Social Networks 101 - S01E01
Here it is! Our first Podcast Episode
News: Rumor - Facebook is about to limit 3rd party app access to user data!
Topic: What is a social network, why should a product designer care, and where do you get one?
Tip: NodeXL - Instant Social Network Analysis
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Randy: Hello everyone! I’m Randy. Welcome to the podcast. With us today we have.
Bryce: Hi, I’m Bryce Glass.
Marc: Hi, I’m Marc Smith.
Randy: Today we can go straight to our first news items and it’s going to be a rumor this week. I’ve been out in about in the industry talking to lots of people and the buzz that’s going on now is that Facebook is talking about closing the open graph and limiting—rate limiting—the number of people who can use applications connecting to Facebook connect. I wanted to get our opinions on that presuming that’s true. Marc, you use systems like this for NodeXL don’t you?
Marc: Well, I’m using a lot of APIs from social media services but I’m not sure that I’m familiar with this particular decision. It does sound like a step in a larger pattern in which these APIs are restricted after years of being relatively open and accessible. Well within the rights of these organizations to do so but it does seem like a change in the nature of the internet that once these sites get to have rich enough and valuable enough content, then they’re no longer available.
Randy: Bryce?
Bryce: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I hear that rumor and I think of kind of the implications that kind of all along the stack for users, developers, publishers and for Facebook. For users what does that mean? Do applications just stop working? You and I have published quite a bit about application trust, all these mobile apps with people have asked very credible questions like “should I install this thing?” and “Do I want a relationship with this app?” Facebook has been a very intimate part of that for an entire ecosystem of social apps. What does that look like in coming months as that starts to get repealed. How do the publishers differentiate?
In a little bit I think we’re going to talk about the value of having or not having your own social network and with clients and consulting work I’ve always kind of hewn toward the advice of “why have it if Facebook has already got it?” Well, I think we’ve got a pretty credible answer to why you might want to invest in your own at this point.
Randy: Yeah, that’s the problem, right? You’ve got the number one social network who established the de facto identity model. As a consultant I’d been recommending it for years. Now all of the sudden those people can’t … those users can’t have their data updated. There are calendar applications and a contacts application that now will not be up-to-date. Facebook is thinking—and I’ve seen this before with Facebook credits—that someone else is capturing more value from their data then they are and therefore somehow it’s a bad thing. It’s like, “That’s why you’re capturing what value you are capturing from that data.” I don’t see the advantage to encourage the creation of thousands of other social networks separate from Facebook, no.
Well, so it will be interesting to see how this unveils itself and let’s move on to our next topic.
Our main topic today—kind of social networking 101—what is a social network? Why would I care? How do I get one? I’m going to start with the real quick story about what is not a social network. There are a lot of people think they know what it is. I’ve received calls as a consultant in social media with people who wanted to set up social networks. One came from a man who said, “I want to set up a social network that doesn’t exist yet and that is for waitresses, waiters and bartenders.” I said, “A waitress in Poughkeepsie and a bartender in Florida?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, they have things in common but they don’t have any reason to interact with each other.”
That to me what’s at the core of a social network is that social connection that there is something they need to do together. So, social networks include cancer survivor groups who use mailing lists. They include your friend’s network is what most people think of on something like a Facebook or your coworker’s network on LinkedIn. There are lots of specialized cases. There are social networks that are set up temporarily: line parties with films. It’s a very broad category but because it’s broad, it doesn’t mean that everything you can think of is a social network.
Bryce: Yeah, absolutely. I think certainly there are kind of different occasions for sociality to form but it’s in the eye of the practitioner or the prognosticator to figure out exactly how likely that is to happen. Danah Boyd has published quite a bit about the fact that social networks online tend to mirror social connections that happen offline and there’s also kind of a large body of evidence out there about the notion of social objects. So, there are many sites. YouTube is probably the one that springs to mind most closely where it’s the thing that bring people together in order to comment and form connections much more so than any prior shared affinity. But absolutely I think if you’re struggling to find out what that thing would be in the first place, then your first inclination probably shouldn’t be “let’s put a formal structure around it and see what emerges.”
Marc: I’m a sociologist and we see social networks everywhere but social network has come to mean the group of people who share some mutual value. I think there is a lesser definition of social network which is any group of people who connect but to Randy’s point these were group of people who were unlikely to connect.
So social networks are really any set of connections among a group of people. Some social networks become valuable to their contributors and their participants because there’s mutual value to be generated. Some barely exist at all and are really trivial or sort of just casual. You go to the same Starbucks I go to but we don’t go there at the same time. There’s a connection but it’s not a meaningful connection. I call you regularly. That’s a more meaningful connection but I only call you between 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday. That’s a certain kind of connection.
So there’s all sorts of social connections. It’s just that when social connections become dense, when they become reciprocal, when they take on certain structures and deliver value to their participants, then we bestow the added value of “social network” but there are lots of kinds of social networks and they’re just not all meaningful.
Randy: Right and that’s where I was going with the “why do I care “question. So, if you’re doing product design—specifically web or mobile—what you’re looking for is networks that have a reason to communicate and to share or to create for each other. Random or arbitrary tag-matching just won’t cut it. So, when we ask about “how do I get one?”, it’s kind of ironic that our news today is that my first recommendation when I first started putting together this podcast was to say, “Well, just use Facebook’s or use LinkedIn’s if that’s what’s going to work for your application.” Now, I’m a little more frightened that may not work for you.
But keep in mind, there’s one more thing that enters into this and that is the scale. When most people are talking about social networking from a marketing point of view or a user-generated content point of view, they’re looking at the large networks. But—it’s surprising—the vast majority of social networking is taking place in very small social networks and we call those like mailing lists. Often your application doesn’t need a huge friend graph with reciprocal connections that are difficult and expensive to set up or to import. Sometimes you just need a topical mailing list. Sometimes you get one by just signing up all your friends or using SMS groups.
Bryce: Randy I’d like to echo that and kind of amplify it too. I think it’s really critical to be hypercritical about your needs and I’m thinking in the product development process of how small decisions early on can lead to kind of exponential increase in work down the road. So, if you start down the path of, “Well, let’s recreate the full social functions of a Facebook or a LinkedIn for our particular needs.” Well, now you’re thinking about things like relationship management and reciprocity and invite processes and email communications… I mean, subsystems upon subsystems upon subsystems some of which represent months of work. What about a notification system, so users know when something has changed in there?
We look at Facebook and they’ve done a pretty good job of it. We think “How hard could it be to emulate what they’ve got?” Turns out— it’s pretty darn hard.
Marc: Well, but it’s pretty darn hard at that scale and I guess I’m wondering, based on the news in Randy’s point, do you put your business on these platforms when they can and do arbitrarily change their terms of engagement and limit what data they will share? I think the theme of this discussion is networks: they really do have value and where do you get one? Well, you have one—you just may not really own it. You may have inscribed it in Facebook, in LinkedIn but you, surprisingly, may have less access to it than you thought.
Randy: And you may in fact just want to discover where it is. I think that should roll into our tip for the day about NodeXL.
Now it’s time for our actionable tip. This is meant to be something you can take away and use today. Today, NodeXL with Marc Smith.
Marc: It is possible to use NodeXL without knowing all that much about NodeXL. I’ll tell you a little bit about it. It is a tool for getting a social media network automatically and analyzing it and giving you a social media network visualization and report. Your first step is to do an import and my tip today is to tell you that you can download recipes for running NodeXL reports from our website nodexlgraphgallery.org. You can think of it as “Flicker for network graphs.”
You get a little image and a report underneath it. At the very bottom of those pages, there is a link to the Options file. We like to think of it as the recipe. You download that file; go into NodeXL; go into the options import menu; pull that in and when you run the automation button, you will now get a result that resembles the result you see on the website. So you can get expert results just by downloading the file, importing it into the options import menu and you’ll get results that look like those results.
Randy: That sounds great and we’ll include links in the podcast notes.
Marc: Right.
Randy: Thanks Marc!
Marc: Thanks.
Randy: Thanks Bryce. That’s a wrap.