Category: Social networking

The future of social networking? What of Second Life?

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date January 3, 2007
1 Comment on The future of social networking? What of Second Life?

The arrival of a new year always brings all sorts of fascinating predictions.

Two commentators on social networking sites who I always have a lot of time for are boyd and Stutzman. Between them they have revealed much about how young people use online social networking services and how young people interact with each other. Their predictions for the future trends in these services are revealing reading.

Stuztman makes a broad range of predictions, most notably that within the US there will be a shakeout of services and that the most established (MySpace, Bebo and Facebook) will be difficult to displace. He reminds us that whilst users might visit lots of different sites, they can only actively keep their own personas on one or two at a time. Protocols such as OpenID will become more necessary to support interoperability across different services – otherwise users will leave. Two other key points he makes are that informational/transactional sites with established communities of users/visitors will attempt to social-ise their user experience and that this will increase the importance of shared experience to the emergence of community.

boyd also introduces new ideas. A few days ago she reminded us that teens do not use these social networking services in the same way that older people do (that is – us). For some, forgetting a password is an experience that is fixed by simply creating a new identity on the site, or moving off to another site. Harking back to the youth studies field, she reminds us that for teenagers and youth, these sites offer a means for identity experimentation, in a way that adults do not often have the time to do with such zeal.

In her thoughts for 2007 boyd sees a fading of enthusiasm amongst teens for the major social networking services. She cites anecdotal evidence that on one hand, new teen users are growing wary of the negative coverage of stranger danger on these sites, and on the other, those who currently use these services are being turned off by the influx of PR and marketing which is getting in the way of the main reason they use these services – to communicate to their friends in their own space. The mass scale intrusion of marketing and more recently spam into some of these services is a growing problem and threatens to make some environments as unfriendly as the ‘mall’ where if you aren’t a potential shopper then you are not welcome.

So, what of Second Life?

Second Life is, as Nina Simon writes is really a social site with the look of a MMORPG. It certainly isn’t a game, as many commentators point out, Linden Labs has set it up with only the most basic of rules. People go to Second Life to, in the words of Simon, “buy items online, view/listen to concerts online, meet up with people you already know (through work, family, friends) all over the world”.

If this user intentionality is correct then I’m very interested in applying Stutzman and boyd’s predictions to Second Life. How will it survive – especially if the churn rates are as high as Shirky believes?

Some questions.

– What of persona interoperability? Using Second Life as a platform does require significant investment from the user which will inevitability take them away from maintenance of their personas on other services. Gary Hayes is positive about this, but also suggest that as open source WordPress equivalents for setting up ‘multi-user virtual environments’ become available, Second Life will have a lot of challengers. His post on MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach is an interesting look at what is likely to fragment that user base of all environments pretty quickly.

– This, then, leads into the next issue – what of the increased presence of real world companies? Will certain user groups be turned off by the presence of the real world in their Second Life alter-reality?

– What of intentionality? A lot of work has gone in from educators using Second Life as a platform for engaging particular niche audiences with learning – using Second Life as a classroom etc. But how many of these Second Life students continue to be users/citizens after class? Does it matter?

Digital storytelling Interactive Media Social networking Web metrics

Shirky (and boyd) on problems of reality in Second Life

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date December 20, 2006
3 Comments on Shirky (and boyd) on problems of reality in Second Life

Typical – the day I go on internet-free holidays is the day Clay Shirky posts on Second Life.

Shirky’s examination of Second Life bores through the hype generated by ever increasing media coverage (yes, even in Australia) of Second Life. He asks, pertinently, what is the churn rate of users – that is, how many people try and then never log back on? Comparing churn rates is the secret metric that is never discussed enough by those on the outside of social sites like Second Life (or MySpace or Last.fm or whatever). Those on the inside, that is the investors and business owners work hard to talk about users, sign ups and those sort of ever-increasing figures, whilst churn lies buried and undiscussed.

Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn’t really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer.

So here’s my question — how many return users are there? We know from the startup screen that the advertised churn of Second Life is over 60% (as I write this, it’s 690,800 recent users to 1,901,173 signups, or 63%.) That’s not stellar but it’s not terrible either. However, their definition of “recently logged in” includes everyone in the last 60 days, even though the industry standard for reporting unique users is 30 days, so we don’t actually know what the apples to apples churn rate is.

At a guess, Second Life churn measured in the ordinary way is in excess of 85%, with a surge of new users being driven in by the amount of press the service is getting. The wider the Recently Logged In reporting window is, the bigger the bulge of recently-arrived-but-never-to-return users that gets counted in the overall numbers.

I suspect Second Life is largely a “Try Me” virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use. Pointcast was a Try Me virus, as was LambdaMOO, the experiment that Second Life most closely resembles.

He also problematises the whole idea of 3D environments which danah boyd picks up in inimtable fashion (meatspace! so 90s!).

I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishize Stephenson-esque visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)

There is no doubt that immersive games are on the rise and i don’t think that trend is going to stop. I think that WoW is a strong indicator of one kind of play that will become part of the cultural landscape. But there’s a huge difference between enjoying WoW and wanting to live virtually. There ARE people who want to go virtual and i wouldn’t be surprised if there are many opportunities for sustainable virtual environments. People who feel socially ostracized in meatspace are good candidates for wanting to go virtual. But again, that’s not everyone.

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it’s not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don’t. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don’t call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

Quite a few very experienced people have made a strong case for museums in Second Life and with a flythrough demo it is easy to get seduced. But I do wonder about the churn factor that Shirky focuses on, and I agree with boyd about the actual use of social technologies.

My team here at the Powerhouse Museum has been toying with the idea of a Second Life trial too – we’ve had quite a bit of experience with 3D environments and reconstructions in the past. But a museum is unlikely to have the resources of a Dell or IBM to do a media friendly product launch type event quickly enough in SL to make a significant splash – these things in the museum sector take months (if not years) to develop properly and by the time they are done (maybe) the hype will have moved on.

Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Boyd on ‘writing community into being on social network sites’

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date December 6, 2006
1 Comment on Boyd on ‘writing community into being on social network sites’

danah boyd’s latest article, Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites in First Monday is a good examination of the nature of ‘friend-ing’. Like many people who actually use social networking sites themselves, boyd is frustrated that a lot of people talking about these sites seriously misunderstand how they are used, particularly by young people. These misunderstandings lead to, at one extreme, a paranoia about stranger danger, and at the other extreme, an overestimating of the real-world ‘value’ of ‘lots of friends’.

While some participants believe that people should only indicate meaningful relationships, it is primarily non-participants who perpetuate the expectation that Friending is the same as listing one’s closest buddies. Failing to understand the culture of Friending that has emerged in social network sites contributes to the fear of the media and concerned parents over how they envision participants to be socializing.

By examining what different participants groups do on social network sites, this paper investigates what Friendship means and how Friendship affects the culture of the sites. I will argue that Friendship helps people write community into being in social network sites. Through these imagined egocentric communities, participants are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally. In turn, this provides individuals with a contextual frame through which they can properly socialize with other participants. Friending is deeply affected by both social processes and technological affordances. I will argue that the established Friending norms evolved out of a need to resolve the social tensions that emerged due to technological limitations. At the same time, I will argue that Friending supports pre-existing social norms yet because the architecture of social network sites is fundamentally different than the architecture of unmediated social spaces, these sites introduce an environment that is quite unlike that with which we are accustomed. Persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences are all properties that participants must negotiate when on social network sites.

Museums need to be careful to understand the nature of use before they head to deeply into either colonising or building their own social networking sites. The LA-MOCA MySpace page I mentioned a few days ago from Jim Spadaccini’s talk at the NDF indicates they have (at last count) 6,375 ‘friends’ – but what does this actually mean?

Similarly, a few days ago a new user ‘friended’ me on Last.fm as a result of my NDF paper. What was interesting about this friend-ing was that they explicitly wrote –

Hi,I am not really sure how this works haha but I love ur
music taste and all that…not sure how ading friend thing would do…but just don’t want to forget ur page.Thank you:)

Copyright issues of the digital era hits Second Life

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 16, 2006
1 Comment on Copyright issues of the digital era hits Second Life

It was bound to happen.

Nick Carr posts about a fascinating development in SecondLife.

Apparently a SL user has created a tool that allows for direct replication of SL objects from within the game. Where many real people and organisations have started to make money from selling unique objects (themselves often virtual copies of real life objects), this new tool allows anyone to replicate, exactly, these virtual objects – in an instant turning the economy based on selling objects into one of endless abundance rather that scarcity, upside down.

As an irate Caliandras Pendragon writes at Second Life Insider, “Those people who are living the dream that is promoted in every article, of earning a RL [real life] income from SL creations, are now living a nightmare in which their source of income may soon be worthless. That’s not to speak of big commercial companies who have paid anything up to 1,000,000 dollars to have their product reproduced in loving detail, who will discover that every Tom, Dick or Harriet may rip off their creation for nothing – and then sell it as their own … If someone wanted to destroy the economy of SL I don’t think they could have found a better way.”

The furor took an ugly turn late last night when, according to the Second Life Herald, a “seething mob” surrounded a CopyBot operation run by Second Life resident GeForce Go. The mob shouted that Go was “ruining their Second Life.” Fearing for her safety, Go closed down her shop and sold her land. In a subsequent “tumultous meeting with dozens of angry and fearful residents all talking at once,” Second Life official Robin Linden “sought to allay fears of any further concern about mass copyright violations.”

Now officially banned by Linden Lab, the company that operates Second Life, CopyBot was, according to reporter Adam Reuters of Reuters’ Second Life bureau, “originally created by libsecondlife, a Linden Lab-supported open source project to reverse engineer the Second Life software … Amid increasing criticism, the group moved to pull the Copybot source code, but on Monday evening Copybot was put up for sale on the online marketplace SLExchange, raising the prospect that it could become widespread.” The resident who is selling the bot, Prim Revolution, demonstrated the machine’s ability by making a precise clone of Adam Reuters himself. Revolution defended the use of CopyBot, saying, “I think the idea of clones and bots is very cool, and I’ll be adding more new features for things like automated go-go dancers at clubs.”

Interactive Media Social networking

Critical cultural history of the iPod

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 2, 2006

A fantastic think piece on the iPod from Alternet (via the inimitable kPunk) and the impact of portable audio which has interesting ripple effects for how our audiences increasingly expect to be able to engage with our content – on their terms, in their space, right now.

Some quotes of particular relevance to museums.

It is impossible to make sense of the contemporary culture industry without putting the iPod center stage. Even those music lovers who have no interest in using one, either because they are unsatisfied with its limited fidelity or because they aren’t interested in mobility, must confront the fact that the choices available to them are constrained by the iPod’s influence on the market. Indeed, the very existence of traditional audiophiles is threatened, since the criteria they use for rating both equipment and recording are no longer a high priority for most listeners. Frequency response, the accuracy of microphones, the virtuosity of musicians — the bread and butter of “serious” music magazines from the late 1940s until the popularization of the MP3 format — have become secondary or tertiary considerations in a context where the most important thing is not how good the music sounds, but how readily it is available to you.

In the various workshops and papers I’ve been doing around the country recently I’ve been talking a lot about the atomisation of content – the freeing up of content from pre-built packages – allowing users/audiences to assemble and reconstruct narratives in their own ways. One of the side effects of atomisation is the loss of an authoritative narrative (the voice of the curator) who would have previously assembled a structured path through a collection for an audience. I usually use the example of music now being consumed as tracks rather than albums – albums being the signature of ‘serious’ rock music. Notice that I say ‘tracks’ and not ‘singles’. If you look at the patterns of music consumption now it is the audiences, consumers who are choosing their favourite tracks by an artist – rather than accepting the predictions of a record company who chooses what to put out as a single. Singles were always chosen by record company executives applying market logic to a musician’s output – what is going to be the ‘hit’? will the hit single help sell the ‘album’?

By building on a longstanding belief that music is tightly bound to identity — you are the music you hear — Apple was able to imbue the iPod with the aura of home itself. If the rumbling bass of an SUV blasting hip-hop breaks down the invisible walls that divvy up our personal space in the public sphere, the iPod does exactly the opposite, building new barriers between us. Music may “know no boundaries,” but the purpose of the iPod is to protect them. As anyone who has spent some time sitting in a Star-bucks can tell you, the customers who work there use iPods to minimize the possibility for social interaction.

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Interactive Media Social networking Web 2.0

New Last.fm – Flash radio player

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 2, 2006
1 Comment on New Last.fm – Flash radio player

As a regular user of the fabulous Last.fm I hardly got excited when their latest update happened. Being a subscriber to the serivce I get to try out the beta versions of any changes so I get advance notice. Sure, you can now visually see how ‘close’ your taste in music is to other users and friends, but I’d skipped over the feature that everyone else seems to be gagging over – the Flash player for the personal radio feature.

The Flash player feature is a big deal mainly because it eliminates the need to download the Last.fm player application – although you’ll still need to install the Last.fm software or equivalent to ‘scrobble’ the music you play on your computer – which is essential to get the most out of Last.fm.

The Flash player means that you can effectively use Last.fm as your radio at work and just ‘tune’ in to anyone’s selection, or any artist’s similar/related music as a continuous stream. You can skip tracks, mark them as ‘loved’, tag them, or tell it ‘never to play that one again’. Being in Flash means that it gets around nasty things like browser incompatibilities, most corporate IT lockdowns and firewalls.

Also they have added location sensitive artist information – namely live shows. This will be an interesting path towards further monetising of the service as Last.fm will be aligning with ticketing agencies and resellers much in the same way they have signed up so many independent labels to stream their music.

If you are curious as to what music I listen to then you can tune to my personal radio now (from my account page) without needing to download anything!

Several other museum web folk are on Last.fm as well and we all have pretty diverse tastes – just browse through ‘friends’ and check them out – and listen to what they listen to!

Last.fm was a big driver for the museum’s team in applying personalisation and taste aggregation concepts to our collection database – possibly more so than other sites that might be more traditionally aligned with a museum.

AV Related Social networking Web 2.0

Stutzman on YouTube

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date October 17, 2006

Fred Stutzman’s blog is quickly becoming a must read.

Here he writes on YouTube from the perspective of YouTube as a social networking service rather than just a video hosting site. As he says,

The social architecture that enabled conversation in YouTube was built in, perhaps subconsciously, from the beginning. The founders built a site so they could share party videos with friends. The founders, while they probably have more friends now, likely had a relatively small social network. It was the millions of users like the founders, using the service in a similar fashion, that drove the value of YouTube. The fact the site also became the perfect home for viral videos and pirated video was completely secondary – they simply had the infrastructure to support the long-tail, hence the capacity to support non-long-tail uses. Other video sites that aren’t targeting the long tail are missing out on the social forces that drove YouTube – while people like viral videos, it is the long-tail of peer-produced content that keeps people coming back. It is the peer-production that enables conversation, and the iterative process that drives value back into the site. Without this value, a video sharing site is just expensive infrastructure built on a house of cards.

He also begins to hint at the other value in YouTube – that by visiting, watching, tagging, sharing and accumulating metadata around videos, users are effectively helping classify and categorise video which is notoriously difficult (like any time based media) to create descriptive metadata for (anyone use SMIL?).