mode of production, rechannels broadcast through social interactions and across actual friend and peer relationships. But do these changes tell us which startup will succeed, and which will fail? If success depends on users?

Systems theories describe epiphenomena well, where system observation and meta data serve to render the invisible visible. In design languages, we have theories of our own, for the elements of design as for the activities of actions. Here, however, our action theories, object theories, and theories of context and use are behind the times. Adequate as they may have been to describing the design of software and systems in which objects, actions, information, and other abstractions required the benefits of consistent and durable conceptualization — these theories have not caught up to a world of mediated social interactions; of views and representations of open, apportioned, or closed publics; of disaggregated distribution and recontextualized communication. Of game or rule-bound interactions, sequenced and serial exchanges, uncoupled posts, and so on. Software design language has not caught up with social uses and is very far behind in its understanding of social outcomes.

We have, in psychology, some great insights into self and alter (the other) that serve many of our needs in explaining the behaviors seen in social media. Relational concepts like introspection, projection, externalization, substitution, and other movements of the reflective and self-reflexive, intentional, and acting subject are critical. We need them to describe how it is that abstracted communication, action, interaction, and social representations become meaningful. How it is that we see and reach through the medium — how it can be that our relations, while having no facework or co-presence, can mean “as if” as much as they would were we in the same room. But again, these notions describe individuals, not social outcomes. They need to be differentiated to accommodate many different kinds of personality, character, social skill, communicative intent, and so on. And this is not easy — particularly because we really only have made those distinctions in the pathological domain. We have no psychological distinctions with which to account for differences created by the amplifying and distorting effects of mediated, non face-to-face communication and interaction. As important as it would be to our conceptual framework, a narcissus-like concept for the reflective public sphere (I see myself as if seen by others in the medium, but those others are in part my invention, as is the social that I imagine they comprise, and so my self as seen by others is really entirely a projection of fantasy, mixed with anticipation and expectation of real and actual behavior) does not exist. The doubling of self in self image and self representation, made possible in social media, needs theorizing.

….

This is the ultimate user centric discipline because it rests entirely on voluntary participation by users. It depends on the user’s ability to act and behave “as if” mediation were not a factor; or to act with and through mediation, as when playing social games.

What I like about the relational approach that I’ve been working towards is its flexibility. Relations are not real. So I don’t have to go about modifying an object theory. Relations are subjective, and describe differences, qualities, directionality, and movement in the way needed to account for mediated social interaction. Objects encourage us to falsely associate causality with an objective object — as if objects were the same one and for all. User centricity means subjectivity. Subjective relation are attachments — the value attached by somebody in a relation to something/somebody is explained as his or her interest. There is no value — there is an attachment of meaning, an association, which could be a response hoped for, a result expected, an achievement earned. It doesn’t matter. What matters are the social dynamics by which some meanings become more relevant and common than others. Foursquare badges are a stupid idea, to 99.99 % of the population. They’re not stupid to those who earn them. The badge, as an object, is meaningless. The actions required to get them; the activities in which they are relevant; the meaning conferred on their owners: those are what matter. (From Foursquare’s perspective, the business relations to badges, and the creative app-like market for new badges, matter also.) It’s social engagement — the participation of others — that leaves behind the content as communication and action with which relational meanings form. And thus from which social binding as well as social meaning simultaneously emerge as new forms of social action.

I hope to get this manuscript out the door some day. It’s so much more difficult to write a book-length work than it is to bang out a blog post. If you think this sounds interesting, do let me know.

In the past months I have been systematically scoping out social media businesses, startups, services, agencies, and more. It’s what us “freelancers” do &emdash; especially now that the industry has matured. I have a filemaker database of more than 650 companies worth tracking. Along with notes, and various other sundry details.

If I were to rush my way through the database, read company descriptions provided by founders, reviews gleaned from techcrunch, killerstartups.com, etc, I would come away with the impression that these were almost all technology companies. That’s the common narrative arc, the identity by so many efforts in this space. And the professional culture that unites so many of us located in and around the Silicon Valley.

And yet so many of these companies are not technology companies. Not from the perspective of what they promise to better and improve. Not from the perspective of the business opportunity they seek to create or extend. Not, certainly, from the perspective of individual users, clusters of friends, groups, or communities.

If this were the age of the television, perusing local company profiles might read like a directory of television manufacturers, broadcasters, transmitters and relay providers, cable guys and dish installers. A Detroit of post-industrial industry, risen out of the early and pioneering PC and software years to mature through database, operating system, hardware, software and finally internet business eras. One epoch after another of technological innovation and business value creation.

And yet from the user’s perspective, very little of this matters. Sure, it may matter (a lot, even) to local pundits and industry experts &emdash; because this is our narrative. But the audience and marketplace of people expected to adopt and embrace this stuff couldn’t care less about funding rounds, acquisitions, and other milestones on the roadmap of entrepreneurial success.

Technology’s manufacture is transparent to the user. It neither gets in the way nor attracts attention to itself. We’ve always designed to that principle: the user experience should not have to attend to interactions with the technology itself.

Which allows me to return to my initial impressions, having sampled a large number of startup and social media profiles and reviews: where is the social? Or to back up, where is the appreciation for utility and value, as well as for interaction and social relations? Where are the descriptions and insights into what users want; how users behave; how user experiences are improved; how social outcomes are shaped and designed?

We are, after all, in the entertainment industry now. (And it is no accident that much of the Silicon Valley’s growth now takes place in New York and Los Angeles, where the content and advertising people are). Social media are an extension of the mass media &emdash; are just another medium. Granted, a medium in which content is contributed; distribution is free and occurs by means of communication; and interactivity creates worlds of possibilities.

Those of us here in Bay Area startups and social companies are creating content &emdash; content of experience. We’re creating entertainment &emdash; pleasure of experience. We’re creating routines and habits and reshaping relationships &emdash; surfacing and enabling what used to be tacit and invisible. We’re bundling information together with actionables to change consumer habits &emdash; granting power to consumers and forcing transparencies upon brands and their advertising.

All these things we do, and yet we self-identify as technology. This is not technology. These are not technical problems, solved by means of technical solutions. We make the infrastructure of experiences. We don’t make guns &emdash; we make the pain and strategy and the fear and the hope and the charge and the sniping. We don’t make engines, wheels, dashboards, and back seats &emdash; we make the driving, the getting there, the waiting in traffic and the weaving and rear-ending and making out at the town’s last drive in.

So where are the descriptions of value, of utility, experience, of individual, group, social, and public habits of use and practice? Do we not have the language for it? Is this just how we identify with what we are doing? Is it too difficult to see that we’re not making TV’s but creating shows? Do we lack confidence in what our “technologies” are for? What if we suspect that only a small number of us will ever take to this stuff &emdash; is that why we prefer to describe what our stuff does rather than what people do with our stuff?

Once in a while, I come across a great company description. I get a sense for what the company’s trying to do, with, through, and for its people (users). Most of the time I read about features, about faster, bigger, wider, broader, narrower, more targeted &emdash; in short I read about the increments on a measure who’s metric isn’t ever defined. Incremental improvements towards what end? Addressing what individual or social problem or need? Enhancing what essential experience of relation, communication, information sharing, or, what?

If I can’t see it, and I’ve been in this since the beginning, and I’m no fool, it’s not there. Perhaps it could be there &emdash; but hasn’t yet been identified and named. Most of the time it’s just not there. It is easier to name an incremental improvement to an existing technical practice than to capture the social benefits resulting from its use.

None of this need be a problem, if it weren’t for the fact that we all tend to the nerdy end of the spectrum, personality wise. We are heavy users of our own product (never a good idea &emdash; but in our case, less self-harming). We make what we want in order to compete against those very similar to us. We increment based on feedback that we obtain from people who use our products &emdash; aware, or not, that the feedback can only possibly tell us about what we built, and not what we could have built.

We eagerly engage in what is an ever-unfolding process of co-evolution undertaken by a great milieu of companies building up component parts to a shared set of experiences &emdash; of media, information, relationships, time, action, and so much more. And yet I have to say that it is entirely possible that behind all of these individual startup efforts is but a myth that this is good, smart, better, and more useful. And that these technical or design attributes naturally go hand in hand with social and cultural practices &emdash; relationships, friendships, being together, relating to and through and with, having an identity, communicating and sharing it….

It is in fact it is cultural and social change that leads technology. Technologies succeed or fail to the degree to which they capture implicit, latent, and ready individual and social needs. Where are these insights? Who has them? Why are they not self evident? I have over 600 companies right here in front of me, and a set of descriptions that reads, altogether, like technical documentation authored by a marketer.

But I just spent two months off social media and out in the world of “normals” in order to re-calibrate my perspectives and reset and re-test my notions. A necessary break, in hindsight, if only for the reason that we are an over-amplified bunch whose work is the very medium in which we conduct our work.

So I’m not seeing it &emdash; not for many of the companies in this database. I see potential, I see direction, and I see increments. But for the full measure of things, I use a bigger metric. And by its measure, we’re thinking too small.

The curious case of social commerce is upon us. And it raises interesting questions for the social interaction designer. I will here allow some of these to beg and grovel.

If you have been a reader of mine in the past, you will know that I believe that in social media, interactions take place among and between users. That the software serving as a mediating architecture is just that. It may constrain and enable interactions, but does so by means only of structuring interactions and content onscreen(s) and over time.

In order to get at the gist of social commerce, we need to look past the screen, the brand names, the offers, coupons, and discounts, to the social.

What’s social about commerce? When is the social commercial? Where and when, in the acts of shopping, purchasing, owning, and using a thing, do social factors come into play. To some degree, in each.

But for social commerce to result in social engagement and participation, individual commercial relations (from wanting to choosing to preferring to owning to showing to feeling) must communicate and signify.

Some aspect of social shopping must communicate, by means of an act, gesture, representation, selection, or something else. And some aspect must accrue social significance — that is, must have a social value and interest distinct from the commercial item and value. Social worth and relevance have to be created, and the social shopping experience must accrue value produced by user actions and related to things of commerce.

We can see then that there may be two ways of approaching the socialization of commerce. One, by identifying and extending the actions taken during acts of social shopping. Another, but adding meta social activities and meanings (as Foursquare is game-like without being a game) to standard shopping practices.

The latter may seem more interesting, but at the risk of distorting original values and relations. Because things involved in these meta games become tokens used in the game. Their “intrinsic” value is replaced by their value within the game.

If use of artificial game mechanics is one way to supply social relevance (through players, play, rules, and elements), then another is to use social relations. Here we might choose among real and invented relations. Or among serious and non-serious. We might organize social commerce activity capture and representation to distort views of individual acts and to fashion desired social outcomes.

We might mix in persons, elements, brands, events, and other types of content from mediated social worlds: tv, movies, books, music. It doesn’t really matter, since the aspects being used are those that signify — it’s not reality, but meaning, that works here as incentive and motivation.

The type of relation we leverage in social commerce will inform not only the value captured by the system (whether as ratings, checkins, purchases or what have you). Relations will also inform the social practices we build around acts of social commerce. And by extension, the durability, identity, and habituality of social commercial activities. These can be one-off experiences, or lead to lasting loyalties and mutually-reinforcing relationships.

I’m really only scratching the surface here, but I have a pile of material to touch on in the weeks and months ahead as I return to a baseline routine of blogging.

If you are in the business of social commerce, have a site or service, or would like to extend an application or campaign in social shopping space, I can be of help. I have concrete ideas and practical applications that will remain off the blog, for the purpose of private commercial consumption .

The Merchant of Venice

The internet changes over time. That the technology has evolved is obvious. But how we use the internet is also changing. So we have two conceptual distinctions — technology and people — that we frequently conflate into one idea of the internet. This post is about teasing apart the objective and subjective dimensions of social media, to examine what’s behind the relational economy we now live in, and its particular mode of production. All commerce and much personal and social utlity implied by use of social media owes to the subjective value added to what was, previously, a mode of production of information (publishing).

I will try to demonstrate here the manner in which social acts and communication result in mediated social realities. And suggest that the relational connections and value-added associations which are the byproduct of social media use create a marketplace of content whose highest value, individually motivated subjective choices, we are only beginning to capture and mine.

Technically speaking, the internet distributes data. Data that is also stored. Data we also call information. Information being a very loose term used sometimes to refer to the contents themselves (words, numbers, it doesn’t matter) and sometimes to its social/cultural meaning (information is something meaningful, a fact). Technically speaking, information is the bitstream and lifeblood of the internet. It’s objective. But speaking in common terms, information is what we know. It’s subjective.

The world of the first, we might consider the “reality” of the online world. Information is the foundation on which a rich medium of presentation and interaction is constructed (it is a constructed world, it is a world produced and manufactured as are all media).

The world of the second we might consider the “subjectivity” of the online world. Interaction and communication, in which information is used and referenced, linked to and embedded, is now the most fascinating aspect of the online world.

In this medium nothing exists unless it is connected to something else. Unlike the real world, the online world exists only insofar as it is navigable. That is, only on the basis of a connection.

The connectedness of the real world is material, substantial, and alive. Forces of change are natural and inevitable, in short: causal. Time moves all substance; all is in motion and change is a natural “causal” chain. Connectedness is simple causality of the world becoming, in time.

The connectedness of the online world is constructed. Connections are constructed by machines and by people, according to the logic and relations that exist at the level of information, and at according to the subjective choices (tastes, preferences) of people (users).

The old model for the online world was web publishing. Separately, there were communication tools and applications (email, chat, IM etc). The current model combines the two. In the old model, connections between bits of information might be made according to the relations that made sense for those bits of information: taxonomic, categorical, by genre, topic, what have you. The online world had more objectivity in that its production reflected “industrial” methods.

The online world today reflects a much higher degree of subjective and social use — connections are made not only as a reflection of these subjective values and interests, but as a byproduct of subjective relations and activities. Put simply, people create value when they interact and communicate online, often-times including ingredients provided by the medium (we can use words, which of course pre-existed the internet; we can also use the stuff found only here).

The online world is capturing more and more subjective choices. Selections made by people for reasons of taste and preference, motivated by others (for, because of, to attract…), reflecting individual identity, group identity, community, you name it. Social media permit online activity to reveal a vast amount of social and cultural preference as well as relational interest. And much of it is recorded, stored, and indexed.

But extracting meaning from the social web is a challenging proposition, let alone undertaking. When content is created, connected, distributed, embedded, or otherwise attached to people, their talk, or their interactions (activities), its meaning becomes ambiguous. Meaning may be obtained from the user’s intentions in using content, or from the content’s semantic meaning, from the relationship between users, the group, site, community context, application context, and so on. And I’m radically over-simplifying the interpretive options here.

Counting and quantifying by-and-large has served as our means of qualifying social web content. This is perhaps now going to change somewhat, as realtime tools like Twitter (and their practices) contribute ever-increasing amounts of “information” to the internet. When information first appears, when it is news and is completely new, it is distributed. This original flow of information creates connections, establishes content relationships, facilitates indexing by search engines, and will make possible socially-validating actions (comments, tagging, bookmarking, sharing etc).

There is a bias in this first flow of news. This bias owes simply to the fact that new information must be observed before it can become part of the online reality’s facticity. Information cannot be valued until it first has been observed. So the “first hit” if you will, in traffic, is relatively meaningless and belongs to the information’s coming into existence. It is merely the appearance of news in the realtime stream.

The second selection of that information is the first to reflect user interest — the second selection is not observation but action. It is confirmation of the information’s subjective value, or of its social relevance. This second selection, be it a retweet, a like, or some other act of “sharing,” transforms the news item (information) into communication, for it is now voiced not as fact but as an individual statement, or personal choice. This move transforms fact as facticity into social fact as subjective interest, and not only as individual choice but as a communicative expression.

Behind the choice of the like or retweet, in other words, is an intention taken up with an audience in mind. In this way our likes and retweets convey, indicate, suggest, solicit, and identify our interests in a social act that engenders further interaction. In the transformation of fact as news into social fact as choice, this second selection attributes new meaning (adding value to the information), as it is sent, shared, rated, saved, tagged etc. That added value is the subjective interest, and is the reason that in the world of social media, the news (facts) that matter are those that are most communicable; in short, tastes by means of which we disclose who we are, what we find interesting, and with which we identify.

Counting accrues over time, as content is validated/used in a variety of social interactions. Because connections may be counted without qualifying the type of connection or the kind of relation, a simple count is the most common way of validating information. This is a reality in which the number of connections to a piece of information is its volume or mass — it’s social reality.

More recent social web practices, however, suggest that qualifying these connections, and accounting for the variety in social relations, will be increasingly valuable if not necessary. For whom is information consumed; in front of whom is it shared or published; for whom is it told; who else chooses it? Where in the world of facts, validity is measured in terms of truth, in the world of social facts, validity is an expression of relevance. Relevance in a social sense is significance. Understanding the significance of information means understanding an act, a social relation, and the connection made with information embedded in social interactions.

The social act is far more complex, relationally, than may at first appear, and to date exceeds the capabilities of search and filtering to model and represent. For relational values attributed or attached to social fact as they are communicated across networks may belong to a number of meaning domains.

These relational values may be indicative, of personal interest. May be expressive, of personal feeling, state, or mood. May be solicitous, of recognition, validation, or some other acknowledgment. May be associative, as in similar to or related to some category of interests and tastes, values, events, and so on. May be inter-personal, as when they are intended to further interaction with a person or persons. And so on. All of these and other social actions may furnish the reasons for which we confirm and communicate, select and distribute, connect to and share, content in mediated social systems.

The social web grows by supplementing information with social significance, or what makes information socially relevant. The old world, the world of web 1.0, was a world of publishing. It was a one-column world. The new world, the social world of web 2.0, is a two-column world. What the double-entry method of book-keeping did for finance, inaugurating a system of debits and credits, and liberating capital from its exchange form, we need for the social web. Facebook is on this already, but still primitively, insofar as social content in feeds is liked and acted on within an inter-personal relational context.

But outside Facebook, the added value of so many one-click expressions or gestures is still lost in a system that captures action in a single column social model. Social needs to model communication, not just information, and for this it needs the equivalent of a two-column transactional model. Like markets run by brokerage and trading systems, the ask and the offer, the sale and purchase, need to be coupled. Only then are social expressions validated by the reciprocation, or confirmation, supplied by another (the audience). Value can then be assessed on the basis of its confirmation.

Communication is just communication as long as it remains observed only. But it calls for a yes or no, for acceptance or rejection. When that is supplied by another person, it becomes social action. Not information, but action, and what we need to capture it, measure it, relate it, and repurpose it, is the challenge facing us today.

This post began as a comment on the following post by Adina Levin, but quickly became too long, so I am posting it here instead. Read Adina’s post on social context first (excerpted here).

Where is social context?
In yesterday’s post on the problem with Facebook Like, I wrote that Facebook is trying to be the sole provider of social context. This got me thinking about the various places that social context may be represented in a networked system:

1. in the object or message (which ActivityStreams helps enable)
2. in the context where it is created
3. in the contexts where it is seen and used
4. in each node of the social graph
5. in sets of social graph elements
6. in decentralized elements of the social graph (e.g. aggregated/syndicated profile elements)
7. shared understanding in participants minds
8. unshared understandings in participants minds

Facebook’s model is seeking consolidation in two places. By replacing a metadata-rich, standardized, ActivityStream based representation of the message with a proprietary API call, Facebook is foreclosing opportunities for the adding of context in creation and in viewing and utilization (items 1-3 in the list).


By acting as the sole provider of social graph and profile services, Facebook is seeking to own those aspects of context (item 4, 5, and 6 in the list). Is Facebook doing anything to enable the exchange of subsets? (item 5 in the list)

________________

What is context? Is it a matter of where or what or something else?
Interesting post — it raises for me the question: What is context? or perhaps, what is the value of context. I am guessing that context means original context, but that begs the question: What’s the value of preserving original context? And in the question of context is the presupposition that shared context is valuable (shared context or shared understanding) — but that is a normative claim and the post also argues for diversity and difference.

Several kinds of original context then spring to mind: context tied to to original intent; context tied to original audience addressed; context tied to object references; context tied to linguistic references; context tied to original activity or practice; and context tied to social or public in which the content is produced.

Any one of these may arguably supply context, if context is meant to include:

• what does the author/contributor mean (to be doing, saying?)
• what does the content mean to communicate (internal references, external references)
• what is the content’s social status (what social or audience does it tacitly address, and what contribution does it make to what practice within that context)
• what routine practice does the content refer to or belong to, that might help in understanding its meaning
• how might one respond (convention, activity, situation, and other kinds of interpretive context external to the content)
• who is involved (audience context so important today because intended audiences are always involved or presupposed)
• there are certainly others

On the loss of context
As I’m not a huge fan of the value of content of original production, being rather more interested in creation, production, interpretation (re-contextualization), I don’t mind loss of context as I believe:

• that there’s no particular normative privilege involved in original intent — the contribution was made online and w some understanding of what this results in!
• there’s no normative claim in consensus or agreement, or in other words, the original context doesn’t preserve truth or rightness of interpretation; the contribution is made online and thus w an expectation of multiple uses and interpretations
• neither the intentions of the contributor nor the interpretations of the reader supply “truth” — the online world is a communication space in which contest and commentary are assumed — and therefore context as a supplier of original meanings vs context as a referential system that informs interpretive schema are each valid forms of context

Which leads me to believe that context needs further critical reflection. What about context is so important?

An alternative to context: frames, and communication and action
Systems theory provides one way around this — communication. A difference is a difference that makes a difference. The question, then, for social interaction design, would be: what action is possible, what communication can be made more probable?

I would then (no surprise here) nominate different types of action, activity, and social practices as contextual frames of reference, from local and onscreen user interface selections and actions on up to routinized social practices meaningful only over time and within the shared practice of a number of actors. Both action and communication can be pretty clearly articulated, and neither requires a regression to original context, be that of intent, reference, linguistic claims, or what have you.

I know that this contradicts some of the common assumptions made in system design about context. But I don’t think we developed these paradigms with social action in mind — I think they were conceived to facilitate effective and efficient user interaction with systems of information (applications). Thus the very notion that original context ought to be preserved is a problematic one — it assumes that meanings ought not go astray of originally intended activity.

We assume, often, that this original context belongs to the object — that, too, is problematic, for much of what is going on is not object centric but is embedded in ongoing communication and social practices (actions).

An example: games and rules
Game rules, for example, better supply context to action and interpretation than do objects — and as Wittgenstein showed long ago, such rules are tacit. Frames can refer to other frames — a move may be understood within its application context or by means of its reference to another frame of activity — in this case, the game.

In social gaming, the game itself may be understood by participants as a social pastime in which several members are contesting supremacy, and this in turn may be a social interaction whose consequences are known only to a small group of individuals in which long-standing social contest for status is re-enacted repeatedly by gaming (game within the game).

Thus the entire question of context may be reframed in terms of action and communication, each of which can involve application-specific meanings on up to social and cultural references. Context might then be better understood within the practices that reframe and recontextualize online contributions, thus permitting ongoing action and communication. Social theory doesn’t have a special place for original context, for action supplies its own context.

Practical reflections: activity streams, action streams
Finally, and to get practical for a moment, some thoughts on the matter of activitystrea.ms and Facebook’s monopoly of distributed social web activities are warranted. Activity streams supports a broader range of activities than does the anti-social Like. The Like is a one-size-fits-all solution to Facebook’s need to venture into social search and socially-contextual advertising and marketing.

Likes eliminate differences of kind and of degree: liking is simple affirmation and association with an item at a minimum, passionate and loyal commitment and dedication at a maximum. But the Like itself neither captures nor represents the degree. And Liking fails to capture nature or kind: does a person Like because s/he identifies with the item, brand, cause, person, etc; own or want to possess it; feel social affinity with the scene or culture it is associated with; mean to gesture or signal activity or engagement (in a game, an offline practice, etc); or what have you.

Activity stream meta data would permit a greater number of updates and qualify them by attributes that supploy more context around the update — which in turn would enable richer and more differentiated interpretations and responses. But these updates, too, are unilateral and monological. Social web updates are a monological system of self-referential declarations. Updates are posted into the open and held open because there is no action possible on them that transforms the update into a move of some kind — a social action.

A transactional system would offer coupling of action updates and closure of activities in which the simple yes/no response essential to social action and communication would be represented within stream updates. A dialogical system would not only solve some of these context problems (not just the where but the what of social context) but would facilitate forms of social networking around messages themselves: distributed or federated, dis- and re-aggregated.

Activity and action streams might not solve the audience context problem, but would permit greater linguistic differentiation of statement types and corresponding responses (invites: accept/decline; offer: accept/decline; news: like/share; purchase: buy/do not buy; and so on). Language itself supplies context, in its grammar and in its role within communication practices.

The fact that so much social web content is treated as information, not as communication, is re-inforced by the loss of context. But could be addressed if we were to standardize the handling of linguistic types and enable reciprocation — or response. The fact that present-day streams now dominate social web activity just seems to beg for this solution of transactionality around coupled messages.

Facebook’s recent F8 announcements concerning the Like button, connected pages, and Open Graph api have resurrected some discussion around social objects. I wrote last week about social objects from a theoretical perspective, and want to clarify a few top-line points that I think are worth consideration, particularly given Facebook’s apparent semantic and social search strategies.

There are two approaches to social objects. One is theoretical, and one is practical. I will only touch on the theory of social objects briefly here, focusing instead on a few practical implications of an object-centric theory.

In Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective, Dare Obasanjo does a nice job of recapitulating one view of social objects relevant to Facebook Likes. He cites a post written by Hugh Macleod in 2007: social objects for beginners

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.
Example A. You and your friend, Joe like to go bowling every Tuesday. The bowling is the Social Object.
Example B. You and your friend, Lee are huge Star Wars fans. Even though you never plan to do so, you two tend to geek out about Darth Vader and X-Wing fighters every time you meet. Star Wars is the Social Object.

In this view, the object structures relations and is the reason for communication. It represents a shared interest, and for all intents and purposes serves as social navigation. Tags are a similar kind of navigation, useful for finding people with a common interest. And this would seem to be the purpose of Likes on Facebook: a digg-like vote of interest that facilitates people finding and creates possibilities for connection.

But I disagree that the object of shared interest is necessarily the reason for interaction and the object of communication. Objects do not create reasons for connection, nor do they ground communication and interaction. I believe it’s the other way around. Communication and interaction may take up objects as a topical theme, but the interest is as much person to person as it is person to object. You may invite a friend to dinner, but this is not because you are hungry.

Objects do not proscribe and structure social relations — objects are subordinate to relations. And interests between people are relational, not object-oriented. The object may supply a shared topic, object of interest, navigational or activity context, but need not itself be the object of communication. Instead, it facilitates connection and helps to create possibilities for communication.

The issue I have with the social object description cited above is that it conflates object and motive. Objects are viewed as causal, of social interaction and social relations. I don’t see how we could ground social interaction in objects, or even object worlds, in a manner sufficient to the psychological complexity of human social motives. Objects are not equivalent to the relations in which they are taken up.

In fact, one of the oft-cited theorists of social objects, Karin Knorr Cetina, makes this very point:

Objects of knowledge, the ones important in the present context, are characteristically open, question-generating, and complex. They are processes and projections rather than definitive things. In our interpretation, objects of knowledge seem to have the capacity to unfold indefinitely; in this sense they lie at the opposite end from pure tools and commercial commodities.

Her paper is about object worlds — she uses the example of day traders and stock market representations — not about objects as things. I think we may have misread her discussion of objects to be about things, when in fact it is about relations we take up with things, their meanings, and their representations.

Nor do I think that objects completely supply context, for context in social interaction, too, is relational. If you invite your friend to dinner, two contexts of social interaction are now relevant: the dinner as object, and the invitation as social action. Action can as easily supply context around social objects as any objective relation, or objective property. This is the approach taken by activity streams, and the reason that activity streams supports more than one expression of action. Liking alone risks digg-ification of shared social interests, and a loss of intent and meaning.

Adina Levin makes this point in a post about the Like

But that’s what Facebook’s “Like” gets rid of. See, there’s an alternative vision about social context. And that is that Facebook is your one and only source of context. Thomas Vanderwal suggests, in the discussion of Facebook’s recent announcement, that Facebook is not doing such a great job of this today: “The social graph is dangerous without context and much more dangerous w/ partial context.” ActivityStreams fosters competition among services that want to provide social context of various sorts, and Like forecloses that competition.

But it is not only context around social objects that is lost, as Vander Wal suggests. It is loss of action, too. Which is one reason for my interest in action streams. Action streams would not only be like-able social objects; they would be actionable social objects. Actionable social objects not only permit more linguistic and expressive (e.g. gestural) actions — invites, offers, announcements, etc — they capture actions on them. For example, an invitation action object could be accepted or declined. This would not only add power to objects, but would capture some social relationality — in the form of reciprocity or mutual interest. Social objects today are still only asymmetrical — two-sided liking is not required for them to serve as interest pivots between people.

There are a couple reasons a double-sided object relation model might be interesting. The first is preemptive: we avoid inundation by system status messages telling us everything about what our friends now Like. The second is enabling: we get better social data. Social data is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, for Facebook’s Likes. Facebook will preside over a world of social objects related to people whose interest declarations will given them a reason to advertise by interests served up on page context, within streams (presumably), and across its open graph (presumably) contexts.

As Obasanjo writes:

In the social media space, a few people have focused on the fact that this data is put in place to enable sites to be added to Facebook’s social graph. However there is little reason why other social networking services couldn’t also read the same markup as a way to add those web sites to their social graph. For example, Yelp is one of the sites that now supports the Open Graph Protocol so when I click like the Pro Sports Club it is added to the list of “pages” I’m a fan of on Facebook. However I could just as easily see that being a [Twitter — Like] button which would add the Twitter account for the gym to my following list along with tweeting to my followers that I liked the gym. It would only take adding a markup element to what Yelp is outputting to indicate the Twitter account of the page being liked. With my Windows Live hat on, I can imagine going to Amazon or IMDB and clicking a [Windows Live — Like] button which would add the movie to my list of favorite things. There are a ton of possibilities this opens up in a totally decentralized way without forcing services or users to be locked into a particular social network.

Unfortunately, the Like represents a pretty thin expression of interest. It fails to capture degrees of interest, or how much you like something; motivation, or why you like it; or social relations, or who you like who likes it. In this, the Like still suffers from the long tail assumption that people are alike who like the same thing — or that likeness between objects is reflected in people who like them being alike one another. Not so, of course, but this is the state of social targeting today (objects of interest are consumer segments; consumers identify with what they like).

It’s unfortunate that the Facebook Like is so close to social bookmarking, to retweeting, to diggs and the like that we still cannot capture more of the differences of kind and degree that would make the social web really interesting. But who can fault Facebook for drawing up a semantic and search strategy around the vote of interest. One-click solutions are simple interaction solutions, if not too simple. The majority of advertisers and many marketers, too, will be satisfied with the metrics Facebook will be able to offer about audiences pegged to shared Likes.

But I think that the future of social marketing still resides in a system better able to provide social relational information captured from actions, interaction, and communication. For the grail in social marketing is not the individual, but the social graph, and in particular, who to market to in a social graph. For the power of liking is not just that we like something, but that we like to be liked, too.

This is just a quick post on social objects. The concept of social objects is pretty widely used in social interaction design, but we’re missing a solid definition of what social objects are. Or, whether they really even exist.

The most common use of the term “social object” refers to shared online resources around which interactions develop and coalesce. Examples could include gifts on Facebook, videos, or what have you. The object sort of serves as a shared object, a focus of attention, an actual digital object, and so on. And the object plays a role in governing or informing interactions; we know what objects mean and what to do with them (give them, comment on them, play them, etc.)

But the definition of social object is a bit too fuzzy for me, and for a couple reasons.

Firstly, as designers, the object plays into our interest in having an object language — things to design and design for. We are biased to think in terms of objects; objects belong to the world of interface design. So there is a possibility that where there is actually other stuff going on, we focus on the object out of our own interest. (By analogy, consider the anthropologist who focuses her attention on these social objects: a ceremonial mask, money, a wedding ring, a football. How much of the rituals, pastimes, social and cultural practices belong to the object and are explained by object properties? Not much….)

Secondly, objects are easily confused with their properties, attributes, qualities, uses, and so on. This is just how language works. We name a thing and give it attributes, and having done so we have a stable concept. Plato’s ideal chair, vs all real chairs. Concepts then substitute for the real thing. It’s possible that we’re actually talking about the concept of social objects, and not social objects as used.

Which is a more accurate description of gifting on Facebook: the relationship between two friends and the practice of giving gifts on birthdays, or the graphic of the beer mug? The more accurate description of user interaction would be that which explains the practice of gift giving, the symbolic act of presenting a gift, the Facebook tradition of recognizing birthdays, and the social space in which gifts are seen by others such that birthdays create a cause for a stretch of social interaction.

We know that social objects are a shared cultural resource — their meanings are culturally context-specific. We know that many social practices involve social objects. We know that in the digital domain, social objects are unique in that there is no original object but many copies; that an object can appear in many places at once.

For example, I give you a beer mug and it is on your wall but in my stream also — same object, but not really, since one is the one I gave you and yours is the one you received. We’re really talking about a representation, not an object. In other words, the object represents the act.

If the social object is sometimes the representation of an act, then perhaps the focus should be on the act, and on interaction practices, less on the object. The act of recognizing a friend’s birthday by gifting a graphic beer mug is a better explanation of the user activity. The object is merely a representational vehicle by which the activity is sedimented into a mediated, visible, socially recognizable form.

Social objects, then, might be better understood as common forms. Forms in which many kinds of graphics, rich media, even textual forms (for a tweet is a social object as soon as it is retweeted) permit diverse kinds of social interaction. The object, in other words, is not an object, but a form.

If social objects are a form of representation, we can expand our understanding of what they mean. If a form has visual content, it is an image. If it has linguistic content, it is a text or an utterance. If it is a video, it is televisual.

If it is a gift using a graphic, such as the beer mug, then it is both a symbolic token (as described by traditions of gift giving — the gift is an object with meaning inherited from the tradition of gift exchange, and specified by meanings belonging to the object: price, ownership, status, utility, etc) and an image. The beer mug graphic indicates “a drink” (this is basic theory of representation stuff: the image is a beer mug); the act of giving it refers to “get you a drink for your birthday”. The interaction, in other words, is a symbolically-mediated one, referencing a content (get you a beer) and a cultural practice (on your birthday).

We can now see that the interaction situates and contextualizes the object. Not the other way around. The object doesn’t tell us what’s going on, nor does it define uses and interactions. Those belong to practices — namely, practices in which objects are used.

There’s another reason that the object should take a subordinate role to the interaction. Tweets are social objects. Tweets are utterances that take a form, and which, given that twitter is a distribution platform, can be circulated, referenced, recontextualized (posted to streams, blogs, surfaced in search, etc), and so on. We miss out on the significance of the “commodity” form of mediated talk if we think in terms of objects. Because we think of objects as things.

But clearly, anything that can be mediated and used as a shared resource can be a social object. And this includes tweets, things, and much more. So if the world of social objecst includes linguistic statements, gestural tokens (emoticons), signs, numbers (is a follower number a social object? it certainly is the object of a lot of social activity!), images, graphics, avatars, and on and on. We would have to admit that not only is the idea of social objects so broad as to be almost meaningless; but that it’s lost any critical or explanatory power. A concept too big to give us any guidance.

So that’s where I am on social objects. We need a better description. Personally, I think we can borrow from linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology. I would argue that the interaction domain has primary importance, and that the subdomain is symbolically-mediated interaction.

Within this, then, types include:

• linguistic statements
• symbolic tokens
• currencies
• representational objects
• images
• gestural signs
• signs
• numbers
• rich media (video, etc — stuff playable online)
• bookmarks
• avatars
• etc

Using the disciplines I just mentioned, we would be able to use:

• linguistics for linguistic statements
• semiotics for signs
• representational theory for representations (looks like something) and images (is of something)
• cultural anthro for exchange practices and their token objects
• media theory for numbers (stats, counts, etc)
• and so on.

The types are then unpacked in the contexts of their use, in their contribution to interactions, in their meanings, and as expressions of intent and guidelines for interpretation. And, most importantly, we would be able to account for the enormously innovative and unique ways in which symbolically-mediated interactions can refer to all manner of meaningful activities online, from social games to Second Life (which is, kind of, a total social object world!), from gifting to retweeting, and so on. It’s a bigger project, but the online world is incredibly rich. And I’m convinced that we might misinterpret what’s going on around it if we allow ourselves to think of objects as objects.

As some of you know, I find the conversational strategies of branding and marketing on twitter fascinating. And of using feeds/streams for talk-based marketing in general. But I’m just now catching up on twitter’s recent announcement, so take this post with a few grains of salt. I may not have this entirely right. But I thought I’d share some thoughts on the implications of twitter’s new platform on marketing and the twitter ecosystem overall.

The Altimeter Group has a great overview from which I’ll excerpt the introduction:


First Take Analysis: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem


Summary: Twitter has launched Promoted Tweets, combining paid and organic media. Brands can now advertise promoted tweets on search pages, however the community has power over which tweets will appear measured by Twitter’s new metric called “resonance” which factors in behaviors like the retweet, at, hash, avatar clicks. Brands can now purchase CPM based ads to promote these popular tweets at the top of a Twitter search term –even in categories they aren’t well known in, influencing awareness. Marketers beware: unlike traditional advertising or social marketing this is both a combination of earned media and paid media. For Twitter this experimental move makes sense as it taps into deep pockets of online advertisers without jeopardizing sanctity of the community as users will self select which tweets will resonate and thereby become promoted ads.


How it will work, a likely use case scenario:

1. Twitter users will continue to interact with each other, and popular tweets will receive a high ‘resonance’ score from Twitter. Some of these Tweets will be created by brands, and some by the users themselves.
2. Tweets with heavy resonance can be purchased by advertisers in a CPM basis to appear as the first ’sponsored’ Tweet on a search term. The sponsored tweets will be clearly labeled and have a different background color.
3. These promoted tweets will only stay if users continue to resonate with them, those that don’t will disappear and a different tweet with resonation will appear.

(Read the original post. As usual, the Altimeter Group has done a fabulous job breaking this down.)
_________________________

Twitter’s promotional tweet strategy will create a very compelling opportunity for brand managers, customer service, sales, marketing, and community managers. It will permit more experimentation, more learning, and more insight. It will also create new risks, for the platform introduces a new set of practices to twitter that will inevitably raise the stakes around transparency, intent, authenticity, and reputation. These will be true not only for participating promoters, but for twitter users themselves.

Any doubt cast on the authenticity and intent of a tweet will rub off not only on the originating promoter, but on all those who “resonate” with it. Any doubt as to the motives of participants will also impact originating promoters and resonaters. These are characteristics that attach to the “speaker,” and to speech. The same will be true of interpretation, or as we might say, the “listener.” Not only will there be questions around what a resonater is doing by promoting promotional tweets — there will be questions about what to do with it (pass it along or not). For example, Does the resonater really agree with it? What aspect of it? Am I supposed to take this seriously, and reflect this user’s interest, or not?

These are fine-grained questions, but they are intrinsic to the very nature of twitter’s system of talk.

Some sample issues and questions

• What’s the credibility of the twitter user promoting a promoted tweet?
• Is the twitter user gaming the system — Digg-like?
• Does the twitter user genuinely resonate with the promoted tweet?
• Why is this promoted tweet resonating?
• How do I look if I promote this tweet?
• Can my followers tell if I’m promoting this tweet because it resonates genuinely?
• Can they tell if I am being facetious — that I’m promoting it tongue in cheek?
• Will I lose followers?
• What is the reputation capital risk of promoting promotional tweets?
• Will there be a perceived difference between promoting retweeted promotions vs the original promotion?

Some implications of promotional tweeting
The odds that a Digg-like group of marketers emerges to circulate promoted tweets and to create resonance by combining large follower networks, a karmic — and measurable! — social contract and mutual commitment to circulate one another’s promotions, seems high. This will immediately raise the risk of a two-class order of users: genuine users and promoters.

• Twitterers belonging to the promotional order will make it onto lists that are to their benefit, but used also by others to unfollow.
• In an effort by genuine users to clear their names, protect their standing, and more immediately, to avoid their own inclusion on promoter lists, a follow/unfollow episode may ensue.
• Some third parties might possibly then provide tools to help genuine users in bulk unfollowing those who have been identified as promoters. They could do this by providing lists, or managing databases of promoters so that they can be easily unfollowed.
• Opting out will now become a cultural practice and code of conduct, as in: “If I ever catch you promoting a tweet I will unfollow you on principle.”

Marketing opportunities: conversational strategies
The new system of conversational promotion will create some compelling opportunities. These will hopefully not only include messages but also short-form narratives, games, stories, puzzles, and more. The most creative campaigns will hail from agencies and brands willing to take the user’s side and deliver content that is an interesting read if not also a compelling activity. Some brands may invent participatory dramas, interactive story-based offers, group or affinity marketing strategies using shared discounts, rewards, and incentives. Those smart enough to try to leverage social graphs will design strategies that percolate through twitter followers as well as Facebook pages, etc. Visibility will be lensed and market segments will be defined in terms of their responsiveness and activity as well as traditional valuations of consumer interest.

Marketers will see here an opportunity to create multi-modal and multi-wave conversational campaigns. These would include messages targeted to different audience segments, tests of content style, offer, brand message and image, call to action, and so on.

• A marketer might create and test a dozen different tweets to track and measure resonance.
• Tweets might be sent at different times of day, be targeted to reach influencers, be designed to resonate with existing intra-day news and events, hashtags, conferences, and other ecosystem attributes that are known to accrue fast distribution
• Marketers should benefit from much greater insight into messaging effectiveness
• Marketers should be able to learn from resonance:
• times of day
• days of the week
• repetition
• contextual topics, themes, events, etc of use to the campaign
• competitive analysis
• responsive vs non-responsive influencers based on individual influencer behavior and attention
• responsive vs non-responsive influencers based on individual influencer network speed, reach, and resonance

ROI: Go for it, or engage with transparency?
Promotional strategies will unavoidably butt up against the choice between using or targeting effective promotional communities (Digg phenom) and more organic, and dare we say “transparent,” strategies. The former will deliver the numbers, and make any marketer pushed to simply show the numbers happy. The latter will more likely result in honest and credible brand capital. A two-tiered community of social media professionals will continue to emerge, separating those committed to good content and interaction from those hot in pursuit of numbers. Both will have to deal with SEO, and twitter realtime search, but the former group will develop skills in organic conversational strategy, while the latter will preside over a network of promoters with high follower counts and “guaranteed” results.

Marketers may seek new ROI criteria for:

• Influencer and network reputation capital (amenability of influencer to promote; which promotions; around what interests, topics; style)
• Resonance capital (in speed, reach, and distribution; aggregate traffic; conversion; new follower counts)
• Marketers may have to consider effectiveness of circulation by highly resonant promotional “communities” vs organic and “authentic” resonance
• Marketers may be called out by twitter users for leveraging promotional communities
• transparency might then involve not only the messaging, but tactics of promotion
• the rapid and proven traffic gains of using promotional campaigns will be weighed against risks of backlash from users who perceive a brand to have sold out by using these new promotional tactics

What do you think? I’m all for a distinct class of commercial tweets if it helps to sustain twitter’s platform model. It beats the corruption that would be inevitable if commercial tweeting were indistinguishable in form and delivery from normal tweeting. Norms are bound to form around use of promotional tweets. Influences on those norms will come from the brand strategists and experts consulting to companies interested in promotional twitter campaigns. They will also be influenced by those who can leverage the platform’s inherent weaknesses to game and guarantee results. Twitter now has its own search facet, a search engine facet, and a new form of tweet — so lists, third party client accommodations, and of course tweeting practices are all affected. The user experience need not be at risk, but is clearly in play.

From a recent post on The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky argues that mass media may continue to see its business cannibalized by new media if it fails to recognize the inherent dangers of overly-complex production models.

“The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
….

“Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact — we will have to pay them — but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
….

“Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
….

“When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”

I have been offline for a few weeks working on a book tentatively titled Principles of Social Interaction Design. It’s nigh on a first draft, and if you have ever attempted to write a book, you know that I’m eager to be well past nigh.

Ironically, paradoxically, or sensibly, I’ve had to be off social media in order to write about social media. I find that certain perspectives and insights come only with a good break from online habits and with a bit of critical distance. So it is with a bit of distance that I’m posting today. But there was a piece recently by Clay Shirky that I found interesting (I’ve allowed myself to lurk on google reader) and worth a few thoughts.

Shirky’s piece is on complexity, and in the vein of the collapse of complex societies, as popularized by Jared Diamond. I’m no anthropologist, but I do like systems theory, and I’m very much interested in systems theory and social media. So there were some arguments in Shirky’s piece that I couldn’t connect myself. I’m compelled to write them up because they strike me as troublesome.

Clay writes, in essence, that complexity will be the downfall of mass media. But he writes also that tradition-bound methods of the past will be the downfall of mass media, too. And this is what bothers me. The argument is that old, bureaucratic, and overly complex systems of production, publishing, and distribution will succumb to new, simple, and future-oriented (read: internet) models of production.

I can buy one or the other, perhaps, but Clay seems to have conflated to arguments into one: old is complex, future is simple. Either simplicity trumps complexity, or future trumps the past. In fact, there have been many old and stagnant regimes that have failed. As well as many new and simple technologies that now beg for greater complexity (to wit, twitter’s recent announcements). Both Google and Facebook are admittedly complex, and becoming increasingly so. The societies of the Mayans, Incas, and the Romans achieved high degrees of complexity, but so too did those of the conquering Europeans. Was the gun not a complex instrument of warfare; the galleon, a complex mode of travel; the Church, a complex bureaucratic institution; not to mention financing at the time?

I fail to see the intrinsic flaw in complexity, and the argument that simplicity beats complexity strikes me as, well, too simplistic. If complexity fails due to its complexity, then what new simplicity is needed to bring about this failure? Surely complexity would undo itself on its own. And if simplicity is better, is this not a comment on simplicity in process, or experience perhaps, and not necessarily a comment on production or organization? For if the experience is simple, what’s wrong with hidden organizational or procedural complexity?

Complexity corresponds to greater organizational differentiation. The more complex an organization, the more responses it has for a greater number of environmental events or external change and stimuli. In systems theories, complexity is an intrinsic characteristic. The question is not complexity, but adaptability. Complexity, if it stands in the way of correctly perceiving phenomena, and if it prevents proper and commensurate responses to those phenomena, is a bad thing. But only on the basis of the response to change; not in and of itself.

Simplicity, in design, in user experience, in processes and interaction models, are generally-speaking, a good thing. There’s no harm in wrapping a complex set of algorithms, processes, operations, and functionalities with a simple user interface. But this does not make the system simple. It makes its use simple.

It seems that Clay is for the simplicity of user experience, and against the complexity of bureaucracies unable to adapt when faced with environmental change. Both of which I can agree with. But I see no causal relation between these two dispositions. And I definitely fail to see how we might apply the laws of physics to get from one statement to the next, as Clay seems to do when citing the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That, to me, strikes me as facile, if not a somewhat bizarre failure to distinguish causalities and levels of analysis.

I’m harping on this only because I have a problem with certain internet myths — one of which I think is the myth of simplicity. Simplicity in structure is not the same as simplicity in process. Complex operations can be made simple if sequenced and stepped well. Complexity in organization can be made simple if its presentation is designed well. Complexity in relations can be simplified if navigation is familiar and sensible.

The world is only becoming more and increasingly complex, and in ways that are unavoidably tied to system interdependencies and connectedness. Simplicity, in itself, is not an antidote. Nor is simplicity in argumentation.

In a recent post titled The Social Media Bubble, Umair Haque raises some provocative questions concerning the value of the relationships we form on the internet. His post has drawn some attention, and I’d like to quickly throw in my two cents.

Haque wites:

“I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.”

Now I don’t have a quarrel so much with some of his conclusions. I have an argument with how the issue is framed.

I don’t believe that we should be thinking in terms of relationships. Rather, I believe the issue should be framed in terms of communication. My reasons are fairly straightforward. If we focus on relationships, we attribute to the relationship what actually belongs to communication. We call them thick or thin, we describe them as strong or weak ties, and we measure the value of connectivity in terms of network density and connectedness. We place emphasis on the tie, rather than on the subjects (people) knitted together.

My issue with this is twofold. First, I think it’s a mistaken transposition of the logic and analytic of social network analysis to the attributes and qualities of human relationships and social organization that social network analysis doesn’t really address. In social network analysis, the tie is privileged over the node, that is, the connection over the subject (person). But all ties are not equal. And ties are not really relationships.

I cannot imagine a psychologist inquiring as to a client’s network density, Dunbar number management issues, or presentation of negative Facebook connectedness symptoms. Ties, used in social network analysis, are a means to abstract and diagram the connectedness of a number of nodes/individuals deemed to be connected. It’s got nothing to do with the experience of relationships, the depth of human commitments, feelings of isolation or involvement, not to mention the substantial domain of emotional and communicative wealth that is transacted daily in the form of civil social conduct.

If we are interested in the meaning of social networking at the human scale of experience, then ties are the wrong way to think of it. The social network analysis model of social is an abstraction. It neither lays claim to causal explanation of interpersonal communication and meaning, nor to a properly humanistic observation of the emotional and lived life of members of a society. What it can do is abstract the number, density, and connectedness of members of a bounded network. And in that, surface patterns. But to mistake the tie for an intersubjective relationship, or to subordinate the tie to the mode of its reproduction — which is communication — is a mistake.

And this is where we trip ourselves up. For when we talk about social relationships and the social web, we inevitably turn to our own experiences. We rally in defense of the thin tie, the weak tie, follower numbers, connectedness, and what have you, in arguments based on personal experience. But of course! Social networks, and social tools of talk, as I prefer to call them, are quite simply a new means of mediating communication and interaction in a manner that captures and preserves interactions on a publicly accessible medium. Ties are not the explanation, communication is.

My second issue with the misuse of ties-as-relationships has to do with relationships in general. They don’t exist. We relate to each other, and in our communication and interaction, express and “exchange” the content of communication and the meta-contents of emotional and affective interests. We are relational; society is relational. But never and in no social theory that I know of are relations reducible to this notion of a tie such that subjective human experiences can be described adequately by the tie. There is no tie — there are two or more subjects committed for a stretch of time to pay attention to one another, take interest in each others’ interests, handle the interaction in an acceptable fashion, and to some degree commit to communicate again. If, in social networking, we exchange tweets with one another for just a moment, but never again, then we have had a passing interaction. It’s that simple. Ties and relationships don’t have to be brought into the equation.

The medium facilitates asynchronous communication between people whose mutual connectedness online can make them present to one another in a fashion that transcends the limitations of physical co-presence. And which, for its capture and storage of that communication in the form of a digital textual artifact, renders this communication in a way that, within the medium only, lends it some persistence and durability. All of which leaves behind content for later use, re-use, recontextualization, and what have you. That’s what it’s good at: mediated communication and interaction.

While I suspect that our tendency to use social networking metaphors as descriptions of “the social” owes to the fact that we as much technologists as we are sociologists, the whole matter of social relationships has been a matter of some cultural concern for a while now. It’s perhaps a post post-modern thing. Or a technology and disconnection thing. We have seen it in pop culture for years. Movies like Crash, Babel, Amelie, and countless others take up social relations and society — as characters are brought together over seemingly arbitrary and random events and connections. In TV shows like The Wire and LOST the theme is explored in terms of the multi-layered interdependence of different social classes and institutions, or in the formation of communities out of nothing but a random event. And these shows are direct descendants of earlier works by Altman, Godard, Fellini, even Fritz Lang (M) and so many others.

The organization of the social is a perennial interest. We want to know what relates us and how we relate. We want to know what a commitment is, what trust means, and how loyalties and friendships are created, sustained, and preserved. Technologies of communication are a means — in this day and age of communication, they are a means of production. A means and mode of the production of communication. And for this reason, a contributing factor in the organization of the social. But they are not a metaphor for the social, are not an abstraction of society’s connected architecture, or an explanation of social byproducts and human experiences such as friendship, intimacy, groups, or communities.

Relationships are maintained by communication. Interactions frame the possibilities for communication between subjects whose attention is focused on the shared experience of a social situation. Social tools change the nature and modality of both interaction and communication, simply because they permit both to occur disembedded for time and place. It’s not the tie that is the relationship, it’s mediated social action by means of which communication is used to relate. And as we all know, and have experienced, the meaning of relating to one another online comes in all forms and shades of significance. Furthermore, relations may be unilateral and one directional, bidirectional, or triangulating and mediating. They have affect and real human interests: we like each other, admire each other, pay attention to, support, encourage, quote, refer, include, remember, and forget each other. These are our experiences and in our experiences are how we relate.

The tie has no such attributes, and in social network analysis, may not even capture directionality. Ties are not mutually affirmed or reciprocated. Communication and interaction is. What’s more, the tie may falsely sustain the appearance of a bind that exists. But as we live our friendships and communities, and use our social tools as means of communicating, we pass in and out of attention as well as through different periods of interest and engagement. Much of this is even just social observation; where is the tie and how would it be captured when the act of being involved is an informal and somewhat haphazard habit of following twitter. The experience of social observation is hardly counted in social networking, for the simple reason that our tools can only capture actions.

It is easy to undersell the value of social tools on the basis of relationships. But to conflate relationships with the processes and practices of communication and interaction is a mistake, and places the cart before the horse. Relationships form out of communication and are sustained and reproduced during stretches of interaction — stretches that include periods of passive engagement and un-involved social presence. That these aspects of subjective experience cannot be captured and represented in the form of a tie is just the misapprehension of human relationships in the form of abstract models of connectedness. Social life is transactional.

Related:
Social Media in Isolation is Useless to Government, to Business, and to You Mark Drapeau

Umair Haque Is Another New Spatialist Stowe Boyd

I have been off blogging for a couple weeks while taking time to make headway on a book on the principles of social interaction design. I don’t like being away from blogging this long. It can precipitate lifestyle changes in the offline department, which when combined with the recent stretch of fine Bay area weather we have been having, can becoming self-reinforcing. Pro-social in an offline way, anti-social in an online way.

Today’s the day that I reflect on the book, come up with examples, and look over the rough cut to get a sense for what’s still missing. I was doing this a few minutes ago when I drifted into thinking about Clay Shirky’s concept of filter failure. I had been searching for what to say about geolocation services. And something jumped out at me that I think merits a quick post.

In news of SXSW recently, geolocation services (primarily Foursquare and Gowalla) were cited as the geek habit du jour (or make that week). Several attendees blogged that Foursquare had replaced twitter as the means by which to find friends and coordinate meetups. Of course this was how twitter was used at SXSW a few years ago. Both tweets and Foursquare checkins, if they are used to signal one’s location, effectively do the same thing. Tweeting is then reduced to its signaling function; and Foursquare subordinates location checkins to user location signaling.

This is interesting if you dig into it a bit, and not only only because in each use case the primary function of the tool is subverted to its event-specific use case. (Live socializing changes uses of all social tools in that attention and audience are now both focused and directed on a social occasion. The sociality of networked audiences is replaced by a physically co-present sociality, or situtation, in whose service social tools can now simply provide communication and signaling functions. Interesting, eh?) For twitter, subversion of the application occurs when tweeting is used to signal, or in other words, when talk is subordinated to posting one’s location. And in Foursquare, the subversion of the application occurs when users, instead of checking in to a place, use places to post their location.

Twitter at SXSW = linguistic statement communicates position. The tweet, rather than being conversational, is used to coordinate meetups and to be find-able during the course of the event. The linguistic statement loses its expressive function in favor of signaling.

Foursquare at SXSW = checkin to place inverts relationship between person and place. The business or establishment is not as important as the location of the user; the user’s interest is in sharing his/her location, and the checkin serves as a somewhat arbitrarily chosen means of saying “I’m here.” The Foursquare checkin loses the its function as a means of capturing the value in where people go, in effect to be used for signaling location rather than declaring affinity for places frequently visited.

Now, clearly, geolocation services and applications are useful for different reasons and in different ways, when used during live events. As is the case often with twitter, be it to find friends nearby or to tweet during presentations, etc. But the most common use case for Foursquare is not the live event. It is, I think, in capturing local habits of its users, surfaced in where users go. We all know from checking in that doing so does not mean “find me here” or “I’m free, let’s hang out.” The checkin does not signal social availability here and now. Some have observed that Foursquare’s approach to friending is in contrast with following on twitter primarily for this reason. We neither want to be followed in real life as we are on twitter, nor mean to suggest by our checkins that we are free to meet up.

This suggests that there might be a problem ahead for Foursquare, if it wants to move from point-based checkins to some kind of higher value social utility. And here’s where I am somewhat confused about how geolocation services fit into the social media landscape.

Ideally, a social application extracts and captures some kind of value from a user’s activity, builds relations between the user’s selections and content, and makes those available for others (e.g. the majority of non-participating users) to navigate by and reuse. User checkins with Foursquare really ought to do more than locate users, or provide them with points and badges. They ought to layer taste and preference mapping onto physical maps, thus socializing the otherwise asocial world of place and location (maps). And it would seem that Foursquare, in working with businesses, sees this Yelp-like opportunity quite clearly.

But does the checkin capture any of that relation? Besides habits of frequenting particular places, and aside from the assumption made that a person checks in because she or he likes (vouches for) the place, what value can be extracted from the act of checking in? Checkins are not modified by ratings, are not accompanied by mood icons, or presence-availability signals (eg Free, Do not disturb, party time!). All checkins are equal. As a system that should be adding value to location by extracting subjective preferences and habits, the checkin model is too simple. (The whole point thing is another matter altogether, and certainly adds bias that may later look to have been a mistake. Good for viral adoption; bad to turn location services into game-like experiences. Though points may be put to use by businesses, in which case Foursquare will face other troubles ahead.)

I want to return now to the filter failure comment by Clay Shirky. For in the context of information overload, filter failure may be part of the problem (and solution). But all social web content is not just information. Much of it is communication, and some of it is relational — interpersonally, or socially. And filters applied to communication and to relational interests perform notably poorly.

Filters applied to information, as search results, subtract “unwanted” results per criteria selected or saved by the user. The filter is meant to eliminate and sort out information that’s noisy. The implication being that information overload can be solved by application standing criteria. I want more of this, less of that. But the relation between me and the information I want is only unilateral. And unless I am willing to adjust my filters regularly, I am going to have to choose standing interests and preferences. And when applied to communication and social relationships, standing interests and preferences simply fail to reflect the transactionality and dynamics of social talk and interaction.

Now it occurred to me that there might be a different way to think of filters. I take Shirky’s comment at face value and so to mean filters on content. So, terms, phrases, authors (sources), and perhaps other meta data (time period or recency, trend or popularity, etc). Criteria applied to the data format, or to the information value of the content. Filters would be one-sided, or individual. Each users sets his or her filters according to his or her own preferences.

But the problem of information overload in social is solved by capturing value in relations between users and content (places included), and of resurfacing that value for use in social interaction and communication. It’s intrinsically a two-sided problem, not a one-sided problem. Communication and social relations are each reciprocal and mutually-interested forms of action. Information filters are monological. Social filters would be dialogical. The distinguishing feature of value in social is that it is shared. Shared interest distinguishes social content from the unilateral tastes and preferences I might apply by means of filters. I want multi-polar social filtering, not just an upgrade of the types of filters I use for search.

In the action streams proposal I wrote up and posted recently, the critical difference between activity and action streams was the two-sidedness of the system. I proposed that stream posts be capable of coupling, and that with coupling, posts would be capable of conduction social action. An invitation post carrying buttons for accept/maybe/decline, for example, would be an action stream post used for invitations. This two-sidedness that comes with post coupling permits social interaction because it enables reciprocation.

I wonder if the same issue may be at hand for social tools. If, for example, no granularity in filtering will be good enough to solve the social problems surfaced by geolocation services, unless they are two-sided, reciprocating, and mutually shared. Social filters would then permit us to use relationships to filter information, and would capture real social value from shared interests (mutually recognized interests).

I have thoughts on what this would look like. But I wanted to get this out because it struck me from SXSW commentaries that when social is live and located, as it is in the case of events, social filters are in effect and systems work well. Shared and mutual interests in themes, topics, meeting places, and being found for face to face interaction are tacitly and implicitly approved by those who checkin using Foursquare during an event. Not so, when we drift about town and occasionally check in to a cafe, restaurant, bookstore, or bar. One sided filters won’t suffice here. We need to know more than what we know we like — we need to know what others like. Including, of course, whether they are available to hang out and if so, interested in doing so with us.

Interestingly, I think many of us use twitter to check each others’ availability in this Foursquare use case. Which just goes to prove the point that communication is two-sided, and that social and relational content exceeds the handling capacities of one-sided information filtering. The question “hey, want to have coffee?” is way of ascertaining mutual interest. But of course dm’ing or tweeting that is to risk a “no.” And that’s where a two-sided signaling model might come in handy.

One of the key social interaction design deliverables is the social interaction design requirements document. Like the market requirements document, this spec covers social needs and requirements. Social needs of the product, of users, and of course, the business served by each. And its value applies equally to social media startups, campaigns, enterprise applications.

Writing a social requirements spec, much like the MRD, involves organizational and company goals. What are your business interests in social media? What kind of audience are you assembling — and how? What’s the engagement model? How is content, in the form of interaction and communication, captured and returned to participants and non-participants alike? And of course, how do you help and add value to your social media audience?

This requirements document serves startups in the social media space as well as brands or companies using social media for “campaign” purposes. For it is important to identify end-user goals and interests in order to best serve them with social media. Principally, because interactions between members of an audience will not only result in compelling experiences but also leave behind content that can be consumed by those who don’t participate.

The social interaction design requirements spec thus wants to address user diversity. Users have different needs and interests — in terms of social media participation and use habits. Users have different ways of engaging in social media, too. And they are likely to interact with other users for a great variety of reasons.

I thought I would share some of my own insights and approaches, in a roundup of simple tips. I write this in the spirit of sharing a look into how best to apply social interaction design thinking. Social interaction design is, as I approach it, not what is on the screen but what happens off it. The emphasis is on social, less so design. And design is as much about our own frames and perspectives, as it is in the products and experiences we create.

This list is not exhaustive, and for many of you it will seem basic. But sometimes we forget the basics, myself included. Oh, and this list goes to eleven.

1. What moves your users?
Social is all about putting people in motion. And people move each other as they are also moved. So what kind of audience are you assembling? Is it a public, a crowd, an attentive audience, a gathering of individuals? Is it groups, passersby, or players playing social games?
Audiences have different psychologies and are moved in different ways, according to their collective sense of presence and involvement, and their individual sense of participation. So think first about what kind of audience you are assembling, and how it is moved.

2. All content is communication
All content in the world of web 2.0 is communication. Yes, it is information and it informs. But it is created and left behind by countless individual acts of communication — with the intent to communicate. If you view social web content as information you’re still in web 1.0. The talkies are here.

So consider the interests of your audience members, and read and listen for what they are communicating and to whom they are communicating. Communication does not just want to speak. It wants to be seen and heard. And people don’t just talk about stuff, they talk to other people. So how do you help users get from talking at to talking with?

3. What’s the user’s investment?
You have made an investment in social media. Well so too have your users. So what’s their investment, and how are they invested? Consider the things that reflect on people, provide them with responses and feedback, with impressions and a sense of being involved and valued. Are they here to build a reputation, to talk, to maintain friendships, to contribute and feel acknowledged? Likely they are.

We all are in this because we are invested, personally, in what our experiences return. Reflect on what your own investment is. Do you track your progress and are you invested in your own success? Speaking honestly and for myself, I know that I will look at traffic I get from this post. That’s one of the ways in which I am invested. And likely, you do the same — whether for your own company, campaign, or that of a client. So you have yourself in mind — as do I when I check the numbers. And that’s precisely the point: your audience thinks the same. So get past your own investment and have your audience in mind. What’s their investment?

4. What are your users’ individual motives?
Users are people too, like you and I. So they have motives of their own, and they participate in social media because they want to, and because it involves things they are good at. So think about what motivates people you know. I try to as much as possible.

When constructing my social personality types I built a list of a few dozen friends and put myself in their place, emotionally, mentally, and habitually. I tried to think through their experiences and habits on social media. To get out of my own experience and to enrich my palette and understanding. Who would invite friends to events? Who would check twitter by phone? Who cared most about pageviews or follower numbers? Try doing the same. We are all different, and we recognize only what we know. But the greater your grasp of these differences between people, the more user experiences you can recognize and accommodate.

5. Embrace ambiguity
All social interaction and communication is ambiguous. Embrace it. For ambiguity is precisely the unresolved, the unknown, and the unacknowledged of human exchanges that keeps all interaction and communication going. We interact because it’s never finished. We keep talking because there’s more to say.

Social software is not regular software. It is not comprised of discrete transactions and well-defined tasks. It’s an open state of talk in which transactions always sustain the possibility for more. So consider the ambiguities that both sustain interaction and communication around your service. And which provide for ongoing interests expressed and exchanged by people never completely in the know.

6. Change your frame
It’s not about you but about them. Success in social media comes when you shift your frame of perspective, and take your user’s interests to heart. This change of frame is as much about thinking less in terms of your own product or service, as it is thinking from the user’s perspective and experience.

We think too much about what we are trying to achieve, about what we have designed or built, and thus in terms of what it does or should do. That leads us to think in terms of controlling outcomes, or tweaking features for new behaviors. All well and good, but those engender a product and design-centric view of what’s going on. Social is happening out there, and your users do not have you or your product in mind, but their own experiences and those they share them with. Change your frame.

7. Know your blindspot
We all have a limited perspective and understanding of the world, and that includes our interpersonal and social relationships. We build this into our products and services because we tend to want to confirm our own views. Users are not taking a drive in your car — they are going someplace.

Know your blindspots. Reflect on what matters to you and to what and how you seem most inclined. Then fill in, as much as possible, what’s in your blindspot. Self awareness and humility will return generously.

8. What’s your surplus value?
What surplus value do you capture and extract from your social, and how does it add value to the experience for all? We live in a system of excess information, of noise, redundancy, and a collective clamor for attention. How are you designing your product or service to provide surplus value to the experience?

All social media is about interested users — interested in other people and interested in their contributions. Interests are preferences, tastes. And social media are about tastes: capturing tastes, reflecting tastes, making tastes. And tastes are individual, social, and cultural. So what do you do that offers a view or experience of collective participation that no single user can see and enjoy?

9. Help users help each other
Facilitate random acts of kindness. We are all kind, and an exchange of kindness is the spark that lights up the social like no other. Think less about what people want, and less about what you (think) you have to offer them. Think instead about the moments and opportunities you might design through which users might experience spontaneous and serendipitous kindness. The virtuosity of kindness needs no architecture, and its spark needs only connectedness and a gap to bridge.

10. What differences make a difference?
We talk a lot about identity online, but identity really only matters because there is difference. We are all different and all becoming different by differentiating ourselves. Even when we identify with somebody, or with a brand or idea, we differentiate ourselves in doing so. Difference matters most in social, not identity. So consider how your social allows differences to make a difference. Think about how you encourage and enable people to be different. How you capture and represent social differentiation. And how these differences might add some interesting facets to the differences that make our identity what it is: different.

11. Don’t lose yourself in metrics and numbers
You are better than that, and to lose the forest for the trees is to undermine your own knowledge, skills, and effectiveness. Social is in the heart as it is in the head. It’s about everything you already know and all that you would still like to learn. That goes for your users as it does for you. So disregard the numbers when you sense they are a comfort or distraction. Objectify your social, and your users will be stats and numbers. They should count more than that.

The launch of any new social tool is a moment of high anticipation and anxiety for any development team. Try as they might, through internal use and limited alpha testing, engineers and designers must hold their collective breath for what happens when their product goes live. There’s nothing like the real world for final proof of concept.

As pregnant as this moment is for the vendors and creators of the full spectrum of social applications — blogs, wikis, communities, apps, games, you name it — it need not be filled entirely with speculation alone. And it would be a poor reflection on designers if the launch event were subject to complete uncertainty. But in the world of social tools, design can neither regulate nor legislate social outcomes. Social behaviors are not a reflection of design, but are an appropriation of design: design put to (social) use.

This may fly in the face of some design thinking, but in social media it’s simply a reality. And I need not point to the unexpected reception that even some of the most highly-funded and well-engineered social products have received of late (Buzz, Facebook’s public status updates). Not to mention the efforts of a one-man shop like ChatRoulette.

For the uses to which social media are put hang on the dynamics of actual users, not the architectural blueprints and feature specs of designers and engineers. Users look to other users for an indication of what a tool or service is good for. And what they notice first is neither design nor features, but the communication left behind by other users.

But even if launching a new social application is not entirely unlike the grand opening of a new bar or restaurant, hostage to the whim and fancy of passers-by whose decision to enter follows a critically ambivalent period of nose-to-the-window peering and contemplation, there must surely be common social patterns and conventions by means of which social interaction designers might anticipate early outcomes. If not predictive and regulative, design can, at least, anticipate.

So before you hand over the keys, let’s consider some of the early social practices new social tools are often subjected to.

Population dynamics most likely play a large role in the early growth trajectory of social media startups. Though it would be very great to have research on this, I don’t know of any myself. Anecdotal evidence existed for Orkut and Friendster, and does so probably for other services, suggesting that membership composition of a service early on can affect scaling. Friendster in the Philippines, Orkut in Brazil. And more recently, Wave, Buzz, Foursquare, among others, provide more current reference points.

Consider the likelihood that early social practices shape the direction of growth and use in social media. If we could better understand how these population dynamics shape a social tool in its beginning stages, we could potentially leverage some of them for more pronounced effect. Social system design would then include mechanisms of soft dynamic social regulation.

• What aspects of a population lead to culture? Follower numbers? Heavy use? Viral invitations and connections? Social discovery? Communication?
• What balance, or mix, of features that support top users as well as incentivize casual users benefits certain social outcomes?
• Does the design allow activity, uses, and practices, to stick?
• How does it surface and present these such that their use is reflected back into the social system?
• What options do designers have to adjust emphasis of social activity to reinforce some activities and demote others?
• What would be the social interaction design methods for such early interventions?

Early developments
Social applications and services develop practices early on according to the activities and behaviors of their first users. At this stage, behaviors and practices reinforce themselves, and initial signs of common practices and culture emerge. All of this happens by means of the tool or application, but on the basis of interactions among users. Their observations of what’s going on inform their expectations of how the service works, how to proceed, and what to do with whom.

Nascent sociality emerges around several cultural and social forces. The social interaction designer can delineate these to better identify and monitor them. (Note that top users often embrace a tool first, test it well and thoroughly, and publicly, and leave behind a substantial amount of communication in the process. This can, in cases like Buzz, dominate the experience for casual users. And the feedback provided by these top users should not be mistaken for global feedback, product feedback, or normative feedback: top users are not every user, have their own interests in mind for the product, and are not necessarily the best judge of what most people want to do.)

Salient early social forces and practices include:

• Users and their individual interests and habits: what users want from a tool and what they do with it, and with others
• Individual user activity and behavior: how users user the tool or service
• Communication between users: made specific by the tool’s means of capturing and representing communication
• Interaction structured by means of system elements, navigation and other features of social architecture
• Temporal rhythms based on speed and frequency of user activity
• Early social differentiation among users, resulting in notable users, relegation of experiences of casual users and marginal users
• Stylistic and cultural specificity, in which tone, etiquette, self-restraint, and other aspects of regard and care become soft but recognizable social norms, leading to a kind of arrangement of social furniture
• Topical sedimentation as collective cultural themes emerge around the specific user interests, communication, and interaction that gain early traction

We can take a closer look at these separately. Each of the following lists describes some (not all) of the social and cultural factors at play in developing social practices.

Early adopters
Early adopters shape the population growth of a service or campaign, in part by attracting friends, colleagues, and like-minded people (location included). These early adopters:

• Set the style and tone for others
• Spread the word among friends and colleagues
• Tend to use the tools and services in ways that best meet their needs and interests, thus creating more content and activity around certain features in particular
• Set the bar, high and low, for participation and activity levels

Member connections made
Early adopters will inevitably make introductions to other new members. How this is done will depend on the styles of those early members but possibly begin to take the form of social convention. According to the ways in which a tool reflects the practices of early adopters, and of top users in particular (e.g. Buzz, which preserves and amplifies top user activity) connections may aggregate to individuals. Alternately, connections may be established more diffusely (twitter following). These early social connections are necessary for social density, grouping, social differentiation, and more. Connections happen between people, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly facilitated by a social activity. They are identifiable by their use of:

• Private messaging to directly communicate interest
• Public messaging such as blogging and commenting
• Status updating to solicit interest
• Following
• Use of symbolic tokens (social objects) to suggest or attract interest
• Matchmaking and introductions
• Helping
• Promoting
• Karmic offerings, gifts, etc
• Personal but socially visible (public) compliments, testimonials, vouching and so on

Social differentiation
Participation by early adopters sets expectations for activity and participation. In any service that surfaces users for their contributions, visibility and distinction are earned. How they are earned could establish trends early on, for example, around differentiating factors like:

• Looks and appearance
• Behavior
• Activity volume and frequency
• Friends made, and their social status
• Stats, points, and other socially signifying quantities
• Communication style, personality, and character
• And more

Activities
Social activities transmit a lot of social and cultural information. Users observe and take lead from what others are doing, particularly when it seems successful. Thus early activities will establish expectations and possibly become self-reinforcing:

• Status updating to solicit connections and interest
• Public writing such as blogging, articles, comments
• Content contributions using content inside or outside the site
• Competitions for points and game-like distinctions
• Status pursuits by means of system incentives (featured member, most active, etc)
• Status pursuits by means of social incentives (elite, mayor, etc)
• Voting and rating to qualify content or users
• Tagging or categorizing to identify content or users
• And so on

Rhythms
Social participation will vary in speed and frequency, time of day, and regularity. Early users will shape expectations for the participation and engagement of others over time. The site or service will reflect frequency and regularity of participation according to how it captures and represents activity over time. Furthermore, use of messaging in public and private, including realtime status updating, will shape expectations around user responsiveness. For example:

• Status updating will speed up site participation for those available to it
• Direct and private messaging will bury the responsiveness of member activity
• Blog and commenting responsiveness will establish visible social rhythms
• Changes to tags, news, featured content and members, and other content lists can be made in real time, or by slower updating schedules
• And so on

Conclusion
These and other factors shape emerging social practices and culture in social media. They can be attributed to users interacting with and through social technologies, mediated by constraining and enabling design features and choices. In this way social practices do reflect technical architecture. But if adoption develops into regular use, if not committed participation, more “purely social” forces emerge.

We can understand these forces as reflections of individual users, their communication, interactions, and collective social practices. Technology then becomes transparent and social practices supplant design as the primary organizing principles of activity. Close observation of these dynamics can suggest ways of intervening in them — and of steering the development of your social.

Good research on this would be interesting to conduct and have, for the reason that managing population growth early on could in fact be a mission-critical task in social media growth and campaigns. There’s an understandable tendency in the development of new social apps to push for widespread adoption early on, after which agile development (=tweaking), responsiveness to user feedback, and community management might avail companies of limited steering mechanisms.

But there’s as of yet no such thing as agile social development. Which would mean, in my view, phased release of architectural add-ons and features on an as-needed basis — as populations scale, social practices emerge, and cultures and communities of users coalesce.

Agile social would suggest that growing communities, shaping populations, and steering practices might in fact be in the designer’s purview. That not every social tool should be launched fully-dressed, or with the full set of accommodations that its architectural plan includes. But rather, as communities themselves grow from campfire to city only over time, agile social anticipates architecturally and is socially responsive and dynamic.

In contrast to the world of real world products, social applications really only get started when they are brought to market. They are not finished. Why then should the designer’s role be done and over with? The skills involved in seeing a social tool to market and beyond, through its early stages of use, may not be among the pages of most design textbooks. But it seems to me that designing the social is a much what happens after launch as it is what happens before.

Some interesting perspectives appeared this week on game mechanics in social media and the corrupting devaluation of social systems, user experience, and metrics that seems to accompany follower counts, foursquare check-ins, and other numerical incentives to use.

I just want to throw in my two cents from a social interaction design perspective. I agree that the simplicity of incentive models predicated on growing your numbers (and status) exist. (What I’ve called the apparency problem in social media: the apparent appearance of social status and relevance.)

But I think these are systemic outcomes and not necessarily a reflection of human nature alone — as is often argued.

I’ll start with context, and with brief excerpts from Peter Michaud, Dare Obasanjo, and Louis Gray. And begin with a status update from Alex Payne of twitter. (Contrast with this recently from Craig Newmark: “Design and esthetics don’t solve problems”)

“Game mechanics aren’t going to fix your product and they aren’t making people’s lives better. Great essay: http://j.mp/aN66i8″ Alex Payne, twitter

Peter Michaud, in an aptly titled post on Achievement Porn, writes:

1. Our society is set up to make us feel as though we must always achieve and grow. That’s true because individuals growing tend to bolster the power and creature comforts of the groups they belong to with inventions, innovations, and impressive grandstanding (Go Team!).
2. Because of this pressure to grow, there’s another incentive to make growth easier. More perversely, to make growth seem easier.

Dare Obasanjo, reflecting on Peter’s piece in Achievements, Game Mechanics and Social Software, agrees that game mechanics should not be used as an easy fix but notes their marketing appeal:

“I will say game mechanics can more than “fix” a social software product, they can make it a massive success that it’s users are obsessed with.
….
Finally, is it better for me as a person to have traded achievement treadmills where I have little control over the achievements (i.e. number of blog subscribers, number of people who download a desktop RSS reader, etc) for one where I have complete control of the achievements as long as I dedicate the time?”

Finally, Louis Gray, writing yesterday in an un-related about followers, addresses the metrics, value, meaning, and bias problems:
The Followers Game Is So 2008. Time for New Metrics.

“Humans have this innate sense of need to be ahead of all others, to measure themselves, and deliver some level of self-assigned worth thanks to what are questionably valuable statistics.
….
We have got to achieve more accurate ratings of influence that determine value.
….
How would social networks be improved if we just hid them away entirely, and stopped looking at growth or relative sizes? My value is still the same, in terms of quality, whether I have an audience of 2,000 or 20,000, especially if I have the right people.”

I think there are several points worth making here from a perspective of social interaction design.

First, it’s not humans or human nature that are the cause of this. It’s systems and the design of social experiences and systems. To attribute the follower incentive and achievement reward dynamics to human nature I think falsely attributes outcomes to essential human values. Social theory tells me that individuals of any society will choose and reflect values validated socially. And viewed empirically, societies around the world are organized in wonderfully different ways, manifest in a tremendous range of culturally diverse traditions and pastimes.

So I think this is a matter of social organization and not of individual human nature.

Secondly, we need to consider not only the outcomes for social systems — those being a devolution of interaction and a devaluation of meaningful differences — but also the user experience and user actions the system enables.

Social outcomes, including those that characterize the dysfunctional if not failing state of many social media designs, reflect aggregate individual user choices and selections. Users can only do what the system permits them to do. And in the case of social design, user choices are a reflection of individual nature and interest only on the first order of interaction — where users engage through UI and features.

At the second order of social interaction, where aggregated individual activities are presented back to the population and used to thematically distinguish the tool as a social experience, system choices lend bias and weight to activities that matter and privilege those that make the most difference.

Social media are intrinsically socially diffuse and the social activities possible in them are for the most part only loosely coupled. Given that a user’s interest in a social system is a reflection not only of his or her interests but of his or her social position, actions and activities that make the most social difference readily stand out.

Actions like following and follower numbers matter because system designers choose to surface these numbers as an individual difference made that makes social differentiation possible.

The problem is in the simplicity of these social models or mechanics. Following is a unilateral action. It may solicit reciprocity but is successful, as an action, without it. That’s Michaud’s easy achievement but stripped down to the basics: acts that make a social difference. (We don’t need to attribute the act to human interest in achievements and a cultural inclination for success. For we could refer back to psychological validation, interpersonal recognition, or many other motivations just as equally.)

Furthermore, following serves as a gesture of interest, of one user in another. But as a form of communication it lays no burden on the one followed to engage or participate. So in a blind social regime like twitter, it offers a low-risk means of connecting precisely because it’s asymmetrical. And in a disconnected social order like twitter, connection is the first step to social relations.

That we pay attention to this stuff, as we all are profoundly aware of, is testimony to the fact that these systems have successfully provided one metric by which to measure social value. But it is clearly an underwhelming and uninspiring metric, when viewed from the perspective of user acts and not overall influence or status. The attention accrued to status achieved by means of numbers and counts betrays the user’s interest in deeper and more meaningful interpersonal or social engagement.

In other words, the value surfaced and valued by the system is not very valuable from the perspective of attention paid and sustained by users, or value derived from use and experience. Consequently, our social uses of social media (the micro) suffer devaluation at the hands of system values (the macro). It’s a bit like being in a country that continually devalues its currency.

Social systems can function technically and operationally even when they are dysfunctional socially. In ways our entire social order grinds along in spite of or perhaps because of fundamental and internal dysfunctionalities. It would be hard to tell the difference in fact between a social system that reproduces itself in order to fix its problems from one that reproduces itself because it is successful and growing.

The challenge ahead for open and distributed social media is, I think, in coming up with better and more well understood social dynamics. Acts and actions that satisfy on the first order of user experience but which result in more compelling, meaningful, and socially interesting system dynamics and outcomes. Ambiguity needs to be our friend, numbers less so.

All social systems can handle more information as they complexify internally. So our information problem may be an internal complexity problem. But if so, then one to be addressed by differentiating the ways in which communication communicates and makes a social difference. This, not coincidentally, at a time when social media encourage ever increasing amounts of communication.

Greater differentiation of social activities and better social design at the presentation layer will permit more user behaviors and activities to make a difference. And when that happens, social complexity and differentiation will engage more, better, and with richer and more diverse results.

I see us moving forward from a phase in which basic and open socially networked communication tools established early and basic practices, like following, and now begin to integrate more and different types of social interactions. If this pans out, simple means of getting attention will fade in value and be replaced by activities that are genuinely more interesting.

Related:
Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews
Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard
Social media: the attention economy explained

A couple of items in the news this week got me thinking about the social search space. But not from the usual angle. We have all heard about ChatRoulette by now, and of the random acts of human exhibitionism that take place there. Well, apparently some of those random encounters were too good to let go of. And so some visitors have taken to the a new Missed Connections to find people they met on ChatRoulette.

Cue “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” Yeah, by U2. And maybe that should be “I still haven’t found who I’m looking for.”

This is a great example of unintended social outcomes, and how in openly-designed social systems, users will find ways of addressing what’s not handled by the application. Since ChatRoulette is anonymous by design, we can already anticipate that one of its social facets will be identity. Anonymity and privacy get users in, but on some occasions they will want to find each other again. Anonymity is coupled to identity (who). Just as random is coupled to specific (what).

Missed connections may be where users have to go now to try to re-locate people they met on ChatRoulette. Or ChatRoulette could accommodate this need in the future. It would then in effect be providing more than just random encounters — and would be providing a kind of social search.

Another item in the news this week related to social search was PeerPong, which received funding. (Disclosure: I consulted to PeerPong early on.) Described now as Aardvark for twitter, Peerpong matches user questions to twitter users who may be able to answer them. As aardvark uses one’s social network to distribute questions and solicit answers, Peerpong uses twitter. (As you probably know, aardvark was just acquired by Google.)

The social search issue here is obviously different from that happening around ChatRoulette’s missed connections. But they have one thing in common worth mentioning. It is: what happens when social search gets personal?

Social search tends to suggest traditional search supplemented with search results qualifed by social relevance. Using, say, social algorithms and user input (ratings, votes, etc) to deliver complementary results. Social search as regular search plus long-tail social data mining.

But there’s another kind of social search. This kind, of which aardvark, Peerpong, and missed connections are all examples, uses people to solve search problems. We usually call these question/answer services. And in this area, success can be more elusive. Where in algorithmic social search there is one user experience issue, in question/answer services there are two.

Both questioner and answerer must have a satisfactory experience for the service to work. In fact the service really hangs on the experience of the answerer. The questioner has an immediate and present need or interest — not so the answerer. His or her motives for participation have to be incentivized or contextualized by other means.

The possibility that social search gets personal can be a systemically reinforcing and, as a user experience, much more compelling (and human) means of solving “search” issues. (Question/Answer services are much more than “search”.) But this potential for the social to get personal is also a barrier to use — put plainly, people can get freaked out.

ChatRoulette’s social search problem will be reciprocity and mutuality — solved only if both parties agree to re-find each other. Presumably the experience these users had on webcam was enough to take care of trust issues (which is not to say it’s free of risk). For aardvark and peerpong, the challenge is relational.

What commitments or obligations to ongoing social search will a user have to another user in the future? Users don’t know each other, even if they may be connected through twitter, through shared topical interests, or by social/peer networks.

Context of use can address some of this. By contextualizing search experiences and answer contributions, services like these can reduce the freak factor, using social context then to de-personalize perceived obligations, expectations, and commitments. Context can help reduce user fears of expected future participation commitments. And context can be used to supply alternative incentives to use — game contexts, expertise ranking, and the like. In short, using social to absorb some of the personal.

One wouldn’t have thought ChatRoulette would have anything to do with social search. But the random selection of users is guaranteed to produce its inverse as an effect and byproduct. When people connect, algorithms become unnecessary.

Cue U2.

PeerPong Raises $2.8M for an Aardvark for Twitter
Calling All Romantics: Chatroulette Now Has Its Own Missed Connections
ChatRoulette, hall of mirrors
ChatRoulette, I’m watching you (watching me)
Google’s Aardvark acquisition: Questions for Buzz?

Twitter is now reporting that 50 million tweets bleep through the grid every single day. It’s a staggering number, 600 per second, of which “approximately 83 tweets per second contain product or brand references (20%)” according to coverage in Readwriteweb. Alongside metrics reported for Facebook (60 million status updates per day) and Youtube (1 billion videos per day) I’m inclined to run for cover in anticipation of some great resounding social sonic boom.

No need to do that however as the metricians have yet to find proof that there is a social equivalent of the sound barrier out there to warn us of. Be that as it may, social media giants Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Google Buzz likely enjoy the race for traffic growth more than they know what they would do if we ever gave them a finish line. Boom! More likely the sound of a starting gun in our case than some barrier up in the sky the other side of which lie demons in waiting. The envelope these guys are pushing is no sound barrier but contains instead the big paycheck (and for the true type-A venture guy, the big payback).

Fifty million tweets a day would knock you on your ass if you were at the receiving end of that firehose. But you are! And so am I. But I, like you, am as likely tweeting myself or if not possibly sitting here like a monkey with my fingers in my ears, hands over my eyes, and then over my mouth. In the time that I’ve been writing this, and since my last tweet exactly 20 minutes ago, 720,000 tweets have blown by me and I didn’t catch a single one of them.

I’m like the guy in the Memorex ad seated in some high-veneered-class black leather and chrome Corbu lounger dressed in Ray Bans and with my tie laid out behind me like a wind sock perched at the back end of some Nasa Ames wind tunnel test of the tweet resistance properties of social media power users.

And the tag-line, or the alt-tag, or the tag cloud reads: “Is it live or is it Realtime?”

If I can be exposed to 50 million tweets per day and still retain my balance at the end of it, if I can withstand the shock and awe of that many messages and I’m not bleeding from the ears eyes and nose, and if I’m not wearing some giant camo protective suit like the guy in Hurt Locker who looks like a cross between a transformer and the michelin man impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, then there’s something behind those numbers worth peeling back.

Fact is there’s probably a lot there worth digging into. Here are some hints as to what we might find, if we had the data and the gear to mine it with. This from Socialtimes:

• A large number of inactive twitter accounts, with around 25% users having no followers and 40% users having never sent a single Tweet.
• Around 80% users sending fewer than ten tweets.
• Only 17% of the registered users having sent a tweet since Dec, 2009.
• The number of active users becoming even more engaged.

“The conclusion of RJ Metrics study was that although Twitter grew tremendously in 2009, a bulk of this growth could be attributed to power users.”

Yeah so how do you like them numbers? Obviously, twitter usage stats correlate to what is perhaps a shrinking percentage of active users (somebody dig up the historical data on how many had 0 tweets and 0 followers 2 yrs ago) vis-a-vis a rapidly-rising flow of tweetage from a core set of power tweeters.

(And I’m now seeing the mental image of not a classroom but a markedly larger higher-ed environment kind of hall or auditorium far in the high back left of which is a cluster of excited-looking students yet again engaged in frantic hand-waving and displaying loss of upper-body movement described perhaps by means of words like “paroxysms” and “peripatetic.” And if I press my fingertips to my temples I’m getting a strong sense that they want my attention.)

Fact is, twitter is an attention machine. And it’s not always a smoothly-functioning affair. It works great if you expect little to come back. It’s perfect if you just get a kick out of turning it on. Awesome if you enjoy hearing the buzz. And rocks if you like standing around with a bunch of other folks just admiring the damn thing, like a beast of engineering well-oiled and purring and all coiled up and ready to pounce like some high performance V 8 on the track at Altamont.

Thing is that we don’t know what kind of machine it really is. Or was, is, and is becoming. We don’t exactly know who uses it, why, and for what purpose. If twitter is an engine for buzz in some circles, a motor of growth for others, a speed demon for fast-moving news cycles, a truck loaded up with discounts and offers, or just a limo with its engine on idle parked where the valet should be while you make your important appearance as it sits, a symbol of your status and overall position — numbers like 50 million don’t tell us what engines those 50 million messages are spinning.

I’ve noticed several types of people who use and benefit from twitter. Obviously a small number of the overall population, given twitter’s somewhat remedial drop-out rate. I group them into four main types, as Self-oriented, Other-oriented, Relationally-oriented, and media users. This fourth type is new, as it’s not really a personality type but works as a media user type.

• Self-oriented types can use twitter to their benefit as a soapbox. Good for punditry, for talking at more than with. Celebrities fit in here also, along with the pundits who would like to be celebrities but are not.
• Other-oriented types, whose communication skills are a bit less self-centered and monological and who are instead more conversational. These types respond and talk to and sometimes with other people. They don’t have to talk about what interests them because they often start with what somebody else says.
• Relational types are more difficult to find on twitter, because twitter makes relational activity hard to engage in. There’s multiple @replying and @naming, but no multiple DM-ing. Relational stuff, like gossip, back-channeling, mediating and triangulating good social grist rests on communication that includes and excludes members of a self-sustaining group.
• Media-related types are those who use twitter just for broadcast. As a way to push out content like news, links, headlines. Or some micro-social version of the big media forms of these. Not as social, not as conversational, and, really, not as egotistical. Twitter as smart extension and tool or channel. (Yeah marketing types don’t go kill twitter now y’hear?)

At 50 million tweets a day, twitter really is humming along. But I would really like to know who’s using it and how that’s going. It has helped me see the value in twitter, and also preserve my own cranial structural integrity, to sort out differences in what is posted there and in how people use it. For branding themselves, passing around bits of interest, journaling out loud, climbing social ladders, socializing hysterically like a first-timer half hung out of the sunroof of a towncar in Vegas…but with a megaphone, an octave pedal, and some doppler-canceling device whose chief function is to make sure it passes at a steady and un-diminishing pitch and volume.

I’m digging deeper into this, because twitter and its ilk are, really and truly, and for better or reflux-inducing worse, the Great Capitalist System’s new mode of production. Both the distribution channel and media preference of choice for millions of new consumers. And even if at 50 million-G-force-inducing-tweets-a-day-but-nobody’s-paying-attention this machine is imperfect and recall prone, it is how we many of us communicate and with that how much of our culture surfaces and makes its waves. Relational, communicative, un-coerced and largely free of the police, twitter is just one in a family of now gangly and sometimes awkward adolescent social tools historically inevitably destined to grow up make the social contributions that are their civic duty.

I’d say stick around, watch, learn, and think a bit. But if you’re here you probably already made that choice. It’s early days, like when television comedies were radio acts with a camera. The talkies are here. Say something interesting. Keep it real. And never be afaid to draw back the curtain ask: So what does this mean?

Related
Slideshow: Finding Signal In the Real-Time Noise by Louis Gray
Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day; Still Dwarfed by Facebook & YouTube
Twitter Users Sending 50 Million Tweets Each Day

Thus at bottom the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation … the universe of communication … leaves far behind it those relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in a single dimension, that of communication. That’s the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That’s obscenity. The hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contactual and motivational obscenity of today…” — Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication

We “are now in a new form of schizophrenia … The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world’s obscenity … He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence…” — Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication

“Now I think that it would be better to reveal myself” Mr. Ternovskiy, builder of Chatroulette, referring to a less graphic kind of transparency, in Chatroulette’s Creator, 17, Introduces Himself, The New York Times

As is generally the case with a new application on the Internet, and with social applications in particular, users are queuing in large numbers for a peek into the random universe of ChatRoulette. The site is a rabbit hole for voyeurs and exhibitionists alike, mutually and symbiotically united in a simulcast trip through the looking glass in the age of social media.

Viewer discretion is advised, and if you are even mildly sensitive to social allergens, you may wish to keep the lens cap on and your eyes behind a good pair of wrap-arounds, for there is indeed a lot of flashing going on in the aptly named “surreal” world of ChatRoulette (@nickbilton).

What explains the proliferation of nudity and exposure in ChatRoulette (and video chat systems like it)? Is there, as Nick Bilton asks in his review of the service, “a nascent desire for anonymity online.”

This doesn’t add up for me. There is desire, yes, but not for anonymity.

Nick writes, in The Surreal World of Chatroulette: “our lives used to be private by default, yet with the advent of each new social network, privacy has become increasingly difficult to preserve.” But were our lives private by default? Have we not, through practices social and cultural, always sought out and crafted arts by means of which to expose and express ourselves on stage, in front of audiences of all kinds?

The point that social networking threatens to undermine privacy is a point taken, but not as an explanation of the social practices that so easily and readily spring sites like ChatRoulette to life. It is much more likely that there is in ChatRoulette’s ability to send users “parachuting into someone else’s life” a kind of mediated proximity, realtime in that it’s live, co-present in that it telescopes a kind of social watching, intimate in its on-screen coupling, and spectacular in how it attracts attention.

Take desire — a force most decidedly at work in ChatRoulette. Desire desires the desire of the other, as French philosopher Lacan put it. Desire would not desire anonymity — but the desiring person may desire to be seen anonymously. And to anonymously share this desire with another anonymous person. Desire is, when mediated in online adult webcam chats, and between consenting users of ChatRoulette, amplified according to its own internal social inclinations. Desire is for the other’s desire: it is reciprocating. This is precisely what Chatroulette does: it shows you the Other.

The modality of the medium in this case is visual. And because it involves seeing people, and seeing them live, it will be about watching. This is the social modality by which users will relate, and the activity in this kind of sociality will necessarily involve the kinds of action coordination, synchonrization, mirroring, and other mutually-interesting aspects of watching one another remotely.

Watching, and being watched. Those are the perceptual senses involved, and thus the basis of communication. So if desire is at play, it is at play in getting attention. At play in self disclosure. At play in the thrill and surprise of synchronizing with another user. But by means of seeing and being seen (mutual recognition is being seen), of watching and being watched (anonymity is watched).

This coupling is an example of one very simple answer to asynchronous communication otherwise so common online. We push media for what they bracket out of social experience, and press at the margins to discover where the medium produces its most uncanny, unsettling, and weird effects. Webchats are live, are a kind of realtime streamtime that occurs in time (feedtime?). In time, not asynchronously and out of time, not in separate streams of user messaging flowing alongside one another’s times. A live and streaming realtime. Which means co-presence.

Presence online can be established by artifact and extension, which is normally the case when we are present but not really (available but by notification only, and presented by means of re-presentation of text, messages, etc.). This kind of presence, which we have called ambient presence, is sensed but not seen, makes it into one’s awareness but is not verified, and may be social without placing immediate demands on participation. One can be present and fake it this way too. One can be present by proxy. But there’s no faking it on webcam, no proxy presence when there’s immediacy and an intimate proximity.

Presence by cam is not mediated by text or other artifact. It’s truly present. And here the co-presence of seeing and being seen, watching and being watched, and the uncanny special effect of closed-circuit mirroring in mediated interactions with which we also see ourselves seeing ourselves being seen, and can watch ourselves watching while being watched, couples us to others, anonymously or not.

This coupling resolves an ontological crack in the conventional online experience of asynchronous participation: the separation and disconnection of online connectedness. With the exception of webcam and VOIP applications, online social media are one-sided. They present us with a one-sided and unilateral view of interaction and communication.

Not on twitter, on Facebook, or any other social platform do we see what the other sees, view what the audience views, read what another is reading. Webcam chat hookups like ChatRoulette unify the experience in a single and shared (although mediated) reality. (Imagine that we might see another person’s twitter view in a split pane. How would that change our sense of the social?)

I wrote last week about the possibility of coupling realtime activity streams, as in twitter, Facebook status updates, and the like. I speculated that coupled posts would permit communication to become action, as users would then be able to respond directly to posts across systems. And that action streams might also permit users to use messages to act — such as send or reply to invitations, purchase tickets, and so on.

Chatroulette is an example of coupled realtime streams. But being live feeds, and being webcam feeds, mutually-visible and coupled activities are up to the user’s imagination. No meta is required for the transmission of live activity on camera.

Live feeds may be contrasted further still with the temporality of realtime message streams. I’ve argued that realtime activity streams are still experienced by users in their own time. That streamtime is not a shared experience of time. In webcam chat time is shared, users are in one another’s time, creating a stretch of shared time together. This solves a problem that realtime messaging applications suffer from: the ordering of messages delivered in realtime.

Realtime messages are delivered in chronological order. But this order bears no relation to message content or context. It is simply the order in which they arrive. Consequently, the order created by design, and by means of which messages are posted and displayed, adds no value and supplies no narrative or conversational threading to the content itself (or for that matter to its authors). The realtime temporality of message delivery is extrinsic to its meaning.

Which is in part why the medium creates so much noise and redundancy. For in any social medium, attention is the resource with which the engine keeps running.

Attention is focused in webcam experiences fundamentally differently than it is in experiences that use the screen for display and re-presentation. (See yesterday’s post.) The screen modality of webcam chat uses “windows” through which we see the other user(s). Obviously, then, our attention is on what we see (including ourselves seen seeing). And because social media are about giving and getting attention, we hold the attention of the other by visual spectacle. In visual media, attention goes to that which is the most compelling, riveting, ridiculous, funny, or obscene. In short the “sociality of the spectacle.”

Which brings us, finally, to devolution and the corruption of social media experiences. Communication and attention being the scarce resource in a medium that produces surplus and excess, a seemingly unavoidable systemic process of negentropy often accompanies the rise of noise and redundancy that occurs with system growth. Negentropy is the phenomenon of increasing order, and it appears in uncoordinated social systems as self-reinforcing dynamics emerge around common practices. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, order will generally emerge around the lowest common denominator: the form, content, performance or expression most likely to communicate (get attention).

In Chatroulette, this is already the obscene. Obscenity, like the raunchy and ridiculous, make for compelling viewing and will thus always attract attention. Attention is sought after by the individual, and secured by the sustained engagement of one other viewer (or roomful of viewers, but one view). The spectacle is singularly interesting.

But in realtime streaming services like twitter, attention is sought amidst a massive audience in a constant flow of messages. Thus repetition is the lowest common denominator in twitter: the trending topic or bit of news whose headline and social significance are gaining the attention of the audience at large. A reference to common knowledge and news, including gossip, rumor, and hearsay, secures attention. Not the spectacle of the singularly fascinating sight, but the spectacle of the massively popular hit or trend.

The sociality of twitter thus involves the attention-grabbing awareness of an audience becoming community or populace. Focusing the awareness of all on one unifying theme. The sociality of ChatRoulette involves the attention-getting focus of one, creating the intimacy of a couple for a stretch of time outside the view of the rest.

And so it is, in my view, that the answer to Nick’s question is not that in an age of public social networking we desire its opposite, anonymity. But that in any mediated social experience a number of intrinsic transformations of experience that involve our senses, our interest in others, communication and its modes, and the construction of unique mediated realities, together fashion the constraints and opportunities for paying attention in new ways. Hulu would do well to consider a co-viewing option (perhaps initially pre-screened and using community flagging norms) instead of a messaging platform. After all, ChatRoulette shows us that if it’s not anonymity we desire, we do desire new experiences with others.

I told myself that I would refrain from posting today, having perhaps posted too much last week. But sometimes a post simply gets stuck, and like a ditty on spin cycle, begins writing itself. There’s naught then to do but wring the thing out.

Alongside buzz on Buzz last week there was also the much less polished but in ways more magnetic attraction of tiny video phenom ChatRoulette. There’s little to say about the service itself, for it’s really just a couple webcam windows on a page. But it occurred to me this morning that in some ways ChatRoulette is a good illustration of a social interface principle I’ve been repeating for a couple years.

I like to say that the social interface has three modes: Mirror, Surface, and Window.

The Mirror mode is reflective, and is what is involved in our self-reflection and self-image as constructed or produced online. You can go back to Freud for more on mirroring, or leaf back to the Greeks and the fable of Narcissus. I need say little more, I suspect, on the fact that we get mirroring from our presence and participation online.

The Surface mode corresponds to the surfaces the medium is capable of rendering. All visual media, online included, render content on their surfaces. Films are projected, television is broadcast, print is printed. The interface can handle whatever kind of visual presentation its technologies and designers can muster: applications, images, full-screen video, animations, games, etc. And computer screens are the most flexible of any of our contemporary screens. One reason that this medium presents such an industrial threat to old media.

The Window mode provides for the possibility of seeing others through the screen — either quite literally (meaning, visually!) as in webcams, or by means of text chat. I consider the window mode to be at work in text chat because the user’s focus of attention is another person. The modality of the UI isn’t constrained to what’s on the screen, but includes the user’s interior focus of attention. In either case — seeing another person or thinking about another person — this communicative functionality is enabled by the medium.

These three modes come together brilliantly in ChatRoulette. In fact the simplicity of ChatRoulette makes a good case for the degree to which social interaction design is “off the page” and involves construction and production of socialities.

ChatRoulette is a surface on which both mirror and window are combined. This isn’t in itself unique. What is unique is that your audience is selected at random — hence the roulette. The author’s origin being Russian, roulette here refers to the Russian version, and not the Vegas version, although there’s a “What happens in ChatRoulette stays in ChatRoulette” aspect at work in its appeal.

To further illustrate the point that social interaction design addresses the particular production of sociality, the random selection of audiences, which pairs you up with somebody on a cam, is a button that enacts a socio-logical operation.

This operation creates a sociality of anonymity. Anonymity permits the play of seeing oneself, seeing oneself being seen (face or some other part), performance, intimacy, proximity, and other social effects of a surface that brings these together. And anonymity escapes social normativity of being one among a known audience of peers.

Consider the normative constriction that would immediately take effect if it were hooked up to your twitter followers or social networking friends. There would be much less nudity and self-pleasuring on ChatRoulette. In fact this suggests to me that privacy is not the best concept for understanding social outcomes in social media. For privacy in ChatRoulette is not just a personal or individual right protected by the medium, but is a constraint that enables very public exposure: to wit the fact that some users feel the need to get into and expose their privates.

The intimacy of anonymity on full display on ChatRoulette also demonstrates the normative function at work in social media. Being seen, and knowing by whom, is key to engagement of a normative constraint. Norms of use in ChatRoulette include transgressions of common codes of civility. By means of the absence of a collective or unifying experience (audience of more than two).

A similar kind of behavioral effect occurs when twitter streams are shown on stage during presentations — and differently when the stream is visible to the speaker. The twitter stream that in normal twitter usage is one’s own personal and specifically individual view is now a common view — by virtue of the stream being one stream seen by all. And if it is behind the speaker, it is a public backchannel, and tweets will often reflect the audience’s awareness that their public commentary is literally behind the back of the speaker. This disrupts the normal speaker-audience relationship and, for better or worse, permits new ways of speaking.

Some have remarked on ChatRoulette’s utter simplicity, and asked why it took the internet so long to produce such a thing. ChatRoulette is not new, but its popularity outside the adult web idiom is. And it shows that some of what the medium does and does well, that which compels by means of voyeurism, curiosity, the arbitrary, creating experiences both self-conscious and in ways liberating too, derives from some very simple combinations made possible by the medium’s unique use of mirrors, windows, and surfaces.

Related:
Social media: the attention economy explained

User Competencies of the Social Media User

ChatRoulette, from my perspective by danah boyd

Some Interesting Facts About Chatroulette by Fred Wilson