Who are my friends — seriously?

Matti — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:09:01 +0000

One thing I’ve been interested for some time is friendship in online environments. Services like Facebook or Twitter allow us to add friends or to follow, but what these actually mean is totally different discussion. I know, I’m not the viagra one doing this kind of things — actually, I’m behind the masters¹ in this area.

However every now and then you get interesting ideas that what could be done when data just emerges and you take a deeper look to it. The following is something Juuso Karikoski (Aalto University) and me have worked on and shall present in the IEEE Social Computing 2010 (stay tuned for a conference report), but I’ll make a human readable version out of here.

It’s even now possible to use one data source and try to understand structure in a service. Sometimes it’s unidirectional and sometimes the system allows you to weight this data. However, the problem is that it just shows one channel of communication, but we use several different kinds of channels: I communicate via IRC, Facebook, email etc. — and looking just one service gives us a limited view.

What we worked out was a solution to mash together two different kind of data sources: phone call log data and a data from an Internet service called OtaSizzle. Naturally, this view is still limited and our sample size was hilariously tiny (n << 100), but it’s more than nothing. What we basically show is difference in these two networks.

As you might guess, we are not the only ones who have this kind of results: Karien Van Cleenput has just shown similar thing using a survey, and with decent sample size too. She suggest that strong ties are maintained with full variety of communication where as weak ties are maintained using social networking sites and face to face as their means.

What these results mean for me at least then? By looking several data sources together, we can build superior experiences for the users, something that makes them smile every day. And we need to understand the complexity of human nature, how they communicate using variety of media…

For example, see Huberman et al (2009), Golder et al (2007) and Eagle et al (2009) for using online or mobile phones as data sources and making observations of the data and Donath et al (2004), Donath (2007) and Fono et al (2006) for explaining human behavior in online networks.

Social media is dead, long live social media!

Matti — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:23:41 +0000

I had an interesting discussion with Micki Krimmel in Nokia Open Lab 2008-event. While having workshop of the next steps of social media our group started to speak about data interoperability and other things we saw important. Micki just commented that discussion that those things might be important to us “pioneers¹” but real people, the ordinary Joes and Janes just use the tools for communications.

I like this mark and think it’s really important one: maybe for the younger (even younger than me) generation there’s not the history of web as we have it: I had my first website out when I was at elementary school and I see the huge difference with the way I write content here: I started with Notepad and now I just write the content without ’s and

So, what’s the most interesting thing that Micki pointed out: our chose of wording; social media, might even cause harm. As a political scientist student I know that terms are a way to use power. I’ve also see some people in the academic field defining what social media is and what they refer with that term. But what ordinary people think when we ask about Facebook or Flickr? Do they think that’s something totally different — or do they just see it as a cool and cheap way to communicate. So, as some of us want a special term to this, the question remains if that is a good word for what we do or should the term evolute to show how social media is becoming every day thing 2.

Just to elaborate this more: someone asked “What is antisocial media?” while we discussed this. That is a good question — is there any media that is antisocial?

actually, I don’t feel that pioneer in this area; I’ve been blogging for two years now and it became mainstream way before
This sentence is based on the assumtion that social media is pushing itself to the live of younger generations and thus they see nothing special in there, they just use the best tools available. This sounds like I need more understanding in this…

Science and Industry » communication

Who are my friends — seriously?

Social media is dead, long live social media!