Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 06/17/2009 - 09:48
#iranelection Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 13:21#iranelection continues to be the top trending topic on twitter for another day as events continue to unfold in Iran. There is a lot of information there, but there is a lot of false information as well. With that, let me highlight and comment on some of the best material I’ve seen.
One of the most tweeted articles recently has been the Boston Globe’s photo montage of Iran’s Disputed Election. As I write this, it has received 1399 comments.
Several YouTube videos often get tweeted, including a video from the June 15 protest against election fraud in Iran (BBC Persia), a video of shootings in Iran, a video of doctors and nurses protesting at a major hospital in Tehran and a video from French television about developments in Iran
Two written stories provide more details: Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 writes A day in Iran I will never forget and an anonymous note on Facebook from a person in Tehran powerfully tells of their experience.
For a very different perspective, read Mohammad Sagha post about his trip to Tehran.
A big issue on Twitter is the question of how you know which sources to trust and what people can do to help. One post went up entitled Iran Election Cyberwar Guide for Beginners. As I write this, the link forwards to a site saying the account has been suspended. I suspect it is because the site got so many hits that it went above its bandwidth allocation. Fortunately, the content has showed up in a post on Boing Boing and other sites.
Another tweet pointed to On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict from the Albert Einstein Institute. It is nearly 200 pages, but is full of valuable information. There is great concern about the safety of people tweeting in Iran, about infiltrators and efforts of the Iranian Government to shut down access to all media.
This is illustrated nicely in two competing blog posts. Charting Stocks has a ‘proof of Israeli efforts to destabilize Iran via Twitter’. TEDChris does a very good job of challenging the ‘evidence’.
It isn’t just the new media that is getting hit. Even Al Jazeera has been asked to close their bureau in Iran. There are numerous reports of other news agencies being forbidden to report about what is going on in Iran. One tweet summed it up quite nicely, Foreign press ban? Not in the age of Twitter. That's soooo 20th century
It seems like everyone has their slant on larger discussion about media. Could Iran shut down Twitter?, Did Twitter Just Overthrow Mainstream Media?, How Iran’s hackers killed Big Brother, The Revolution Will Be Twittered, Iran Protest Tech Tools at Work>, Iran’s Twitter Revolution and Social Networks Spread Defiance Online.
Beyond that, there is plenty of humor. One that I liked was a cartoon of students protesting the stolen election in Iran and responding to a comparison to Florida in 2000 saying “We reject the American way of life.” Andrew Sullivan has The Mouse That Roared, and First Door on the Left has a cartoon about the Iranian elections featuring K. Harris.
Meanwhile, back in Iran, there are reports of Iran blocking Google Mail, Yahoo, SSH/SSL and cellphones. There are reports of power outages, Hizbollah militants fighting on the side of the Iranian Government against the Iranian people and more attacks against universities.
As I write this, more and more tweets pile up, but it is time to put up this post and then do a little other work.
Today, we are all Iranian, The Whole World is Tweeting. Allāhu Akbar
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 21:10A fun meme that has come up on Twitter. Change your location to Iran! There have been concerns about the Iranian Intelligence Service trying to track down people based on their locations. So, Kim, Fiona and I have all changed our locations to random places around Tehran. We’ve also changed our timezones and the background color of our pages to a shade of green I lifted off of a picture of President Moussavi . While doing this, I also used BrightKite to indicate that I’m in Tehran. Not only may that confuse the intelligence services, but it is an important show of solidarity with the people of Iran.
الله أَكْبَر
It was quarter of four in the morning in Tehran when I started writing this. I’ve been reading the #iranelection messages on Twitter. Even at this hour, they come fast and furious. I’ve been trying to get other work done today, but I’m distracted by Iran and I’m over tired. I’ve also got client work and family responsibilities to tend to, so I will save posts that require more thinking, research and editing for later.
Over on LiveJournal, one person commented in response to my #cnnfail post, “CNN's not that bad... they cater to their audience's demands, isn't that what they're supposed to do for the most part?” It is sort of like the question about whether or not political leaders should simply do what the polls tell them most people think. It really isn’t that simple. We need media and politicians that are leaders and not just followers. More on that later.
One of the trends that has been hot on Twitter today is “Functioning Iran”. The idea seemed to be to publish working proxies that people in Iran could use to get to the Internet. The problem is that the Iranian Government is also monitoring Twitter, so any proxies posted are likely to get blocked in Iran. Beyond that, most people kept retweeting the same four proxies.
What has been more interesting and helpful is Austin Heap posting instructions on how to set up a squid proxy and how to set up a squid proxy on Windows. I tried setting up the Apache2 mod_proxy service but didn’t have any luck and didn’t feel like struggling with squid, so I figured I’d try a different approach.
It turns out that using SSH, you can set up a very nice proxy. In my case, I used the –D flag of SSH to connect to my server with the connection back to my machine. E.g.
ssh –D 8831 –p 8022 user@example.com
where 8022 is the secret special port to connect to ssh on my server, user is my username, example.com is my server and 8831 is the port that I want to use for proxy.
Then, on Firefox, I went to Tools, Options, Networks, Settings and set the Manual Proxy configuration Socks Host to localhost and the port to 8831. I specified Socks5, and then went to this proxy test site. It said I was not coming in from a proxy, but it did say that I was coming from the IP address of my server, instead of the IP address of my home computer.
I tried a similar thing for Chrome, but didn’t have any luck. However, I tried it from Safari and from Internet Explorer 8, and it worked fine. For Safari users, go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Proxies and click on Change Settings. On the Connection tab, click on the Lan Settings button, and then check the box to use proxy setting. Like with Firefox, put in localhost as the address and 8831 as the port on the Socks line. Internet Explorer and Chrome appear to use the same settings.
So, while this might not be helpful to most people using Twitter from Iran, it is nice to know how to set this up. Next time I’m some place that blocks access to Twitter or Facebook, I can get around it. If there are geeks from Iraq that want to use SSH they can get in touch with me and I can give them limited access.
The other big techie event is that NTT America, Twitter’s hosting service scheduled a ‘critical network upgrade’ for this evening at 9:45 PM Pacific time. While any network upgrade will inconvenience people, 9:45 PM Pacific Time worked out to be 9:15 AM in Tehran. With a general strike called for tomorrow, this might not be the best time for an outage. After much discussion on Twitter, NTT America has been rescheduled until 2 PM tomorrow Pacific Time. This is likely to be more inconvenient to venture capitalists on the West Coast of the United States, but for the people of Iraq, it will be at 1:30 in the morning. Not the best time to be with limited communications, but perhaps not as bad as at 9:15 in the morning. It will be interesting to see if there is a big uptick in traffic on other sites like identi.ca or FriendFeed.
#cnnfail and #iranelection
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/14/2009 - 09:16Somewhere in Iran, perhaps at Sharif University of Technology in the Tarasht neighborhood of Tehran a quick run from Azadi Square, a young Jack Reed manages to connect to the Twitter API across some Internet proxy to send out 140 character dispatches about the protests over the announced election results in Iran. They note which sites are blocked, the status of cellphone coverage, how to connect to the outside world and other technical details.
There are thousands of tweets about the Iran Election, tagged #iranelection for people around the world to follow. Information gets repeated rapidly, without being confirmed. A clip of a BBC report on YouTube gets widely repeated:
as does a Flickr Slideshow of the Streets in Iran. A site called Tehran Bureau is posting regular updates. A picture on Tehran Live evokes reflections of Tiananmen Square.
Unlike the Jack Reed of yore, these young citizen journalists simply wanted to write about technology and are finding their stories caught up in a larger story. As misinformation spreads, perhaps at the hands of intelligence agents also on Twitter, things get uglier and many of them protect their posts and stop sending political messages.
Others post plans for worldwide protests and links to the Iranian Embassies. Reddit posts a list of Twitters posting from inside Iran.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, CNN airs a segment where "Larry talks to the stars of American Chopper and takes you on a behind-the-scenes tour." Insomniac news junkies are outraged and #cnnfail becomes a trending topic on Twitter.
This becomes a story in and of itself. My News Junkie runs Twitter Users Shame CNN For Not Covering Iran Elections, Riots. Michael Pinto creates an image that contrasts the coverage of the events by different news outlets. 
Others note that CNN International is providing better coverage. They suggest going to the edition.cnn.com website, and highlight a report by “CNN's Christiane Amanpour on the angry aftermath of the presidential election result in Iran.”
Others join in the discussion, Read Write Web asks CNN to check Twitter for News about Iran. TheLetterTwo writes about Why Traditional Media Is Failing to Understand The Web.
Hours into the protests, CNN starts providing much more in depth coverage. People that are still tweeting from Iran are adding ‘confirmed’ or ‘unconfirmed’ to their tweets, although it is hard to tell how things are being confirmed.
As I write this, evening is settling into Iran. Will it be another night of violence? Will there be a general strike? Is this the new Tiananmen Square with crack downs to follow, or is it the new Iranian Revolution? Most importantly, what can all of us learn from this about news coverage in the twenty first century?
The Death of Twitter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/12/2009 - 17:46Today, I saw two reports presenting very different views on the imminent death of Twitter. The first is from people noting that sites like Compete.com are reporting Twitter’s growth was essentially flat. The second is that soon, Twitter will pass two to the thirty-first tweets, which is the largest signed integer. Anyone who is storing information about tweets using signed integers is likely to crash sometime on Saturday.
It was just seven months ago that Twitter passed its billionth tweet. So, is Twitter really slowing down, or is there something else going on? Looking at sites that track the number of visits to the Twitter Website, it does appear to be slowing down. However, as people start following more and more people, keeping track of tweets on Twitter becomes more and more difficult, and people start using tools like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr. Looking at traffic on these sites can also be misleading as people download applications to view their tweets.
So, what can the impending Twitpocalypse tell us? Looking at the number of Tweets per day, the trend is still up, sharply, even during the ‘flat’ month of May.
This illustrates one of the problems with metrics in a Web 2.0 world. Page impressions, and all the metrics around page impressions mean less and less. With Web 2.0, information from one site is displayed on other sites, and what you need to look at is the underlying API traffic, sort of like the number of Tweets per day.
From the bigger picture, I believe that we are seeing just another example of what goes on with technology adoption. Back in 2007, I wrote about a reporter at ad:tech who “was surprised to hear that twitter was still around and active”. In my blog post about the Technology Adoption Curves and the Twitter Lifecycle I commented, “As the innovators go out and try to convince people of a really cool new technology, and the early adopters start piling on, the laggards hear about this and try to convince everyone else that there isn’t really any value to the cool new technology.”
A group psychologist, who isn’t on Twitter yet, as far as I know, was commenting about Twitter on a mailing list and suggested as a tweet from him, “Adapting and resisting – two sides of the same coin”. Perhaps that sums up some of the discussion about the death of Twitter in less than 140 characters.
Over the coming months, I am sure that we’ll see many more blog posts about Twitter’s demise. They are likely to be partly right. What we see as Twitter today and the realtime microblogging of the future may look considerably different.
Likewise, I suspect that people that said that horseless carriages were a passing trend were right. The model T looks considerably different from today’s hybrids.
(Originally published at DigidayDaily.)
