How we are linked

I recently came across Nexus, an application that can map out the connections in and amongst all of your collected friends on Facebook.  The result is, I think, pretty neat.

Network of friends from Facebook, listed by decreasing density - MBA, Regina, Vancouver (the two central networks), Family

As you can see, my friends form some interesting smaller networks, through which they are all connected to each other (at the very least) through me.  It is possible there are other connections which have not been ‘formalized’ through facebook, but at present this is how it stands.

The lower right collection of nodes are mostly representative of my life in Regina before I moved to Vancouver.  They are friends from elementary and high school, earlier university days and from my year there after I returned from travelling but before I moved out here.

The lower left area (two diagonal lines) consists mainly of my family – or at least, those of whom are on facebook – and (strangely) all of the friends I remain in contact with from Terra Breads, where I worked for two years upon arriving in Vancouver.

The nodes which are relatively connection free (mostly on the right side) are people who I met while travelling and working in Australia and Europe, from 2001-2003.  Not surprisingly, they know few of my friends from either my past or present.

The middle node is, to me at least, the most interesting.  It has in it my girlfriend, my friends who I lived with, and all of my closest friends here in Vancouver.  That entire network grew out of a chance encounter I had when I was looking for a second place to live after not really liking my first place or my roommates after arriving here.  In a sense, it is the reason I stayed put, and I am very glad of that because out of it came all of the happiness that I have today.

The secondary node just above it is why I started writing this post today as I reflected on a book I recently read – Linked (How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and what it means for Business, Science and Everyday Life) by Albert-László Barabási.  That book would probably describe that network as being fairly strongly connected internally but with a lot of weak ties radiating away from it – and it is because of that fact, and specifically that secondary node, that I: a) became a teacher/tutor for two years, whereby I; b) re-ignited my passion for learning and the world, which led me to; c) apply for grad school whereby I; d)  became a part of the very tightly connected upper network, which is a physical representation of all of my friends/aquaintances from the UBC MBA program.  Many of these people are now close friends who I will almost certainly know for most of the rest of my life.  The important thing to note is that each node (a person) is connected pretty well to every other node within the network.

Tightly-knit MBA network

Strangely (on the surface at least), it will probably be that central network, with its many weak branching ties to other networks, that gets me my next job and not the very tightly knit MBA network.  This is due in part to concept of The Strength of Weak Ties – a research paper written by sociologist Mark Grannovetter that was published in 1973 – which of course was described in Linked and which resulted in a, b, c and d in my own life.   In other words, when you’re looking for a job, as I and many of my fellow MBAs are these days, it is best to look amongst large networks with many weak, branching ties; in that way, you are more likely to come across information that is not already mutually known, for example, the job board we all look at called COOL, which stands for Career Options On Line (I call weak sauce on the name, by the way; looking for jobs is not ‘cool’ – looking for jobs sucks, and takes time, and is generally demoralizaing.  But anyway, I digress.)  Which is not to say that this MBA network is not worth something – in fact, I think the opposite is true – it will be extremely valuable in the future (to each of us) as we all branch out in the different directions our lives take us and remain, importantly, weakly connected to one another.

The important central network with (relatively) many weak and branching ties

In any case, I encourage you to have a look at the nexus friend application and examine how all of your friends and aquaintances are connected to you and each other.  You can find it all here.

Understanding twitter

A couple of blog posts/articles I’ve been reading over have articulated more or less what I have been thinking about twitter lately.  I haven’t really used the service yet, but I’ve been ’shadow following’ (for lack of a better term) several marketing type people and other friends in my area to try to better understand why it has the err…umm…following, that it has so far.  Because to me, on first impression at least, the thing seems redundant to your average internet joe.  In earlier entries I covered how some companies are using it to manage their online brand identities and to keep the conversation going with their customers – and of course, the same could be said of its purpose for your average internet denizen – after all, we are all supposed to have a personal brand that stands for who we are and what we do.  And I get that.  But I’m just struggling with why anyone would really want to know what I am doing all the time.  I mean, I’m really not that interesting, and while it may be true that others are more interesting, I don’t want to know what they’re doing 24/7 either.  I’ve already acclimated to Facebook and my friends with constant status updates (which is pretty similar to twitter) and I regularly ignore those – I mean, how much time does one have in this world?  Yes, I get that it is fun to stay in contact with friends and to know what they are doing.  But all the time?  Really?  Is that really what is going to make the world a better place?  Constant conversation between everyone?  Are we headed toward the hive mind after all?

Sigh.

I’m not done with twitter (I’ve barely even started using it).  I’m waiting to see if I can get into it on a personal level and make the thing work for me in some sort of powerful way, as David Pogue witnessed toward the end of his article in the New York Times. See, I get that it could be that good.  I get that it might be nice to have an army of followers who can help at your every beck and call.  Maybe I’m just used to physically writing things down (you know, pen and paper) when I’m curious about something and I want to explore it later.  Maybe I don’t need to blast out some request and have it answered immediately.  Maybe I’m already set in my ways (that would be kind of sad considering I’m not even 30 yet).  I like email, I like RSS and using google reader for my blog reading in the mornings over a cup of coffee, I like the google (anyone notice the launching of that service for the computer illiterate?  Seems funny, or offensive, or both, to do it that way, but hey, I’m laughing).  I can’t remember where now, I think maybe it was in Wired, but there was an article saying the blog is dead.  Well I say fuck that.  The blog is not dead.  The blog is here, and writing is here, and that is going to stay.  RSS definitely made following blogs a lot easier, and I absolutely love it, but I just can’t say that I will ever need someone to tweet to me that they have updated their blog so I can go and read it immediately – the world is full of plenty enough interruptions as it is, and very few things are so important that I would want my phone distracting me constantly.  Oh man, all this complaining is making me feel so old.

For similar thoughts, better written (and funny), go here.

Ideas, ways to correct me and make me understand, go in the comments.

What we learned: insights from our digital branding project

Easy Lesson 1: Know why you are doing it and how it will enhance the user experience.

Companies and brands use a wide variety of social media and networking tools such as twitter, facebook, and blogs; not all companies should do this. A Seth Godin witticism elaborates: sundae toppings are great, so long as they go on top of ice cream. If you’re taking a product or service like detergent, adding all kinds of ‘treats’ like twitter and corporate blogs is like putting gummy bears on a meatball – at best they add nothing, at worst they clash. To most people, detergent is detergent and talking about stains online does not build brand nor enhance the experience of using Tide (Tide Facebook Fan page has 429 members – the affect on P&G’s last year sales of $76.4 billion is indeterminate.)

Easy Lesson 2: You need to have support and resources.

If you are going to turn detergent into a community, make sure you have support and resources. A quick and dirty perusal of the Tide forum boards shows a relative ghost town. For Example: a Tide Team Member responds 40 days later to a complaint about the lack of scent in a product and offers a coupon – not sure if this is exactly the way you build support for any community, large or small.

Easy Lesson 3: Make participation so simple that anyone can do it.

Web 2.0 is one of the few places where the pareto 80/20 rule does not hold – in its place is the 1/9/90 rule, where one percent of users contribute 99% of all user-generated-content (UGC), nine percent contribute the other 1%, and 90% lurk in the background surfing and reading and thinking about what the information means to them. If it takes more than one minute or requires too much personal data, you can forget about reasonable participation rates.