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Facebook as Social Software

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Facebook applications are cool and popular right now.  Everyone wants one.  Indeed, I found it very interesting that BJ Fogg is teaching a class on Facebook Apps.  This class seems relevant and interesting.  I’d take it!

However, I’m actually not a fan of (using) Facebook applications.  I’d rather give applications a whole Web page to work with.  I believe that Facebook applications are written because they can draw many users through viral marketing, not because they are generally better or easier to deploy than stand-alone apps.

The benefit that I see from a user’s perspective is that it becomes much easier to engage in social applications.  Our research lab has been playing Scrabulous on Facebook for a few weeks now.  Would anyone have played had they not already been part of the same social network?  In general, I would like to see data comparing the number of games played on Facebook with the number played on scrabulous.com.

Compare Facebook-style social applications with MovieLens buddies, an old-style social feature that allows users to share ratings and receive movie recommendations together.  Nobody uses it.  Now, if MovieLens had a Facebook application, would we also benefit from the viral effect?  Is a Facebook application the path to (research) riches and glory?

Max

Del.icio.us Dominates

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Another interesting ReadWriteWeb article, this time on how life is shaking out in the social bookmarking world.  The article has a number of interesting types of analysis, but the main focus is on user-ship.  On this dimensions, del.icio.us dominate, with more than 10x more users than the next best (Magnolia). 

My predictions is that there should be a moderate vortex effect in social bookmarking, with benefits to the category leader because of the greater volume of other users creating value by adding their bookmarks.  On the other hand, in the absence of true personalization in this category, the vortex should be limited, since above a critical mass the additional users add more noise than additional value.  In fact, we should expect to see a number of secondary social bookmarking sites spring up with the goal of attracting a clientele that shares similar tastes.  In a sense, this will let people find their own "neighborhoods" of others with whom to share bookmarks, rather than sharing with the unwashed masses.  Unlike with automated personalization, these neighborhoods will most easily form when they are structured around easy-to-understand syntactic categories, so the usual suspects — religion, politics, and sex — seem most likely as the fracture points.  

No, it probably is not coincidence that these are the traditional "off-limits" topics for casual conversation.  These are topics about which people prefer to talk to people with whom they agree.

I’d personally rather see a more personalized approach from one of the top social bookmarking sites.  Such an approach might lead to a much stronger vortex effect, and the opportunity to dominate the category.

John

FeedEachOther: a new feed reader with cool social features

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ReadWriteWeb talks about a new feed reader that has strong social features, making it easy to share items with other users in rich ways.  They say that FeedEachOther also has interesting recommender algorithms to help people find other feeds to read that are similar to feeds they have read in the past.  Sounds very interesting! 

John

 

“Wiki City Rome”

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Interesting article (see http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wikicity-0830.html) —

Residents of Italy’s capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking next month with the launch of "Wiki City Rome,"
a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that
uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate
the city’s pulse in real time.

Do experts edit Wikipedia? Will they?

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There was an interesting essay in the most recent CACM titled "Why You Can’t Cite Wikpedia in My Class" (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1284621.1284635). The author, Neil L. Waters, is a professor
of history and the Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies in the
Department of History at Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT. He recounts how several students submitted essays to him with incorrect information on several topics in Japanese history, and how he traced the incorrect information to several Wikipedia articles. 

I’ll skip the part about how he had his department formulate the "you can’t cite Wikipedia" policy and the large amount of attention this received. (You shouldn’t: it’s quite interesting.) What I was struck by was the last paragraph:

I suppose I should now go fix the Wikipedia entry for Ogyu
Sorai (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogyu_ Sorai). I have been waiting
since January to see how long it might take for the system to
correct it, which has indeed been altered slightly and is rather
good overall. But the statement that Ogyu opposed the Tokugawa
order is still there and still highly misleading
[2]. Somehow the statement that equates the
samurai with the lower class in Tokugawa Japan has escaped the
editors’ attention, though anyone with the slightest contact with
Japanese history knows it is wrong.

Hmmm…. so …. why didn’t he go fix the article? One can imagine lots of answers, but I’d guess the right explanation is that he doesn’t have any incentive to do so. Probably this is true for most experts in topics like Japanese history (what are "topics like Japanese history" anyway?).

So, I think a great research question is: is there any way to create incentives for experts to edit Wikipedia?

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