This is not a social graph

The debate that agitated the tech blogsphere yesterday was fascinating. You will find its traces on techmeme.

For some reason, the discussion reminds me of Magritte's piece "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe) that tells us about the treachery of images.

Basically, the ever-blunt Dave Winer wrote a blog where he considered that bloggers should avoid "sounding like a monkey" and realize that what they usually consider a "social graph" is just a graph, and not an actual "social graph" (see figure to the left).

Therefore, according to Winer, we should stop calling social graphs social graphs (if you follow me / him) but, rather, social networks. To Winer, the denomination of social network has the advantage of avoiding all confusion.

That so many tech bloggers picked on the post and that it became the number one item on tech.meme is quite surprising to me. Part of all the excitement came from the fact that it was a slow week-end, even for the Silicon Valley. Yet, the discussion showed one blogger, Winer, asserting his authority based on his knowledge and expertise, and other bloggers defining themselves with regard to this knowledge. Some bloggers, such as Alec Saunders, opposed Winer's view, and there opposition was quite theoretical, having to do with the role of the internet in general (and bloggers in particular) for the public: should it be to echo celebrity gossip or to educate others?

Whatever one's position on the debate (and we may find its substance razor-thin), in the end, a social graph is not a social graph: it is a concept and a foundation for identity.

Youngsters network, too

I have not posted much in the last few weeks -- Blame it on the always brutal beginning of the Academic year.

So here is a small and pointless post, to piggyback on this previous post that discussed social networking applications for (slightly) older persons.

So, in fairness to our young (very young) friends, it is time to acknowledge their own networks.

Here it is, tested for you: Club Penguin is a must among the young and innovative crowd. One will appreciate both the computer literacy needed to navigate the website as well as the interesting language developed by the penguiners.... (Slate has an interesting article on the topic.)

Also, to revive one's little girl in you (well, in some of you, anyway), please take a look at Barbie.com (yes, it exists, and no, it does not fuffill any specific societal mission or even developmental role for its users). Be prepare of a pink attack on the website.

In all fairness, I checked for the guy side and, yes, GI Joe has its own website, although his saving the world apparently prevented him from fully investing himself in social networking. Barbie, on the other hand, since she broke up with Ken, seems to need quite frequent makeovers before she can move on to Myspace and meet new friends.

Education 2.0

A lot of thoughts is given, these days, onto the potential of web 2.0 applications to revive instructional methods. An interesting experiment, related here, had Second Life as an educational platform. Second life was viewed both as the platform for teaching delivery (virtual classroom) and as the subject of teaching (online ethnography).

With creativity, such experiments can certainly revive more traditional Management of Information Systems classes.

The LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) center, funded by the NSF, provides a wealth of ideas and information onto how to be innovative and effective in these new learning environments.

Keeping it consistent

It depends how you count it

A new study from researchers from Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Liverpool, whose results have been summarized in the Chronicles of Higher Education, reveal what many of us already sensed:

Social networking applications do not increase the number of strong links that people have but rather, they drastically increase their weaker links.

The study investigated users of social networking applications and showed that these users often claim 150 to 200 "friends", but that they also recognize that they have about 5 core friends, on average. Incidentally, the people who are not users of social networking applications also consider that they have 5 core friends.

Myspace and Facebook are therefore really useful to expand one's world of weak links (always useful for job search and for fun), but building stronger links is a more selective process.

Social networks, for everyone

It is ironic that more and more social networking applications are becoming available. Everybody knows Myspace and Facebook, but there is also LinkedIn, for professionnals, a small world, for wannabe celebrities and socialites.

These days, the current trend (and venture capital investment) is toward social networking for older people. And, by older, it is often meant people who have said good-bye to their teen years.

See, for instance, this article in NYT (from which the illustration to your right is taken).

It is highly understandable that these applications develop today: older people can buy more, and they are courted by different advertisers (there are only so many ads for American Apparel one can take on a webpage).

However, the mentioned article also introduced another rationale for the development of these grayer social networking sites: older people are not as fickle in their use of different applications. Therefore, they should be less likely to leave a network (whose development has been costly) for a newer one an time soon.

Now, from a sociology of innovation perspective, this argument kinda makes sense, if we accept the premise that younger people are early adopters and older people are followers. This may be true in general (although, of course, there are exceptions on both sides). No, what bothers me is that we just do not know if older people will continue to be more consistent in their adoption of new technologies that younger people and if younger people are not going to settle for an application. The history of technology is full of emerging standards. Such standards are not forever, of course, but they can be surprisingly long-lived.

Damage control

Surprise! (well, not so much, really). Five days after the unexpected price reduction of its new star product (by the way, did we really think that calling it "the God-Phone" would do good to Steve Jobs' ego?), Apple annouced that it sold its millionth Iphone. Doing so, it beat its own estimates.

The Apple-unusual price reduction has been much discussed, and David Pogue, from the NYT, had a good analysis on his blog. Two things really struck me about the decision:

- The ire of customers who had already bought an iphone was very personal: many, especially in the vocal sphere of tech bloggers, expressed their disappointment and their feeling of having been "de-moted" from the highly regarded status of early adopters to that of, well, Apple uncritical followers, to be polite. The $100 apparently did some good to appease these status-worshipping customers.

- Apple's decision to cut the price of its product and Steve Jobs' ongoing discussions about digital music and video pricing seem to go hand and hand. They signal a new (or renewed) vulnerability of Apple in its industry.

Weekly update

Job search and social networking

Since (see my previous entry), the most practical goal for getting a degree is to land a better job, there remains a question of how to get it.
And there, solid networking abilities are priceless. These ideas are far from new, since Granovetter showed in 1973 that "weak ties" were critical in finding a job.


Today, more and more websites are providing tools to network without leaving your home (see here for a list of the main sites).

These websites are extremely useful to expand one's social and professional circles, but there are two caveats, however:

1- Beware of your online professional image: if you decide to use Facebook as a tool to get you hired, make sure that the available profile offers a perfectly neat image.

2- Electronic ties and face-to-face encounters do not carry the same weight (see here for more details), so make sure that you still network in the good old-fashioned ways as well.

Back to school

As the new Academic Year dawns on us, the average student is likely to suffer from, among others: college tuition, textbooks, term papers, team work gone awry, and tensions with the loved ones.

Yet, if you read this entry, dear student, you have no reason to despair. Take a look here, for instance, at the job and salary prospects of new graduates, by major. Not too bad, right?

What strikes with these numbers, is how knowledge about information systems and technology is a common factor among many of the highest paid majors. This does not mean that everybody should magically turn into a computer scientist, but rather that having a strong foundation in IT, IS, and MIS remains a key competitive advantage to new graduates.

Now, if you are already a graduate student and need a bit of motivation, you will find it here.

Technology as a religion?

If God had a computer, would he use a Mac or a PC?

This question has nothing to do with a Bruce Almighty revival (i.e. the movie in which Jim Carrey, temporarily given God-like powers, grants wishes through his e-mail system).

No, I am talking about the relatively new position of "technology evangelist" that some tech companies have created. A technology evangelist works as a kind of marketing /PR person for the company, propagating the good words of technology and innovation to internal and external companies.

Apparently, Guy Kawasaki was the first person to hold officially the position of a technology evangelist, in the late 1980's and for which company? The then troubled Apple computer. More recently, Robert Scoble made a name for himself by becoming Microsoft's first technology evangelist unleashing the power of blog to relay his message.

Call me old-fashioned (perhaps) or too literal (admittedly), but the terminology bothers me. Since when is it ok for companies to officially have recourse to preachers?
God knows (no pun intended) I love technology and all the new gadgets and software, but can't there be such a thing as technology fanatism?

The virtual book tour

Following yesterday's post on authors meeting their readers on Myspace: Publishing companies have figured out the economic interest of blogs.

According to the ever-reliable NYT , instead of the traditional (and expensive) book tour on which promising authors embark to promote their latest book, publishing companies are now pushing the majority of their authors to get invited into some of the many literary blogs.

From a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense: the strategy is virtually costless and can be extremely effective: literary blogs have their own niche (no sci-fi author would discuss his or her work on a romance-only blog) and some bloggers have a devoted following: a good word can increase sales tremendously, especially since, on average, apparently, only 6,000 copies of new books are sold in the US. A few hundred sales more, or less, can make a huge difference for the author's and the publishing companies' bottom lines.

As you like it

In the ongoing battle between MySpace and Facebook, Facebook seems to be winning by a landslide. It has not been acquired by Murdoch, and it is where most people are migrating since it opened its doors to everyone and its architecture to innovative web companies .

Yet, today, as I was going through the NYT "Book review" section, I came upon this interesting op ed by Pagan Kennedy: " A space for us" (by which he means a space for us, authors and readers).

Apparently, there is on Myspace a very active, if small, community where authors can fine tune their (arguably fairly limited) PR abilities but also get to know their readers by reading their profile.

Note: To be fair, I have not checked to see if Facebook also has such an active literary scene.

Kennedy's op ed interestingly turns into a reflection upon the relationship between author and reader. Kennedy observes: "And so I have become my readers’ reader, and something about the reciprocity of this delights and scares me".

Kennedy also cites a fellow (published) author, Matt Haig who reports that he got compliments on his book from one of his readers claiming to be William Shakespeare. Matt Haig reports (via MySpace mail): "Shakespeare sent a message telling me how much he enjoyed my work. I returned the compliment and told him ‘King Lear’ was pretty good, too, and that I’m sure he has a solid career ahead of him.”