DailyDirt: Deconstructing Social Networking
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Social networks are clearly a very fashionable field of study right now because they provide an unprecedented volume of records for human interactions that can be mined for trends and correlations... and marketing strategies. Figuring out how viral messages spread could teach us how to educate our peers or to notify people about emergencies or to advertise caffeinated beverages. Here are just a few studies on how people behave in online communities.- If you're looking to create the next Facebook, it might help to know that it's not the absolute number of friends on a social network that encourages new users to join, but the types of friends who are already signed up. A user who gets an invitation to join Facebook is more than twice as likely to join if he/she sees more than 4 of separate groups of friends are already signed up. That's real peer pressure at work. [url]
- Twitter bots can influence the behavior of online communities and help speed up human-to-human communications. These bots don't have to pass a rigorous Turing test to fool people into following and tweeting more frequently. [url]
- [PDF link:] Another research abstract discusses work on identifying influential and susceptible people on Facebook by looking at how viral messages spread. Influentials are thought to be critical people in disseminating information, but where would they be without their susceptible audiences? [url]
Filed Under: advertising, marketing, online communities, psychology, research, social networks, twitter bots, viral
Companies: facebook, twitter
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yay.
Awesome. Because everyone needs more caffeine in their diet.
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But at present in order for social network to be appealing it should provide something that's lacking in other established examples. Otherwise it's quite hard to compete with heavyweights like Facebook. So Diaspora competes on respecting privacy and decentralized federated design (which both are lacking in Facebook and Google+).
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Diaspora seemed like a cool idea, but it suffers from exactly the "nobody I know is on it" problem. It's probably much easier to build a service that people use independently of a social network (eg. a photo-sharing service or MMORPG) and then turn it into a social network when it hits a tipping point of active users.
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