Clever Obama iPhone application to use social networks

The Obama campaign has released an application for the iPhone that cleverly sorts your address book, prioritizing which friends you should call to convince them to vote Obama.  (“Call Friends” sorts your friends by how close the race is in that state. So you can call your Ohio friends or Missouri friends and not bother with your California or NY friends.)  It’s a smart marrying of the fact that friends are much more likely to convince friends politically, coupled with the technology that helps you to easily see where your social networks may make the most political difference given battleground states and the electoral map.  The ‘Get Involved’ Button uses GPS to help you find the closest Obama campaign headquarters.

Another interesting part of the application is that it shows how many calls you have made using this application and how many have been made nation-wide, enabling one to feel a growing sense of momentum and part of a larger national cause.  (The software doesn’t transmit who you called, but records the number of calls made with the application so they can centrally keep track.)

Download the Obama for America iPhone application here.

Here is the blog post of its developer Raven Zachary.

See earlier blog posts of mine about use of technology in the Obama 2008 campaign.  See also this one and this one.

Where being too social is suspicious

One hopes that this is not a sign of the less civicly engaged times….

Facebook has reportedly booted off some of their users who were, get this, too social.  Apparently their software identified these users as behaving suspiciously.

Eliabeth Coe got booted after she sent friends and professional acquaintances a link to her company’s Web site when they thought she was spamming.  She had to endure the Facebook-addict equivalent of Siberian exile — 31 days without being logged on.

Lisa Shane was organizing a high school reunion on facebook, when she got booted off for sending the same messages to more than 200 people. She was locked out of her account, contacts, RSVP list and details about the venue  one week before the reunion.

The Post reports that “Others have been kicked off the popular site for adding too many friends at once; sending too many messages; joining too many groups; or “poking” too many friends, a casual greeting on the site. Shunned Facebookers said the punishment contradicts the site’s core mission — to help people connect and communicate.”

In defense of Facebook, with 100 million users, they do have to battle an increasing amount of spam, fake messages and links, some generated by bots and malware. The Post notes that “About 64 large-scale spam attacks have been reported on social networking sites over the past year, and 37 percent of users have noticed an increase in unwanted messages in the past six months, according to Cloudmark, a Web security company.”

But we fear that the backdrop of lower levels of social capital makes any highly social individual appear “suspicious.”     On the positive side, maybe “necessity will be the mother of invention” and the Elizabeth Coes of the world can learn that it actually may be a lot more effective trying to make friends the horse-and-buggy era way of actually calling people and getting together.

See Washington Post story, “A Social Network Where You Can Be Too Social” (Kim Hart, 9/4/08).

What Quincy Jones, Paul Revere and Lois Weisberg have in common

Answer: they were all extraordinary social capital builders… (see links below)

While building stronger social networks has lots of benefit to you (helping you get jobs, be healthier and happier, able to mobilize others for entrepreneurial or political efforts, etc.), we’re much more interested in social capital because of the public benefits to those networks. In other words, if people have much stronger social networks, public benefits flow, even to those who are socially isolated, like more responsive government, less crime, better public health, less corruption, more trustworthy behavior of strangers, more well-working schools, etc.

Nonetheless, SocialMediaTrader has an interesting post on how to build one’s social capital and talks about how Paul Revere and Quincy Jones were extraordinary social capital builders. [SocialMediaTrader relates the story we've told before that it isn't a mystery why Paul Revere is well-known as the person who alerted colonists that the "British Are Coming!" whereas another rider William Dawes who also rode out to towns to alert colonists that same night is not. The difference was that Paul Revere knew the "social hubs" in these towns and thus the people he told, in turn told many others, so many more learned of the British plans from Revere than Dawes.  Dawes often told more socially marginalized townspeople who only told a few and word spread less quickly.]

Another very interesting article from some years back about someone with an amazingly diverse set of networks is “The Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” (by Malcolm Gladwell)

We supplied a social capital building toolkit on the Saguaro website which we hope you’ll use and give us feedback on.

Also Bill Sherman has a number of blog posts related to how to build social capital.

Anxious about non-friends inviting you to be their Facebook ‘friend’? You’re not alone.

I’ve written earlier about how odd it is to be invited by non-friends or the weakest of friends to be their Facebook friends and this post raising the same issue through humor troupe Idiot’s of Ants.

Turns out that sociologists now have a name for this angst: Social Networking Anxiety Disorder.

Nicole Ferraro of Internet Evolution writes: ” Speaking on a recent O’Reilly Webcast (The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive — and Most Don’t), Shelly Farnham, doctor of social psychology, said, “A common problem in social networking applications is it’s hard to say no to people who want to be your friend,” adding that a number of applications ease this pain by allowing you to isolate 25 Friends (e.g., Top Friends).

“But what about when someone you don’t consider to be a ‘Top Friend’ per se requests to be part of that elite list? Truth be told, our social algorithms and applications just can’t capture the complexities of human relationships.

“Not sure if you’re suffering? Here are three symptoms of SNAD to look out for. If you have any of these, you should contact your mental-health-professional avatar immediately.

“1. You were considering breaking up with your significant other, but decided to stick it out because of the anxiety associated with changing your Relationship Status on Facebook and de-tagging hundreds of photos.

“2. You currently have 36+ Friend requests festering on Facebook or MySpace, which have built up month over month because you don’t want your rejection to send these strangers on a downward, emotional spiral.

“3. You belong to several groups including “I Skin Cats on Sundays” and “Cousins Make Great Husbands,” because, well, they were nice enough to invite you…”

To see Nicole’s whole interesting post, click here.

Social networking becoming more invisible but more ubiquitous?

The Economist notes that while social networking efforts haven’t found profitable financial models, there is evidence that they are migrating to more of a common model that is less proprietary and more in the background, like air.

“Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as ‘walled gardens’ before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook’s messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning. Parts of the industry are collaborating in a ‘data portability workgroup’ to let people move their friend lists and other information around the web. Others are pushing OpenID, a plan to create a single, federated sign-on system that people can use across many sites.

“The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem rather old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users. ‘E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,’ says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application, for the Mozilla Foundation, which also oversees the popular Firefox web browser.

“That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections. On Facebook, a social graph notoriously deteriorates after the initial thrill of finding old friends from school wears off. By contrast, an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. Joe gets e-mails from Jack and Jane, but opens only Jane’s; Joe has Jane in his calendar tomorrow, and is instant-messaging with her right now; Joe tagged Jack ‘work only’; in his address book. Perhaps Joe’s party photos should be visible to Jane, but not Jack.

“This kind of social intelligence can be applied across many services on the open web. Better yet, if there is no pressure to make a business out of it, it can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users, says Mr Ascher, whereas Thunderbird, which is an open-source project, can let users minimize what they share. Social networking may end up being everywhere, and yet nowhere.”

View full Economist story here.

Social networking: a social “eden” or dystopian tool?

Freakonomics convenes an e-forum of various researchers of the social effects of social networking sites. As we’ve noted on this site, research on the social impact of these sites is still in its infancy, and we’ve blogged before on what’s interesting and the limitations of Nicole Ellison’s MSU study. On balance, most of the researchers see that there will be both desirable and undesirable byproducts of these social networks.

I agreed with some of the interesting comments of Will Reader (we blogged about his study earlier): “Some doom-mongers have suggested that social networking technologies will eventually lead to a society in which we no longer engage in face-to-face contact with people. I don’t see it. Face-to-face contact is, I believe, very important for the formation of intimate relationships (and most of us crave those).” But since close friendships require large investments of our time and emotion, we want to make sure that others are worth this investment, and non-verbal cues obtained from face-to-face interactions are one of the best ways to gauge this.

Reader notes that “talk is cheap” on social networks. “Anyone can post “u r cool” on someone’s “wall,” or “poke” them on Facebook, but genuine smiles and laughs are a much more reliable indicators of someone’s suitability as a faithful friend….To return to the notion of social capital, we know that people are increasingly “meeting” people on social network sites before they meet them face to face. As a result of this, when many students begin university, they find themselves with a group of ready-made acquaintances. Given people’s preferences for people who are like them, it could be that friendship networks become increasingly homogeneous. Is this a bad thing? It might be if, by choosing potential friends via their Facebook profiles, it means that folk cut themselves off from serendipitous encounters with those who are superficially different from them, ethnically, socio-economically, and even in terms of musical taste.”

Reader believes that social networking will change our society but one’s own preferences will dictate whether it is a utopian or dystopian future.

We’ve written earlier about how the Internet is an especially efficient way to maintain social ties that were made face-to-face, but Reader is undoubtedly true, that for geographically based networks (like Facebook, generally centered on college campuses), Facebook activity prior to coming to college campuses may accelerate the process of making new friends and may also exacerbate our tendency to form bonding friendships at the expense of bridging.

And Judith Donath makes the point that we have made earlier that social networking sites often “cheapen” the currency of friendships.

See whole forum here. [Freakonomics asked Martin Baily, Danah Boyd, Steve Chazin, Judith Donath, Nicole Ellison, and William Reader:" Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?"]

Obama using viral marketing in S. Carolina

“Cyber Stumping” (Direct, 2/1/08) reported on an interesting activation of viral marketing at Barack Obama’s Columbia, SC December event with Oprah Winfrey. The 30,000 attendees in the football stadium at Obama’s request texted their cell numbers to the campaign to get mobile campaign alerts and then each called four numbers on the back of their tickets to urge them to vote Obama in the primary.

Brian Quinton (the author) lauds this as a way “to data-mine a live event” and get 120,000 campaign calls made on the bills of the attendees. He notes that it enabled the Obama campaign to skirt governmental limits on calls to mobile phones by campaigns.

As effective as this was, one wonders whether they shouldn’t have merged information on where these rally attendees lived with campaign lists of uncommitted voters in their neighborhoods to give them names of neighboring South Carolinians to persuade.  Under the theory that friends persuading friends is more effective than strangers persuading friends;  that after all is what social capital is all about.

The *Direct* article also talks about campaign effort to make their online presence more interactive and integrated with their offline presence. “[M]ost candidates are using the Internet to spin their speeches and appearances in near-real time. Hillary Clinton introduced the “Fact Hub” rapid-response page of her Web site just in time to defuse a story that her campaign had stiffed a Boone, IA, diner waitress….Both parties also have embraced social networks, Democrats more so than Republicans. By mid-December, Barack Obama had joined every social net from MySpace and Facebook to LinkedIn (for business professionals) and niche sites such as BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com (for Hispanics), AsianAve.com, GLEE.com (for gays and lesbians) and Faithbase.com (for non-denominational Christians). Last February his campaign also launched its own social net, MyBarackObama.com, to help early supporters find each other and to raise cash.” But Obama is being sophisticated in some ways: “Even before December’s Oprah tour, Obama event attendees were asked to fill out contact information. In the case of the Oprah rallies in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, those phone numbers were added to the candidate’s house list immediately. Attendees got a call from a staffer within 48 hours of the event thanking them for their support and asking for a pledge to vote for Obama in the upcoming primary.”

Social Networks: Birds of a Feather Do Flock Together

A study by Harvard and UCLA researchers on Facebook is finding that social networks tend to lead to bonding social capital (people associating with others like them). These are preliminary findings and the study is continuing through 2009.

They have found that race and gender have the largest influence on who one befriends in social networks online, and white students (especially men) have the least diverse social networks. The study also found that the size of the social network was largest for black students, followed in turn by mixed race students and white students.

While this finding is consistent with findings across lots of sociological settings that show that we tend to form friendships with others who are like us (what researchers call ‘homophily’), it is a blow to Internet utopianists who hoped that the Internet would somehow make it far easier for us to form friendships with those who are different than us. [As the dog using the Internet in the famous New Yorker cartoon articulated, "no one knows you're a dog on the Internet."]

The interesting research project is being conducted by Jason Kauffman and Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University and by Andreas Wimmer (a sociology professor at UCLA). [We wrote earlier about Nick Christakis' research on how obesity spreads through social networks.]

Putting a positive spin on the fact that facebook tends to lead toward like befriending like, Kevin Lewis (a third year PhD working on the project) asserted that this finding may buttress the case that the friendships formed online are real, if they exhibit traits (like homophily) that we see in real-world friendships.  Harvard-UCLA researchers are also examining”triadic closure” with these data: the tendency found by socialists for people who have friends in common to themselves become friends over time.

This study is part of an emerging field of computational social science (analyzing the vast data trails that Americans leave with their e-mail, their online friendships, their call-logs, etc.). My colleague David Lazer recently convened a meeting at Harvard of scholars doing computational social science or interested in doing more.  (For a brief post, see here.)  Some of the projects are quite fascinating including one by a scholar who captured all of his child’s communication and utterances from infancy through toddlerhood through an always-on digital camera, and then transcribed all the conversation to observe patterns of speech development.

And the New York Times yesterday in their article, “On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data” (NYT, 12/18/07) mentioned not only the Kaufman et al. study but other interesting recent studies. “Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April….Social scientists at Indiana [Eliot Smith], Northwestern [Eszter Hargittai], Pennsylvania State [S. Shyam Sundar], Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.”

This is all a wonderful development as we hope it will help to sort out some of the ethereal claims on social networks from the actual practices observed.  And given that these networks are longitudinal, one can actually watch friendships being made and see what factors at time 1 predicted friendships at time 2 which is quite exciting from a social science perspective.

Viral popularity

We often assume that quality dictates popularity. Well not always. For sure, marketing can distort this hunt for quality: we buy a lower quality item because we heard about it first and not the better quality (less marketed) item or because the ads led us falsely to believe in its quality.

Now it increasingly looks like if one gets to be a front-runner in popularity, that begets itself. This might be called ‘viral popularity.’ Many search engines or sites produce lists that reinforce popularity. Google sorts items by which ones have been linked by others, making it more likely that others will link to them. Papers like The Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times lists the “most emailed articles.” YouTube lists a Viral Video chart (You Tube). You can see the Top Stories in the Blogosphere (also here at Tailrank or top blogs at BlogLines top1000). the most downloaded iTunes songs, the most popular bookmarks on Del.icio.us, reddit or StumbleUpon. And all these tools are augmented by social networks like MySpace and Facebook that can help speed the circulation of recommendations.

In some sense, these are examples of James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, but what if the front runners become the most popular over time just because they got an early lead?

This seems more likely because Power laws that shows that in many contexts (relationships, website hubs, roads, utility networks), the well connected hubs take on a greater central role in networks over time. This is because a node’s value in the network increases based on the number of links to it. And thus new nodes or actors increasingly likely to want to link to these nodes, making them more of a hub and further increasing their value. Hence the natural cycle perpetuates itself.

In contrast, as Super Crunchers points out, ‘nearest neighbors’ approaches that recommend works to you based on what others with your taste liked, lead users to engage with a wider % of video (through Netflix recommendations) or books (through Amazon’s ideas of other books you might like) or music (Pandora). In these cases, a piece of music or a video doesn’t necessarily become *more valuable* to the network as it becomes more linked to or watched, although invariably at some point there is a tipping phenomenon here too where people want to read a book, or watch a video just to be current with a piece of work that lots of others are discussing, and to be “cool” enough to be in the know.

Social network effects may originally induce a long tail — a phenomenon itself disputed by Chris Gomes in the WSJ and elsewhere — as users hear about works that they otherwise would never have heard about, but viral popularity in the main seems more likely to increase the warped distribution of popular videos, blog posts, and the like.

Spurring civic engagement on Facebook, Myspace and SixDegrees.org

Facebook, Myspace, Six Degrees have both launched ways for non-profits to utilize the social networks that exist on those sites.

Causes (started by Project Agape) premiered on Facebook in May 2007.  Users or non-profits can form a page for their 501(c)(3)  Facebook members can urge others to support political candidates join charities or advocate causes.  Causes is up to 4 million users and has raised over $300,000 for nonprofits and politicians.  (Causes is planning additional improvements, but for the moment does not enable the non-profit organizations to post video, send out a message through Facebook to all the users affiliated with the cause urging their action on an important topic.)  At least initially, causes were generating more members than non-profits, even though non-profits have the advantage of being able to send out mass market invitations.

As of a month ago, the biggest causes was *Support Breast Cancer Research* which had close to 1.5 million members and had raised over $30,000.  Stop Global Warming had garnered 650,000 and Save Darfur had close to 500,000 members.

MySpace’s more linmited site, called Impact, premiered in late 2006 and enables users to vote on non-profit causes with the winners getting $10,000.

Some sites enable ‘viral fundraising.’  Network for Good’s SixDegrees.org enables users to create a “charity badge” for their favorite non-profit.  The badge can be sent to friends who can contribute and forward on the badge to their friends   The badge keeping a running record of how much has been raised.  In the first 8 months of 2007, SixDegrees members created 6,000 charity badges and generated $740,000 in donations.

These sites often appeal more to “newer” trendier causes that older ones.  For example, the Save Darfur campaign has generated tens of thousands of members on Facebook, whereas Red Kettle (the Salvation Army’s page) generated only 29 MySpace friends.

 We’ve been involved with conversations with another Internet company that is aiming to create more powerful ways for groups to collaborate/affiliate/federate.  We’ll let you know more about this when it becomes public but it is much more about civic action than merely affinity or fundraising.

For the moment, while Facebook’s Causes and Myspace’s Impact seem a welcome change in allowing some use of these networks for more civic purposes, it seems as though they’ve hobbled their tools enough and created a weak-enough attachment that we’re skeptical that a lot of civic good (beyond some fundraising) will take place.  We’ll hope that the next generation of tools is significantly more powerful.  For an interesting take on some of the elements missing in Facebook’s Causes see Facebook Causes 2.0 – A non-profit wishlist.  Missing from this wishlist is the ability to form chapters of groups from localized Facebook groups.  So it would be great if employees at a company, or students at a university who all shared an interest in Darfur, or wanted to work on loose nukes or helping Katrina victims could either have a way through the software to easily get together or be connected with local groups that were taking action on this issue in more meaningful ways than simply contributing money.