Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Social Media Map
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/18/2008 - 10:55As new services continue to crop up, the map of the social media services I use and which ones feed which other ones continues to change and become more complicated. Back in June, I produced this graph of my social networks:
Things have become much more complicated as more Microblog sites like, Identi.ca, and other Laconi.ca based sites, Kwippy, Rejaw and others come on line. Things have become more complicated as more sites send feeds to others, include Posterous. Things have become more complicated as additional aggregators have come on line, like Profilactic, and SecondBrain. Included in this are aggregators aggregating aggregators.
Hard to get your mind around? Just take a look at this picture.
If that is mind boggling, just wait. There is another OpenMicroBlog player on the scene now, which I hope to explore soon. I suspect things may continue to get worse and more complicated until we start seeing federation between different microblogging sites working much better.
More about Laconi.ca Federation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/14/2008 - 18:46Recently, there has been a discussion on the Laconica mailing list about how to make remote subscriptions easier. Remote subscriptions are crucial to federation and an important part of what make Laconi.ca so interesting. People discussed how to make remote subscriptions easier which brings up the question of what the different use cases really are.
Let me start off by explaining what remote subscriptions are, how they related to the larger microblogging world and how they work with Laconi.ca. From their I will suggest some use cases and ideas about how remote subscriptions could be handled better.
Essentially a remote subscription is when you use one microblogging service and within that service, subscribe to people in another service. Right now, anyone can set up their own Laconi.ca server and subscribe to people on other Laconica servers. Ideally, they could subscribe to people on any microblogging service, if that service supported appropriate standards, such as the Open Micro Blogging protocol.
What sort of use cases might this create? Well, currently, I have an id on Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku, Identica and several other Laconica based servers, and so on. It is sort of like the old days before email systems were interconnected and I had email addresses on many different email systems.
However, I hope the day will come when these service all get connected together and I can choose whichever service I like best and bring in messages from my friends on other services. With that, I would end up having one microblogging profile, which would be how to find me on the service I use. Then, people could subscribe to that profile from any other service they are on.
Currently, Laconica allows you to visit someone’s profile on a Laconica based site, and subscribe to their profile. If you are logged into the server, they assume that you want a regular subscription, very similar to how you would follow people on any of the existing microblogging sites. However, if you aren’t logged in, it assumes that you want to do a remote subscription. It asks for your profile on the remote service and then subscribes your remote profile to the profile that you are visiting.
It seems pretty straight forward, although until you get a sense for it, it can be confusing, especially if you have set up accounts on many different services and you are logged into the server you want to do a remote subscription to. However, as remote subscriptions become more stable and more common place, I expect that people will stop having as many accounts and this will be less of a problem.
Instead, one may think of their Micro Blogging Profile in a manner similar to how they think about their OpenID profile. As a matter of fact, this would be a nice extension to Laconica. Instead of putting in a Micro Blogging Profile for a remote subscription, it would be nice if I could put in my OpenID and then have Laconica use OpenID’s attribute exchange to find my default micro blogging profile and use that for the remote subscription.
However, we are probably a long way away from enough people using OpenID and enough OpenID services supporting attribute exchange for this to be a good near term solution. So, we may want to look at other solutions.
To do this, we need to look at how people find others to subscribe to. One is that they get messages via email when someone subscribes to them. I’m not sure if this works properly for remote subscriptions. That is an area that I need to test. When I get an email like that, I go check out their profile and decide if I want to subscribe. If so, I subscribe directly if they are on the same server as I am on, and if not, I subscribe remotely.
Early on, people asked about customizing the email message that people receive. For example, it would be nice to add a ‘subscribe’ link. Right now, if you try to subscribe remotely to me, you are brought to this link:
http://identi.ca/main/remote?nickname=ahynes1.
If a subscribe link was added to an email, your profile could be added as a parameter, e.g.
http://identi.ca/main/remote?nickname=ahynes1&profile=http://example.com/you.
Then, if you click on it, your profile would already be filled in and you could simply accept the remote subscription.
Another way that people sometimes subscribe to others is by ‘snowballing’. That is when you go through a list of other people’s subscribers, subscriptions, or even the notices that are in the persons feed.
As an example, if you look at my subscriptions you will see that I’m subscribed to http://whojusttweeted.com/jay. For people that are logged in, adding a parameter the link to pass their profile to the remote site, thereby making it easier to remote subscribe might help things out a bit.
However, currently the link goes to a person’s profile, and not their remote subscription page. So, to get this to work, you might have to pass the remote profile, if it is received from the profile page to the remote subscription page. It is a little more work, but not bad.
So, these are a few ideas and use cases of how remote subscriptions could be improved, thereby strengthening federation on Laconica. So, what do you think? Do these make sense? If so, any thoughts on how best to tackle it? It seems as if tweaking the gallery program to adjust the links would be the easiest starting point.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
@noneck Deported
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/13/2008 - 18:49Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to get anyone going to Denver to start using mobile social media. I’ve spoken with delegates and bloggers about how to start using Twitter, how to send text, pictures and videos directly from their cellphones. We’ve talked on phones, IM, emails and podcasts. I’ve talked about the importance of getting the raw, unfiltered and unedited stories out there as quickly as possible.
Today, I came across a story that really ties it all together. Noel Hidalgo, Noneck on Twitter and numerous other sites was deported from China for live streaming a pro-Tibet rally. The story is rapidly spreading around Twitter and the blogs. Rahaf Harfoush has this exclusive interview with Noel. Laura Fitton highlights the story, and everyone is talking about it on Twitter.
Years ago, soon after I married my first wife, I dragged her to a polling place for some election in New York City. I went in and voted. When I came out, my wife went into vote, but the machine wasn’t working. She came out and explained the situation to the poll worker, who said that she had lost her vote by coming out of the booth the way she did.
This was soon after Ferdinand Marcos had been removed from power in the Philippines. I started arguing with the poll worker saying he could not disenfranchise my wife. I talked about people dying in the Philippines for the right to vote. A police officer came over, and then the moderator of the polling location. It was early in the day. Six people were listed as having voted. Yet the voting machine only showed five votes. It turned out that the poll worker had forgotten to press some button which would have enabled my wife to vote. The moderator addressed the situation and my wife received her chance to vote.
Yeah, there were differences between New York City and Manila. There will be differences between Beijing and Denver, but there are similarities. In the United States, we hold the right to vote and the freedom of the press as sacrosanct. Yet too often, we take it for granted. Yet one thing that is important about Sen. Obama’s campaign, is that it is reminding all of us about the importance of our vote, that our vote can make a difference.
Likewise, Noel’s experience in Beijing should be a reminder of the importance of a free press. I hope that everyone going to Denver will do their part to support a free press, especially by bringing their cellphones and posting from Denver as events happen.
More Social Media Explorations
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/10/2008 - 16:40During the days leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, I’m thinking more and more about social media and how we can get delegates to make the most effective use of it.
I have set up the DemConvention room on FriendFeed. I have gotten some people to sign up on Twitter and Utterz and to start sharing their various social media addresses. However, things keep changing quickly.
On Thursday, there was SocialMediaCampNYC. I didn’t make it into the city for that. However, on Saturday, there was a SocialMediaBBQ in Stonington, CT that I attended. I saw some old friends there, friends that I only knew online as well as meeting some new friends. Fiona came along and talked with people about her radio show.
Back home now, I’m checking out some of the sites that people have suggested to me over the past few weeks. As an example, Gcast provides another site for people to call into to leave messages that become podcasts. Upside? It has a toll free number to call. Downside, it takes a few more steps to actually start recording, which isn’t great if you’re in a rush. It doesn’t seem to integrate text, pictures, or video. Most significantly, it doesn’t seem to have much of a community. I’ll check back again some other day to see if it has become any more interesting.
Rejaw is the microblog du jour. Good points? It supports OpenId and replies. I believe it is supposed to take URLs of pictures and embed them into the stream, or something like that. So far, only I’ve only been able to find a few of the earliest adopters. I’ve heard that they are supposed to have something nice for the Mac. I haven’t tried it and from the web, it just isn’t all that exciting.
Posterous is an interesting new site. It is set up for people that want to send posts via email. As a matter of fact, that is how you initially sign up, by sending an email which becomes your first post. You can set it up to forward posts on to Blogger, Wordpress, Xanga, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Livejournal, and other sites. I couldn’t get it to feed by Drupal site, but it feeds the others nicely.
If you send an email in HTML format from Outlook it doesn’t handle it nicely. However, if you send a plain text email, with HTML in the plain text, it processes that nicely. I’m not sure when I’d use Posterous as opposed to other tools, but it seems nice, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it.
Via Twine, I heard that Second Brain has added new features, particularly around the services that it supports. Second Brain does have a nice tag cloud, but again the community doesn’t seem large or active enough to draw me in. It is worth keeping an eye on, but not interesting enough to draw me back daily.
Also, during the week, I had a good discussion with the folks from Mixed Ink. The have a collaborative writing tool, sort of like a cross between a wiki and dig. It was used by Netroots Nation to work on a proposed draft of the Democratic Platform. They haven’t started beta testing yet, but it will be fun to explore them when they do. It seems like there competition may come from Kluster.
Kluster is providing free access for people that want to test drive it, but if you want to have multiple projects, dedicated subdomains and other perks, you need to buy a package, the cheapest of which is currently $27/month. On first pass, it looks a little complicated to set up, so I’ll probably wait for a while before I play with it extensively.
There are still a bunch of other sites on my list to explore, but they will have to wait a bit longer.
#dontgo shutting down discourse
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/08/2008 - 14:08When a small handful or Republican Congressmen staged a political stunt on the floor of the House of Representatives to draw attention to the issue of offshore drilling, they may well have hit the law of unintended consequences and created an online space where serious debate about U.S. energy policy could take place.
In 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), lead by Vice President Cheney to “develop a national energy policy designed to help the private sector, and, as necessary and appropriate, State and local governments, promote dependable, affordable, and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy for the future."
This task force met in secret and still has not disclosed information about its activities, despite Freedom of Information Act requests and other efforts by congress. Since then, energy has become a much larger issue as energy prices have soared and it has affected other parts of our economy.
In response to current concerns about energy, a small group of Republican Congressmen staged a pep rally on the floor of the House of Representatives to call for expanded off-shore drilling in the United States. To promote this, they used Twitter to get their message out.
In Twitter, you can aggregate content by using hashtags. A hashtag is a word or abbreviation in a twitter message, that starts with a hashmark, #. Various sites will aggregate all of the messages with the same hashtag.
The message was of these Representatives was to call on Congress not to go on home without voting on off shore drilling. So, they started tagging their twitter messages with the hashtag, #dontgo. They even set up a website, dontgo.us.
Progressive activists felt that this activity on Twitter was little more than astrotruf. Astroturf is a derogatory term for an effort that is manufactured to look like a grassroots movement. So, they responded with a real grassroots effort and started posting their own messages with #dontgo in it. Some of these messages were meant to be humorous, finding ways of putting the phrase #dontgo into a completely unrelated topic.
However, other people saw this as an opportunity to engage in a serious discussion about U.S. Energy policy, an opportunity that they felt had been denied them by the NEPDG. They note it would take 10 to 12 years from the ban being lifted on offshore drilling to actual oil flowing. They have noted to shortage of ships available for offshore drilling. Existing ships are already booked solid for the next five years. They site the business article in the New York Times about the shortage of ships.
They note that the United States consumes 21 million barrels of oil a day, yet only produces 6 million barrels per day. At our current rate of consumption, offshore oil would last for around ten years.
However, an open discussion about energy policy seems not to be of interest to the operatives behind the dontgo website. They set up a ‘NEW SPAM FREE #dontgo TWITTER STREAM’. Apparently, any efforts to have a serious discussion about energy policy is as repellent to the Republican operatives behind dontgo as it was to Vice President Cheney.
Nonetheless, people continue to use dontgo as a space where energy policy can be discussed.
