As Twitter leaves the realms of ‘joiner geek’ social network, and (partly due to it’s integration with platforms like Facebook), becomes a more popular and diverse service, its utility is being more rigorously critiqued. What is Twitter for? Its a cogent question. In a world of blogs, microblogs, and social networks, what’s the use of twitter? Is it merely a loose knit social network, or a (nano) blogging platform? Is it just the latest fad? Lets look at some real world uses of Twitter, how its utility differs from more traditional blogging platforms, and some scenarios in which it could be more effectively used.

Real world use

Right now, twitters use is primarily as a loosely coupled, mobile social network. The barriers to membership and use are low – as the platform is quick to join and simple to use; and adding ‘friends’ can be done easily and quickly. Perhaps too easily, since no confirmation is required to ‘subscribe’ to a user. Mass adding of contacts within twitter is a quick way of creating an audience – as some of those added will tend to add back the mass connector, creating potentially unwanted one way connections.

Connectivity

Twitter has strong but limited communication features. Users can receive updates (‘tweets’) from their ‘friends’ via web, RSS, IM or (free) text message. They can send their own tweets, through Twitter or a host of other websites, IM or paid text messages.
Tweets are either undirected, direct, or aimed at a user, but visible to the general audience (signified by the @ symbol). A general audience in this context can be either the public at large, or a users entire friend group, depending on privacy setting. Blocking is available – and users can only directly message their friends.
However no fine grained control is available – users cannot for example, chose to receive text message notifications of tweets from one specific user, or group of users. In fact no user groups or gradations of connection exist within twitter. Aspects of this functionality may ultimately emerge from third party applications.

Moblogging

With built in text messaging functionality, Twitter has the capacity to function as a ‘short message’ (140 character) moblogging platform. While it lacks MMS picture support, it has the advantage of immediate one to many connectivity. As such, it can be used to provide news updates and reports of ongoing events.

Public Conversation

A conversation emerges in the ‘friends’ feed of a users twitter; visible from their profile on Twitter.com or via RSS. Although direct messages are not visible to all, as previously stated, frequently publicly visible messages are directed at a user, through use of the @ sign. This allows a users friends or readers to engage in conversation, and allows a user to publicly flag the existence of their communication with high status users. In effect this serves to pull users on the periphery of the network into more direct conversation with more centrally connected users. In this role Twitter can provide a form of ad hoc business social networking.

Linkblogging

Blogging grew in part, out of link logging, and the low time cost and mobile nature of Tweets, makes Twitter ideal for sharing links with a directed audience. Due to the character limit of ‘tweets’, links are often truncated using services like slink.in.

Future Use 1 – Group management

As previously mentioned, creating user groups is not yet a feature offered by Twitter, but their addition would allow significant additional emergent uses of the platform. Work teams, clubs, and institutions could use Twitters push messaging to notify members of meetings and updates. Rather than acting as a replacement for traditional systems of notification (e.g.: email memo’s), Twitters immediacy would make it ideal for notification of last minute changes of plan, or time sensitive communications – especially with large or loosely affiliated groups.

Future Use 2 – Mobile applications

Applications are already being built around twitter, but none have yet taken advantage of the powerful utility of the mobile communication capabilities built into the platform. Twitter applications should in theory proliferate virally, due to the public nature of visible ‘@’ directed communications – in a similar fashion to the recent viral growth of applications on the Facebook platform. However this can only take place if an applications utility necessitates two way communication with its users. ‘Mashups’, which utilise the API’s of two or more external services to create a new service providing additional utility, hold great potential in this regard. Combine low cost two way mobile communication, with social application proliferation, API sourced data, and multicasting, and a variety of potential services become obvious. The viability of businesses which utilise Twitter in this way will be dependent on the future reliability of the platform, and on Twitters tolerance of providing host to an emergent ‘ecosystem’ (positive construal) or ‘parasite infestation’ (negative construal) of applications.

Social Network ‘Facebook’, has made an enormous splash this week with the release of the ‘Facebook Platform‘, an opening up of the mature Facebook API to internal widgets with access to Facebook’s ‘core functions’. Whilst this move has been criticised by some influential members of the syndication community, it places Facebook at the forefront of mashup’s and the read-write web. In one fell swoop, Facebook has become a socially enabled aggregation platform.

‘Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a “social graph,” the network of connections and relationships between people on the service’.
- Dan Farber on ZDNet

Social Aggregation

Let’s look at some ways that Facebook collates user information, and serves this summated information back to a users social network.

Facebook offers users three direct methods of adding to the ‘News Feed’ activity stream of their connections on the Facebook network.
‘Status Updates’ are brief, 160 character messages, updatable by text message or from within Facebook.
‘Posted Items’ are smart links which retrieve a brief descriptive paragraph and photo from a provided link; updatable from within Facebook, and through browser and web based bookmarklets.
‘Notes’ are text, images and links – essentially blog posts; updatable from within facebook itself, and via imported RSS feed. Notes contain an additional feature, a social equivalent to pingbacks, allowing posters to ‘tag’ friends mentioned in, or related to, a post.

Controversially, Facebook also provides an aggregated feed of indirect socially relevant user actions – profile changes, photo uploads and contact addition etc.

Finally, with the addition of ‘Facebook Platform’, Facebook can now socially aggregates the information flow to and from users and their installed applications – for example, tweets updated via and integrated Twitter application.

All of this aggregation is done parsimoniously and noninvasively, with an emphasis on usability and integration with the social map of a users Facebook network – for example, if a user updates a number of notes in quick succession, rather than each note appearing in the news feed of his connections, a lists of titles will appear.

Fine Grained Control

The aggregated ‘Posted Items’, ‘Notes’, and ‘Status Updates’ from a user’s connections, can each be exported as an RSS feed. In addition to the feeds available from applications within the ‘Facebook Platform’, this means that users can now (or will soon be able to, with third party developer support) use Facebook to export feeds of updates to the attention streams, social bookmarkings, and blogs, of their connections.

By allowing users fine grained control over which aspects of their social activity on the site are published to the ‘news feed’ of their connections – for example a user can choose to de-list notification of their new connections completely, or on a case by case basis – and control over the sources and quantity of the information they aggregate from their connections; Facebook have built the beginnings of a social write application to compliment feed reading, on the Read/Write web. Together with the social elements of next generation browsers, this could provide the template for how such services work in the future.

Maturation is inevitable and necessary, and Facebook are only at the beginning of the development of their internal services – for example ‘Posted Items’ can function as social bookmarks, but without tags or folder utility, cannot replace a dedicated social bookmark application.

Balancing the desire of application providers for greater access to the Facebook API, with the privacy of users and the overall usability of the platform will be a difficult challenge. Right now it seems that Facebook are erring on the side of caution – for example, Twitter integration seems for the moment hampered by a lack of write access to user ‘Status Updates’ through the Facebook API.

What to do with all this information?

Beyond hyperbole, what does all this mean? Right now, it means I can import the ‘Status Updates’, ‘Notes’, and ‘Posted Items’ of my Facebook connections; right into Google Reader. I can also export my own aggregated updates, and construct a feed blog, or metafeed – increasing the utility, and decreasing the exclusivity, of my updates to Facebook.

This flow of information will grow richer as more useful applications are added to the ‘Facebook Platform’, as Facebook continues the roll-out of its third generation of internal services (like Market Place and Video); providing a portable, rapidly updated aggregation of social events and conversation – a friends feed, which comprises a deepening, dynamic, and semi-public conversation.

The Future

What’s next? Increased portability of Facebook mobile updates (currently the limited SMS notifications available are restricted the the US), and the easier establishment of networks, would greatly increase the utility of such powerful information aggregation; as would RSS feeds of the ‘News Feed’ activity stream itself. Right now, Facebook is a fantastic tool for large, loosely connected, public social networks, but increased privacy options and network building flexibility could make it a more useful tool for work groups, businesses, and families. Although it’s important to note that company networks do already exit, each new network must be suggested directly to Facebook – with little direction as to the amount or type of requests needed before such a network will be created.

Look out soon, for applications leveraging the social aspects of the Facebook platform in innovative ways – enabling collaborative video editing or games for example.

Open source and information portability advocates would no doubt like to see greater portability of the (user generated) networks with give Facebook its value. Such portability may become ever more difficult, as users become more locked into the services provided by a specific social network, and the social groupings which exist there.

Just back from Barcamp Ireland 3. What a day, so packed I couldn’t possibly get to half the talks (which ran concurrently), but I managed three lectures and the panel discussion. The event was held in the beautiful Digital Hub, off Thomas St in Dublin. The building is fantastic, with bare brick walls and natural lighting throughout, and would make a fantastic billionaires studio apartment.

I’ve posted some wikified notes. I grabbed several mini interviews, on TFM‘s sweet but pricey Roland wav recorder (check out the uber cheesy website), not enough material for a full blown podcast, but I’ve thrown them up, below. Also attempted to moblog throughout the day, with mixed results.

Mini Interviews

Sean O Sullivan of Rococo.
Robin Blandford creator of Comment Casting.
Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications.

Update: Fixed the wiki link!

Are you a social networker and serial photo up loader? If yes read on….

Looking for some extra cash? www.talkbeans.com is Ireland’s fastest growing social networking site – for grown up’s.
We are looking for people to build social networks…. for cash. Its a sinch and its a part-time job you can do anytime, night or day.

We are seeking well connected, fun, outgoing people who have left school – and no longer want to be profiled on social networking sites for Kids.

So www.talkbeans.com are offering European pounds for profiles. All you have to do is get people in your network to set-up profiles (with Photo’s) and use the site actively and we will pay you for each profile you create.

Duties:
Get your people to contact our people and post their profiles. To start making European pounds for profiles please apply below telling us why we should pay you to help build Ireland’s biggest and best social networking site.

Candidate
We love all types of people. If your cool your in. If your not cool your in. If your under 18 your out – try registering with bebo.

Responsibilities:
None. We are not very responsible and don’t expect you to be. We do expect common sense and nothing too rude.

Successful candidates will be contacted by email. Please apply telling us why you not them, Today.

www.talkbeans.com – Don’t be a has been. Be a talkbean!

Got to get me some a them ‘European Pounds’. Oddly the talkbeans site itself seems to be down. Shouldn’t they be advertising spamming this through a social network in any case?

Update: Site’s now back up, and looks unsurprisingly spammy. I wonder could Bebo sue over Talkbeans claim to be ‘Ireland’s fastest growing social networking site’?

Subsequent to posting a link to the (UCD?) ‘Killer Coke’ Bebo page a couple of days ago, it seems the popular page has disappeared. Although never one to underestimate my own importance, I sincerely hope this is not a chilling effect of questioning Bebo’s censorship policy at last weeks Social Network Webcamp. The TCD campaign, which recently succeeded in renewing the Trinity campus Coke produce ban, still has an active Bebo page.

I’m not involved in either campaign, and not sufficiently informed to judge either sides merits, but more information is available here – pro coke, anti-coke, and here’s the ubiquitous wiki.

Perhaps this is something DRI should look into?

I’ve wiki’d some notes on event. Ina O’ Murchu of DERI should be posting videos of the talks in due course.

Particularly interesting was the response of designated Bebo’s spokesperson, Mark Tarbatt of webvertising firm Generator, to my questions about potential Bebo censorship. The impression Mark (whose firm seem solely responsible for selling branding on Bebo, at least in Ireland) gave was that, in the event of a conflict between a user video or community (the example I provided was a hypothetical ‘killer coke’ video on Votetube’s bebo profile) and a Bebo advertiser, such a user or community could be removed. This seems credible given that Mark stated Bebo’s recent adoption of comment moderation occurred not in response to problems of user abuse or sexually explicit spam, but to satisfy the desire of Coca Cola (a bebo advertiser) to prevent ‘harassment’ on it’s branded bebo site.

A quick search of Bebo indicates the existence of just such a conflict.

Digg has an identity crisis

Lets compare Digg to delicious, another popular social bookmarking site, one with a much smaller emphasis on the social, and much greater emphasis on bookmarking. As a regular user of both sites (in the case of Digg primarily through RSS aggregating intermediaries like Netvibes), I find myself using Digg and delicious in radically different ways. Digg I treat as one news source among many, checking it daily along with dozens of other such sources (TailRank, Techcrunch, Boingboing etc) via a tab on my Netvibes page. I use Netvibes rather than competing page aggregation services (e.g.: Pageflakes) because it allows me to read the guts of a story (or at least that portion of it contained in it’s RSS feed) before deciding whether to go directly to the source site. If the story is something I think I’ll need later, or just something intrinsically interesting or of note, I’ll frequently add it to my delicious bookmarks.

By contrast, as a casual Digg user, I rarely digg stories. I’d like to avail of the much more sophisticated social features included in Digg (the digging meme itself, integrated comments on each post, richer social networking, better user statistics), so why don’t I? Two reasons..Firstly, The nature of Digg means that by the time I’ve read a story I’ve left the page dedicated to it (which cuts out my motivation to ‘Digg’ it). Secondly, the operations involved in using Digg have greater costs – originality, search, voting, and exposure to voting. Lets look at the process of adding links, as a logged in user of either delicious or Digg.

Submission to delicious

• Hit del.icio.us tag button (an extension or bookmarklet)
• Tag (with many fields autotagged based on my previous bookmarks)
• Save

Output: An online collection of bookmarks, social in the sense that they are aggregated with the bookmarks of other users, and can be copied or shared with other delicious users, but primarily distinct and isolated in the space of my individual delicious page and it’s attendant RSS feeds. Lets contrast this with Digg.

Submission to Digg

• Search for duplicates to the url I’m submitting
• Submit the link including description, sans tags, but including one exclusive topic.
• Save

Output 1: Story posted to Digg.com, where it can be commented upon, ‘dugg’ or ‘buried’ (though only from inside the post itself, rather than any of the overall site views) by logged in users, potentially promoting it to the Digg front page.

Output 2: Alternately, my submitted URL is rejected. Should the URL I am posting already have been uploaded to Digg, my post will be rejected, providing me with the error message “This URL has been reported by users and cannot be submitted at this time.”

Conflicted Roles

Digg fulfills two distinct roles, roles that in its current iteration are in conflict. The first as a social news site, and the second as a social bookmarking site.
I can use my posted digg stories as bookmarks, laboriously searching for duplicates before I post, and digging rather than posting if they already exist; or I can decide to post only notable stories which I hope will be original. If I do the former, I add several steps to my bookmarking (with diminished navigability due to the lack of tagging), if I do the latter, then my motivation for submission is unclear, and my reward (successful posting, popularity of post) uncertain. Submission of notable stories might be done out of social honor, in search of popularity, as a product or service announcement, or in support of a meme, organisation or product. To time pressed adults (rather than the pimply uber geek / tech teen contingent), spending time on such submissions – rather than posting a blog entry, or writing a story for a more fully developed news site (such as Newsvine) simply doesn’t make sense. Hence we see a small number of dedicated hobbyists supplying the majority of news on Digg, and a much greater number of ‘casual’ readers who ignore the sites social features.

The problem is that Digg’s identity is indistinct. As I’ve tried to demonstrate, Digg is ill suited for use as a social bookmarking site, due to its insistence on novel posts. Digg is also not designed to allow for detailed discursive posts. The site is a news platform, with a great incentive (in terms of traffic and exposure) to be linked from, but a small incentive to post to. As a social network, Digg rewards frequent successful posters, but does little to build community around individual topics or users. As Digg’s popularity increases, a decreasing proportion of its growing user base are likely to contribute to the sites content – due to the increasing difficulty of posting original content, and the increasing likelihood of successful posts failing to be promoted to the front page as the overall rate of posts increases, resulting in a transition from a Slashdot like authoritative (sic) news site, to a Fark like entertainment site.

This is fine as far as it goes. There’s a lot of advertising revenue to be made from being the Web2.0 Fark or the tech College Humor. But it’s a disappointing outcome. Digg has the potential to be more, to compete as a delicious replacement, and to provide sterling competition to sites like Newsvine and Tankrail as a hub for news and current affairs discussion, and sites like Reddit for rapid news discovery and dissemination.

What’s the alternative?

A few minor changes could improve the quality of links submitted to Digg, while keeping its core discursive structure intact.

1. Tag support
2. Rather than spitting back “guidelines to make digg a better place” when a previously submitted link is posted, automatically provide users with the option to Digg the previous submission of a non novel submitted link
3. Allow article submission in addition to link submission
4. Encourage submission and digging via bookmarklet and extension
5. Increase the personalization and connectivity features of individual profiles

At a stroke digg could compete as a social bookmarking site, social news site, social network and even basic blogging platform; building on their existing connectivity and popularity engine, and highly granulated news selection features, and allowing more detailed discussion of individual topics. These features are so complimentary they gain in utility through aggregation. If Digg does not become the place to offer such feature cross pollination others (anywhere from Facebook to delicious) may. Finally, if users are provided with the opportunity to use digg to store bookmarks, in the way they currently use services like delicious, the ranking of links ‘dugg’ will have a much greater relationship to their utility than at present – akin to the difference between asking people what products they like, and monitoring the ones they actually purchase (minus the confound of economic scarcity); and the number of novel Digg submissions will rise, by virtue of the increased amount of postings to the site.

So far, so minor, a problem easily soluble, or at least survivable – on the user end through the duplication of accounts, on the social network provider end through competition. Just as Yahoo and Google trump other web based email services by allowing free forwarding and address book export (effectively providing a jumping off point for users – one I found convenient recently when switching from the increasing bloat of the new Yahoo mail to Gmail, privacy be damned); and just as websites which link to other sites gain links in return – so a truncated form of universal Darwinian selection will eventually cull social networks based on the criteria of connectivity and selectivity. To rephrase, only the most flexible networks, allowing (and encouraging) interconnectivity with other social networks, mashups, linking with mobile / cellphone accounts, and connecting users to their butcher, baker and candlestick maker, will survive in the long term as social networks become truly mainstream. [Thankfully the web currently lacks implimentation of the bandwidth protectionism (read Net Neutrality) which has allowed Murdock Media to become an exclusive supplier of Digital Satellite television in Ireland and the UK. But don't be surprised down the road, if services like MySpace lobby to restrict access to 'unpoliced' social networks]. Think about it, who’d use a telephone which could only call one set of friends? By contrast, services which provide selective connection will also find an evolutionary niche – humans love elites, and expertise is quantitatively valuable.

However, this prediction doesn’t apply to services which gain their value from user generated data. Famously, Gracenotes, the ubiquitous database powering music searches from iTunes album cover provision on down, effectively stole the labour and data generated by its original user community, as user satisfaction became the marginal utility of all that juicy data. Similarly, services like Flixster, Last FM and Allconsuming, built around the value of user generated data, have little to gain from interoperability, and no enterprise users to insist upon it. The open source community, though capable of replicating the functions of a service like del.icio.us, lack the drive to recreate such services under a more open model; services which are gradually becoming more ubiquitous and useful. So..What happens next? Do we all gradually slip into shiny Ajax powered Web2.0 sink wells, whilst waiting for the most popular social networks / web software providers to absorb them or adopt their functionality (the last alternative fails to solve the problem, as it doesn’t get at the knot of preexisting data, of enormous value to individual users)? Does customer demand and ‘outrage’ ultimately trump economics, forcing companies to wear their most valuable assets on their sleeves? Such an outcome is constantly predicted as the fall of DRM, but there can be no Bittorrent equivalent for web service databases. The irony here is that that the very limitations of the traditional software model, and the limits imposed by isolation on the capability of such software, kept data in users hands and ownership.

One could argue that services which don’t allow access to ‘base data’, as Tim O’Reilly refers to it, aren’t Web2.0 in the true sense of the term, but that’s irrelevant, as in the web as services model few companies fit all such criteria. Certainly one may export a document from Writely (now Google docs), but try exporting all your documents at once. What happens when you’ve got a hundred, or two years from now a couple of thousand? What about your revision history? What happens when your office suite sits online, allowing collaboration as never before, but with value added services tied to your current provider? What happens when the web becomes OS? As O’Reilly points out ‘The race is on to own certain classes of core data’, and in this race users may be the ultimate losers.

Gareth

You recently reported abuse for member Leyla H on October 29, 2006. The best thing for you to do is block this person from your profile. If you ignore this person chances are they will get bored and leave you alone. I have provided instructions below on how you can do this.

To block/unblock a member follow these steps:

1) Visit www.Bebo.com and sign-in using your email address or username and password.

2) Navigate to the profile of the person you wish to block. You can do this by clicking on their username or photos in your profile. Alternatively, access their profile by going to http://username.bebo.com.

3) Under their profile photo, find the ‘Block’ link and click on it.

4) Click the button ‘Block This Member’.

Please note that this matter has now been CLOSED. If you feel this Bebo member continues to violate our Terms of Use after you have your block in place, you can submit another ‘Report Abuse’ form.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Please do not reply directly to this email.

As my previous post regarding Bebo spam has thus far generated 56 comments from multiple nationalities, and increased this websites hits by 420% over the average for the past 7 months, this is clearly neither a minor nor a local problem. Bebo’s inaction leaves users at the mercy of spammers and the wilfully abusive. I experienced a situation several months ago where I repeatedly received abusive messages from a small number of teenagers at an unfamiliar school in Ireland. Multiple reports sent to Bebo abuse did nothing to reduce the problem, and I was forced to individually block tens of friends of friends of the comment posters to ensure no further attacks. I don’t want to get into making hasty generalisations from a small sample, but my guess is that repeated inaction in the light of such attacks (and I’ve known at least one girl who received multiple salacious and sexually explicit Bebo comments, yet was unable to get action taken by Bebo’s abuse department – assuming it exists), leave Bebo open to legal action. Perhaps a reader involved in the legal profession might offer an informal opinion?

While these two kinds of unwanted comments and messages (abuse and spam) are not directly related, they do pose a worrying trend. One might hope that Bebo’s staff are concentrating their resources on arguably more serious (and certainly more headline grabbing) problems; removing obviously explicit and criminal material, and dealing with users who attempt to use the service to obtain sexual contact with teenagers and children below the age of consent. On the other hand, given their failure to address the problems listed above, can they be trusted to deal with even such sensitive, and potentially embarrassing areas?

The spam you received was an advertisement for a (now removed) porn site. This was, to the best of my knowledge, the first commercial Bebo spam – if you come across any others let me know.
Just like email, the Bebo message system provides unscrupulous advertisers with an opportunity to send hundreds or thousands of unsolicited messages, almost certainly automatically, and very cheaply. If even a small number of these messages result in sales, bingo the bad guys make money.
You can do your part to prevent messages like this in the future by contacting Bebo directly, reporting the message you received, and requesting they remove the ‘feature’ that allows sending a large amount of Bebo mails to users not on your friends list. Such messages explicitly violate Bebo’s terms of service.

Although the message you received cannot itself harm your computer, sites like the one it linked to can contain Trojan virus’s, which could infect your PC. To protect against such threats, always use a safe web browser, like Firefox 2; install antivirus software, like AVG antivirus; and firewall software, like Zonealarm.
If you’re afraid your machine may have already become infected, run an antivirus scan, then download and run an anti Spyware package; Spybot, and Ad Aware are both free and good.

Finally, never use your credit card on a site which is not trustworthy. If in doubt, use a third party service like Pay Pal or Google Checkout; which will minimize your potential losses to the individual payment made.

Hope this helps. See you on Bebo.