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Our support for it should be available in the next couple of days as well.

Fascinating piece by Cory Doctorow in Information Week about the follies of facebook like ego driven application, titled “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook“.

The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it begins to define “the Internet” for a large slice of the world’s netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe’s Law: “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.” This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc).

But Metcalfe’s law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that’s not always true (see Brook’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”).

Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” Perhaps we can call this “boyd’s Law” for danah boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers. Here’s one of boyd’s examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn’t like her boss doesn’t really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it’s perfectly valid to demand to be “friended” in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend’s buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.

In the real world, we don’t articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there’s an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it’s evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.

Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It’s natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a “social scheduling” application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you’ve reached your forties, chances are you’re out-of-touch with more friends than you’re in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans… Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

That’s why I don’t worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go — and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

Cory does a great job of articulating a lot of things I have been saying when I am talking about how SezWho is different from Facebook. Facebook provide a great user centric, ego-driven profile. SezWho on the other hand provides a community and participation based profile. The differences between the two are gigantic:

What do you think?

Great piece by Jeremy Liew about now to make sense of all the user generated content. He explores 4 approaches prevalent right now:

Tagging is the first approach, and its use has been endemic to web 2.0. Sometimes the tagging is limited to the author of the content, and other times any user can add tags to create a folksonomy.

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The second approach is to solicit structured data from users. Examples of sites that do this include wikihow (which breaks down each how to entry into sections such as Introduction, Steps, Tips, Warnings and Things You’ll Need), CitySearch (which asks you for Pros and Cons and for specific ratings on dimensions such as Late Night Dining, Prompt Seating, Service and Suitability for Kids) and Powerreviews (which powers product reviews at partner sites that prompt for Pros, Cons, Best Uses and User Descriptions, including both common responses as check boxes and a freeform text field with autocomplete).

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The third approach to user generated data is the traditional approach to the Semantic Web. … Ideally, each web site creator would usa an agreed format to mark up the meaning of each statement made on the page, in a similar way that they mark up the presentation of each element of a webpage in HTML. In a subsequent article, Iskold also notes some of the challenges with a bottom up approach to building the Semantic web which can be summarized at a high level as “it’s too complicated” and “no one wants to do the work”.

The fourth approach to user generated structure is to build a central authority of meaning. Metaweb appears to be trying to do this with Freebase, a sort of “Wikipedia for structured data” which describes itself as follows:

…
There are clearly both advantages and disadvantages with a single authoritative source of user generated structured data; and criticisms similar to those leveled at Wikipedia (potential for systemic bias, false information, vandalism and lack of accountability could cause some data to be unreliable) could be leveled at Freebase. Wikipedia has combated these problems largely successfully through a robust community of Wikipedians - it isn’t clear if Freebase has yet developed a similar protective community.

I think all these approaches are important parts of the solution and so are other technologies like natural language processing, concept identification and extraction etc. Overall, there isn’t one approach that will address all the issues but its going to be a heady cocktail of a number of approaches and technologies. One thing is for sure though, search of meaning in the mountains of user generated content is a going to be profoundly important to the evolution of web 2.0.

Another piece on NYT talking about the conversational aspects of social media. Check it out here - its called “All-Stars of the Clever Riposte”.

DASHIV is in town and the celebration has not ceased.

Strange women are opening their apartments to him. Three parties have been given in his honor. His beer mug has been constantly refilled.

All hail DaShiv.

Who in the world is DaShiv?

Well, in one sense he is Bob Hsiao, a 28-year-old part-time wedding photographer from Berkeley, Calif., who does not have a girlfriend and lives with a roommate.

But thanks to a particular wrinkle of Internet culture, DaShiv is a star, an internationally famous portrait photographer, feted and fawned over during his 10-day visit to New York. This fame is not thanks to his own blog. He doesn’t have one. Nor has he scored big by creating a clever YouTube video or a flashy MySpace page.

DaShiv’s notoriety stems from the popularity of the comments and photos he posts on blogs run by other people.

There are those who have blogs. Then there are those who leave comments on other people’s blogs, sometimes lots and lots of comments, sometimes nasty, clever, brilliant, monumentally stupid or filthy comments.

Read the whole piece…It delves in how interesting the sub-culture of commenters is a huge part of the conversation.

Interesting piece by Carl Bialik aka The Numbers Guy titled “Understanding How A Current Kids’ Flick Can Beat Out de Sica“. In the piece Carl examines a number of different ways rating systems operate online.

Compiling all of that information into a single ranking is a provocative numbers question. If the only two critics to rate Café Chris each awarded it the maximum five stars, while 100 diners rated its rival Dave’s Diner with an average of 4.8 stars, has Chris really surpassed Dave in culinary excellence? Or should we treat the much smaller number of voters for Chris — who could be Chris and his brother — with a grain of salt?

This raises a really good question…Are all ratings equal? And what does a rating really mean without some understanding of who the rater is? Let’s compare the situation to a real life scenario. Suppose a software engineer were to be recommended by Bill Gates and another one by somebody not as well know…Who would you hire?

Clearly the answer is that you will put more weight in a recommendation coming from Bill. You would justify putting higher weight on Bill’s recommendation by noting that Bill has better access and understanding of software talent and clearly has a lot more to lose in terms on his reputation by making careless recommendations.

But on the internet its hard to identify, who is who. This patina of anonymity forces sites to adopt hokey solutions like the IMDB

Internet Movie Database, the cinema site owned by Amazon.com, approaches its list of users’ favorite films in this way. A new release whose first two votes are enthusiastic doesn’t push it past “The Godfather.” Instead, IMDB assigns all new movies 1,300 votes with a rating of 6.7 — the average rating for all films listed on the site. Then each actual vote is added to those.

This is how “Umberto D.,” with an average user vote of 8.3, can rank at No. 242 of all time, while “Shrek” is 10 notches higher despite having an average user vote of just 8.0. “Shrek” wins because almost 30 times as many people have voted for it than for “Umberto D.,” adding more certainty to its acclaim.

This modified formula dates from the early days of IMDB, nearly a decade ago, managing editor Keith Simanton says. At first the site used a simple average, but “it wasn’t working out well,” he says. The current ratings system helps “to mitigate the fan-boy aspect.” In other words, two die-hard fans — such as the director and his mother — can’t easily game the ratings.

Another interesting problem here is the problem of context. What is the point of putting together a list of all time favorite movies on IMDb? Is the list intended to display the movies one should watch? If that is the case, a genre based organization might be more successful. In terms of ratings, such a classification would ensure that the fans of a particular genre, like animation movies, who tend to be excitable and a lot more comfortable with rating things online are not directly compared with fans of a different genre who might have different characteristics.

When applied to a specific context and where community credentials of a participant can be clearly established, a rating system can indeed produce results.

A similar approach underlies player rankings on Halo 3, the Xbox 360 title released two weeks ago that lets players in multiple locations join the same game online. The first day Microsoft released the futuristic war game, players joined a game 2.4 million times. Some were playing with friends, but others relied on the game’s matchmaking feature to find equally skilled strangers to compete against.

Microsoft uses a Bayesian formula similar to IMDB’s, called TrueSkill, to change players’ rankings slowly as they get more experience. After all, a single great result in a Halo 3 match could be the result of a fluke (your opponent gave up because an urgent offline need took her from the game) or a deliberate effort to game the system (your friend threw the game so you could gain rating points).

Getting the TrueSkill ranking right is crucial. “If there is a great disparity in skills between competing players, neither of them will have a lot of fun,” says Microsoft researcher Thore Graepel, who helped develop TrueSkill.

…

A new Halo 3 player who gets good quickly may have to wade through tiresome routs until TrueSkill catches up to his true skill. And IMDB users may not be able to discover highly regarded films that haven’t received enough votes to make the Top 250 chart, which in turn makes it hard for those films to get more attention and so more votes. Many other sites, such as the local-reviews site Yelp, keep it simple and just show average ratings.

While TrueSkill is clearly an important component of Halo 3, it also brings up the limitation of such context restrained interactions. Even though a user has skills playing video games and even has a great score in other games, Halo 3 still treats the user as a newbie who has to earn their reputations before playing at their true level. These kind of limitations are likely to force a number of good players to abandon the game in the course of ramping up.

This is the point I have to make a plug for SezWho :-)…We think we have a solution that does not have any of the limitations, identified above. It assigns proper weight to ratings based on reputation of rater, it rewards users for identifying themselves and handles context based translations across different social media (Blog, forums etc.) communities.

This is great…Check out the initiative at Huffington Post to engage their community:

But we’re most excited to announce a new initiative where we will choose one commenter a month to become a featured blogger at HuffPost. Yes, a blogger! Reading through the comments on our site, we realized that our readers are an underutilized resource – smart and opinionated. Our decisions will be based on how many fans a commenter has, how often their comment is selected as a favorite and our moderators’ favorites. Every comment has an I’m A Fan Of and a Favorite link so start voting for the comments and commenters you like best. We will announce the first one at the end of this month!

Thanks community guy for pointing it out. These are the kind of things we worry about as well. In fact we are working on a widget that will reward the best commenters by highlighting their contributions. This will be based on community ratings rather than an editor at a site (who has the time anyhow??)

We live in a page-rank world. Google the main organizer and cataloger of the internet, uses Page-Rank as the primary way to organize information (I know I am oversimplifying here as Google uses a number of other algorithms as well but link structure between sites and pages is still one of the most important factor). Even blog search engines like Technorati and Sphere use a derivative of page-rank algorithm to rank the content. At a high level what that means is that content on a site derives its credibility from the credibility of the site. E.g. if there is a page on cnn.com, it inherits the page-rank from the site. Now if there is a page that has same information and is on a site with a lower page-rank than cnn.com, the page will be considered less credible and show up lower in the Google search results. The idea of deriving credibility of the content from the site made a lot of sense when there were editorial boards and organizations to ensure everything was vetted, reviewed and solid. But does it still make sense in the evolving social media landscape?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say there is a video on YouTube. Should the fact that the video happens to be on a popular site make it more credible? You can be sure that the staff at YouTube has not reviewed the video to ensure the credibility of the content…In such situations does it still make sense to use a page-rank based mechanism to evaluate the credibility of the content? Clearly with user generated content the credibility of the content cannot be derived from the credibility of the site, instead the credibility has to come from other source. How about users who are generating the content? How about the consumers of that content?

Its all about the people

When sites become a two conversation (ReadWrite) and when everybody has access to the means of publishing content, and has the potential to get immediate, unlimited distribution, as is the case with social media, the ranking of the site become meaningless in determining the quality of the content. This is a change for the Internet but in the real world, that is really how things work. E.g. in a meeting, a conference or a social gathering, people take into account the credibility of the person who is speaking to determine what to make of it. In other words, who is delivering the message is almost as important as what is being delivered. Now that Internet is enabling a global conversation, we need to go back to the same people-based credibility model to evaluate the content that is generated by users.

Let’s go back to our earlier example to see how it can work. Instead of using the site based credibility, suppose there was a way to establish that a particular user has spend some time thinking about the topic and has posted some interesting thoughts on the subject on his/her blog. Wouldn’t that make you more likely to watch the new YouTube Video?

This is all good but how?

One of the key strengths of social media is that users have the means of producing and publishing content. This also means the conversation on any topic span multiple sites. While this provides a great deal of flexibility to users it also makes it really hard for any particular site to provide enough of user context to make their content credible. Even a popular site like YouTube can only show what other videos a user has published, but what if the user has only a few videos on YouTube and the rest of the context is in the form of Flickr pictures, blog posts/comments and forum discussions? YouTube will not be able to show that context for the users and the content is going to become less interesting as a result.

Another problem with building a people based credibility framework has been that there has been now way to establish people’s identity. This is an artifact of the evolution of the web where initially the focus was on sites and the organization principle was page-rank. Lack of a universal identity mechanism prevents sites, even though community clearly benefits from such context, from putting together cross-site user profiles. Right now there are a number of efforts like OpenID, card-space that are underway to establish a universal distributed framework using which applications can establish user’s identity. The issue though is that these frameworks are still in their infancy and still a few years away from critical mass. So in the meantime, how do we proceed?

Rise of Community-Rank

One of the key ingredients that has been that have not been leveraged this far is the incentives for participants to identify themselves and be known as a good member of the community. There are a number of members in each community that are serious participants and would be happy to be rewarded in terms of recognition for their value-added participation. What if there was system that enabled users to build and control inter-site and intra-sites participation profile. Such a system will have to allow full user control over the profiles and provide mechanism to users to have as many identities as they want (let’s face is – all of us have multiple identities both in real and virtual worlds). Much like real world, in such a system, community will be able to reward users for participating well and punish those users that don’t. Let’s can this system a community-rank and identity system.

Using community-rank and identity system, readers of social media sites will be able to establish participation history of a user, understand what the community thinks of the user’s content and easily find the most credible content. For search, community-rank will lessen the reliance on site context and put the focus on the community reputation of the people generating the content.

But what about privacy?  There are always risks when you start organizing information around users and their participation in communities. While a system like this benefits the community as a whole, some of the users might not want to have participation profile. To address these concerns such a system will need to provide full user control on the profile information. In addition, it should allow users to be anonymous if they want their contributions to not be a part of their profile. By addressing some of the privacy concerns, such a system can really help improve the quality of conversation in communities.

ConclusionPage rank based organization is not suited for social media site (you just have to go and search in a discussion forum to realize that things don’t work as well as you would like). A community rank and identity system has the potential to unlock huge amount of value in social media by incentivizing participation and by empowering readers.

Check out this interesting piece about irrational user behavior at eBay.

Ms. Malmendier tracked 166 auctions offering CashFlow 101, a personal-finance-themed board game. During the seven-month trial, the game’s designer sold the box set on his website for $195.
Meanwhile, eBay sellers usually offered an opening price of about $45 and set a one-click, “buy it now” price of about $125. It looked like a great deal for buyers. They could pay less than retail to end the auction immediately or place bids in the hope of fetching an even lower price.
But this is where eBay users fell prey to what Malmendier and her coauthor, Stanford University economist Hanh Lee, call “bidder’s curse.” Apparently, some bidders grew so enthusiastic about winning the auction that they lost sight of the “buy it now” price, sometimes offering more than $185.
“We found that in 43% of the auctions the bidders ended up paying more than the ‘buy it now’ price,” Malmendier says.

Another example

Instead of observing auctions initiated by others, like Malmendier, Hossain posts his own controlled auctions. He offers identical items, but plays with the specifics of the sale. For example, he auctioned pairs of popular music CDs. One copy would start at $4 and include free shipping. The other would open at 1 cent but charge $3.99 for shipping. Either way, the initial cost was four bucks.

But bidders didn’t see it that way. On average, the low-cost, high-shipping auction attracted more bids, more bidders, and 25% more money.

“There are a number of ways to explain this,” says John Morgan, of UC Berkeley, who cowrote the study, “but my favorite is that people have two different budgets in their head: how much I’m willing to pay for the item, and how much I’m willing to pay for shipping.”

I guess we are not really rational? Or may be its just an issue with eBay? What do you think?