Libby Hemphill » Social Computing

Twitter network for danah boyd JSB Symposium talk

libbyh — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:07:56 +0000

Today's John Seely Brown Symposium had an active Twitter hashtag of #danahjsb. I imported the hashtag network* into NodeXL and had it draw up a graph for me (click the image for a giant BMP version):

#danahjsb network

Image size depends on the user's number of followers. Edge color depends on the kind of edge - yellow indicates a following relationship, blue a reply/mention relationship. Compare our graph to Marc Smith's graph of the #win09 hashtag users:

#win09 network

You'll notice a couple of things. First, Marc is better with NodeXL than I am, and his graph is just easier to read. Then, dig a little deeper and notice that the network of users who used the #danahjsb hashtag is more densely connected. The #win09 network is brokered by the guy in the middle, and the #danahjsb network has no obvious brokers. More to come on my thoughts about the symposium talk and panel, stay tuned.

* only users whose tweets are public are included in these network diagrams

More Info:

What the hashtag?! - view the tweets

Coming Soon - watch the symposium talk and panel

danah boyd and Panel at JSB Symposium

libbyh — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:24:32 +0000

Each year the School of Information hosts a John Seeley Brown Symposium on Technology and Society, and danah boyd is this year's keynote speaker. John Seeley Brown, Ed Vielmetti, Cliff Lampe, and I will be on a panel following her talk: "Youth-Generated Culture: Growing Up in an Era of Social Media"

JSB Symposium info
Tuesday, October 13
2pm
Blau Auditorium at the Ross School of Business, Tappan and Monroe Streets

Why else might RWW be right about Skype?

libbyh — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:12:39 +0000

Bernard Lund wrote a column (article?) for ReadWriteWeb recently that listed 10 reasons Skype is the biggest Web 2.0 winner. "Web 2.0" doesn't even make sense anymore, but let's set that aside. Lund's article is interesting even without the "Web 2.0" buzzword. For instance, he points out that Skype is profitable. Profitable is surely something winners are, right? What he leaves out, though, is even more interesting.

Skype's core business is about connecting people. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, where connections have become almost a side effect of advertising and broadcasting our every thought, when we use Skype, we do so to make a real, timely, engaged connection with another person (or group). Maybe the lesson Skype has to teach us is not that telecom companies are bad but that Web 2.0 companies who don't help us connect to each other, not just us to advertisers, aren't where the money is. At least, I can hope that's part of the lesson.

Chris Hughes in Fast Company

libbyh — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:56:23 +0000

I picked up a discarded Fast Company magazine at the YMCA today, and in it I found a great article about Chris Hughes. Hughes was a Facebook co-founder and left to join the Obama campaign where he was responsible for the innovative social networking tools available on My.BarackObama.com. I don't know much about how Facebook got started beyond the Harvard bit and annoying Mark Zuckerberg. It turns out Hughes was the non-code-writing co-founder, the "people person." Changes to Facebook over the last year or so have been met with remarkable criticism and user outcry, many for good reason. Remember the privacy flare up? The "all your data are ours" nonsense from just recently? How about the thousands of users who dislike the new Facebook homepage (this user included)? Maybe Facebook wouldn't be in those messes if they still had people people. I'm sure Zuckerberg can write some mean code and that his minions can too, but Facebook seems to be turning into a Twitter on steroids, and in the process, losing that ability to connect real people to each other that made it so great. As an Obama supporter, I'm grateful that Hughes joined the team and helped us organize ourselves, so grateful, in fact, that I don't care that Facebook may end up ugly and abandoned without his vision: "If it's real people and real communities, then it's valuable. Otherwise it's just playing around online." (quoted in Fast Company)

Stovepipes and how mine is better than yours

libbyh — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:58:37 +0000

Ok, so now I've done some reading, and I have dusted some of the luster off the academia-business divide. (It's Friday; I wrote another proposal draft yesterday; I'll be unpredictable today.)

I'm reading Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007" report. I got it from Socialtext, but I'm not sure how. In fact, there were a few PHP errors when I submitted the form to get the document, so my path was broken anyway. So, the ridiculous title aside, I thought maybe this document would be interesting and enlightening. The summary at the beginning is nice - tells me social software is a priority in 2008, explains that the paper is going to talk about social software market players. Fair enough. I'll leave the fuzzy definition of "social software" aside and read on.

The paper tries to describe products available in the market and lists strengths and weaknesses for each. No where in the whole thing does it say where Mr. Nikos Drakos (again, Gartner, with the boys' club) got any of his information or whether he ever spoke to a person who uses any of these products. I'm apparently supposed to assume that Mr. Drakos knows more than I do and that this oracle is authoritative and accurate. Yeah, not so much. If nothing else, I've learned to doubt in my 22 years of schooling. I think I'm fired up because some of the products he mentions such as Twiki are miserable failures for users. Those of us who do user-centered research involving social software found that out by, gasp!, watching users try to use them, analyzing log data about use and content, and trying other products.

I don't know that I meant for this post to become quite so rant-y, but there you have it. I see the difference in rigor that distinguishes academic research from at least some forms of business research. I like rigor. I wish I had more time to develop my own social software based on what academic research has shown (maybe I could even make money), but I have to write that pesky dissertation. I wish I could find more organizations interested in studying the use and effectiveness of the social software tools they employ. I wish we could afford to experiment a bit more with the tools we build and use. That said, Gartner's report is clearly more clearly written and probably more immediately useful than my work, so they get points for that. But Twiki? Seriously? Come on.