Cyberculture – Steffan Antonas

Being A Local In Virtual Space

Let’s say you’ve recently moved to a new city. You’ve got a brand new apartment in an unfamiliar neighborhood and your friends and family are now hundreds of miles away.

A few weeks in, the rush of everything being new subsides and you start to feel lonely. No problem, you think. You make friends easily. It’s only a matter of time before you’ve got a bunch of great folks actively calling you to join them to hang out, right? All you have to do is muster the courage to get out of the house and meet people. The only question is, where do you go?

Assuming your goal is to meet people you’d actually want to get to know and build lasting relationships with, would you start by heading straight to the biggest, loudest night club in the city? Or would you head down to the neighborhood bar, cafe or coffee shop, where your neighbors were all hanging out after work? Given the choice between the two, my bet is that you’d chose the latter. So would I.

Starting a blog and being social online for the first time can feel a lot like a move to a new city. It’s lonely at the beginning and it takes a while to build a reputation and develop relationships with people who you like and respect, and who are genuinely interested in you and your content.

How you go about developing relationships online should closely mirror the way that you do it offline. You’ve got to go to a place where people share your passions and interests, introduce yourself and start a discussion. When deciding where to go, try to pick places the same way that you’d pick a place to hang out offline. Virtual spaces have distinct personalities and atmospheres all their own that reflect the collection of personalities of the community. Huge blogs like TechCrunch and Gizmodo will be just like a massive nightclub – tons of noise and lots of superficial interaction. On the other hand, smaller communities and personal blogs will feel more like a local watering hole – and with fewer people and less noise, you’re more likely to engage in higher quality discussions and build meaningful relationships quickly. If you find one of these spots where you meet people you like that feels like it’s got your kindof vibe, devote some time to visiting frequently and sticking around and interacting a lot when you do. You’ll find you have a lot more fun, build better relationships, and before long, it’ll be a spot where everybody knows your name.

Twitter’s Starting To Out Smart Spammers

Jesse Stay, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer recently posted some interesting and insightful pieces on how Twitter is going after people who game Twitter to get more followers. There are some solid arguments made in each post in support of Twitter’s move, as well as on the dubious and controversial nature of Twitter’s suggested users list (SUL). When it comes to the issue of eliminating spam and improving usability, I fundamentally support what Twitter is doing. That said, Dave Winer makes some excellent points on Twitter’s SUL. The three posts in tandem are great reads if you want to understand the core issues and what’s going on. There are also many gems in the comments.

Twitter Is Apple’s Support Forum

The iPhone 3.0 upgrade software was just released and, within minutes, #iPhone and #iTunes popup on the trending topics list as the iPhone community rushes to their computers to upgrade their phones. Between the time I ran the search and took this screenshot, there were over 1000 new twitter posts mentioning #iTunes – literally in the space of a minute. Hundreds of people are all having similar problems, asking questions, helping each other. Amazing. And Apple is no where to be seen in the stream. Lesson learned…get your community manager and techies monitoring Twitter when someone pushes the “RELEASE” button. Read More

More On Pre-Zuckerberg Prep-School Facebook Culture

Today an article I wrote for ReadWriteWeb went live titled “Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration For Facebook Come Before Harvard?‘. I think it’s a great question, one worth exploring far beyond the light coverage I gave it in the article because the answer can offer us important clues into why Facebook has been so successful.

Facebook is drastically changing the way we communicate and live our lives. Understanding where it came from, and how and why it grew so fast, is an important part of the story – one we should devote cultural and anthropological research to. If you think Facebook is just some “Internet thing” that kids do (and a lot of adults surprisingly still do), then you’re completely disillusioned and you need to get your head out of the sand. The reality is that there is a whole generation of kids moving into their teens right now who will never know what it’s like to live in a world without the Internet and social networking…their rise marks the end of an era. And you know what they all have in common? Facebook. We’ve got to wrap our heads around how it affects our psychology, our culture, and how we can best use it to create and strengthen (not dehumanize) our communities and our relationships etc. I think that telling a more complete story of Facebook’s history is a critical piece of the “community 2.0″ puzzle. Read More

Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration For Facebook Come Before Harvard?

Note: This article I wrote was originally published on ReadWriteWeb and syndicated to the New York Times on May 10th, 2009. I have posting it here and closed comments, but I have participated heavily in the discussions on the original ReadWriteWeb posting and posted additional thoughts and clarifications on the matter on this blog. Please follow the links to ReadWriteWeb and to my follow up post to view the full discussion.

By now we are all familiar with Mark Zuckerberg‘s success story. The explosive international growth of Facebook to over 200 million users continues to land the young Founder and CEO in top news stories worldwide. Recently, Time Magazine named Zuckerberg one of The World’s Most Influential People of 2008, and Fast Company named Facebook number 15 in it’s list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” for 2009. At just 23 years of age, Zuckerberg even briefly made Forbe’s 400 richest Americans list, temporarily giving him the title of World’s Youngest Billionaire.

Interestingly, the stories we hear these days about Mark in popular media tend to follow a common sensationalist pattern: “Supersmart kid invents a tech phenomenon from his Harvard dorm room, drops out, and changes the world”. It’s a classically framed, Bill Gates-esque story of success focusing on intelligence and ambition. What’s most intriguing about the Zuckerberg story we all know, however, isn’t that he dropped out of Harvard and became a billionaire at 23. It’s that prior to February 4th 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, we hear very little about Mark or the inspiration behind Facebook at all.

It’s likely that the reason we hear so little about Zuckerberg’s pre-launch vision for Facebook (originally called thefacebook.com) is because he has been the target of controversy for the true origins of his business in the past. In 2007, several of Zuckerberg’s classmates came forward and claimed rights to the Facebook idea after reports surfaced that Yahoo had offered Zuckerberg $900 million for Facebook just two years after the founding of the company. Even though the suit against Zuckerberg was settled last year, given the nature of the proceedings, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever get an official answer from Zuckerberg himself about the true origins of his inspiration. But maybe we don’t need one afterall?

It turns out that Zuckerberg’s academic history may offer us a great deal of insight into where the inspiration for Facebook came from, and why it was so wildly successful when it first launched. I’d argue that although February 4th marked a major milestone in Facebook’s history, the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to fame actually starts years before he stepped foot on the Harvard campus, and is much more complex and interesting than it initially appears.

Pre-Zuckerberg: Tracing The Roots of Facebook Culture

It might surprise you to hear that while Harvard may have been fertile ground for the initial launch of Facebook, the seeds for the concept were likely picked up by Zuckerberg in high school. You never hear about Zuckerberg’s alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy in the stories because Harvard was where the intial action took place (and the Harvard name, to some extent, validates Mark’s smarts and makes for a more sensational story). The truth is that the time Zuckerberg spent at Phillips Exeter Academy from 2000 to 2002 likely had more influence on the name and initial concept for Facebook than any of his classmates at Harvard.

Phillips Exeter Academy (also known simply as “Exeter”) is a private boarding school for grades 9-12, located in Exeter, New Hampshire. The prestigious “prep” school is a member of the Ten Schools Admission Organization, that includes famous boarding schools such as Phillips Andover, Deerfield Academy, St. Paul’s, and Choate Rosemary Hall (my alma mater). Like each one of “The Big Ten”, Exeter has a tight-knit boarding community that live on campus full-time. Student’s refer to themselves as “Exonians” and have a strong sense of group identity and community that’s rooted in a rich culture of customs and tradition.

An Exonian himself for two years, Zuckerberg had a unique opportunity to observe and participate in the social culture and rhythms ingrained in Exeter’s boarding lifestyle. Every year, the school says goodbye to a few hundred students, and welcomes a few hundred more. Zuckerberg enrolled as a boarder at Exeter in the fall of his junior year and, like every other new and returning student, along with his dorm room keys and class schedule, received his own copy of Exeter’s student directory “The Photo Address Book”, which the students affectionately referred to as (you guessed it) “The Facebook”.

I had the opportunity to interview several of Zuckerberg’s piers this week, and they all confirmed what David W. Farrant (Class of ’00) had to say…

“The front cover says “The Photo Address Book”, but we all called it “The Facebook” all the time because “The Photo Address Book” was such a mouthful. Everybody called it that.”

“Facebook” photo directories were (and still are) a huge part of students’ social experience and culture at prep schools like Exeter. Every school in the big ten has one that they print and distribute to students annually. When students arrive on campus each fall, the rhythm of their social lives are heavily driven by the dormitories they live in, their class year (seniority) and their proximity to friends in other houses. Because students aren’t allowed cell phones on campus, and there’s so much flux in living accommodations each year (houses and phone numbers change annually) these “Facebooks” are an extremely valuable information resource for students.

Of course, not only do students need the directory to find and contact their piers, the books become part of the culture of bonding between classmates and friends as students use it to see where their piers live, who’s hot and who’s not, who lives with who, and who the new kids are. Sounds an awful lot like how people use Facebook online now, right? What I’m describing, of course, is an early, pre-Internet social culture facilitated by a photo directory that was used and enjoyed by students long before Zuckerberg even made it to high school – it was a culture he happened upon and got to participate in by a stroke of pure luck and glorious opportunity.

But the story doesn’t end there. In Zuckerberg’s senior year, the student council, headed by student body president Kris Tillery, successfully lobbied for the administration to have the schools IT Department put the full contents of Exeter’s Photo Address Book online, and before Zuckerberg graduated, it was up under the URL http://student.exeter.edu/facebook, matching the student’s pet name for the directory and effectively shortening the URL to something useful (Tillery was unavailable for comment). During my interviews, some of Zuckerberg’s piers pointed me to this screen shot of the original website that was hosted on the school’s .edu domain that was (and still is) posted in a public Facebook group “Exonians” in 2006. Some of the Facebook comments attached to the screen shot (dating back to 2007) refer to the screen shot as “the original Facebook” and to The Photo Address Book as “the physical Facebook”.

Of course, the school’s student.exeter.edu/facebook website is no longer online, and none of the interviewees were able to confirm whether Zuckerberg himself was involved in, or responsible for, the student council initiative that got the directory online in the first place. What we can confirm is that students thought that the directory they all used would be useful enough online to get the student council involved in an effort to lobby the administration, that the online directory was created during Zuckerberg’s senior year and that he was likely aware of its existence.

Getting A More Complete View Of The Facebook Success Story…

Now that Facebook.com has graduated from its academic roots and been released to the world for free, its continued growth has many experts saying that it will likely be the dominant social platform for the foreseeable future. At 200 million users (and counting), it’s tough to argue that Facebook won’t have considerable influence in the ways we all connect and communicate in the future, both locally and across borders. While we may never know the true origins of Mark Zuckerberg’s inspiration for Facebook, taking a deeper look at the social culture of the prep school he attended, and his experiences as a boarding student there, may offer us insight into where the explosion of a global Facebook culture may have started, why it was so successful when it was first launched at an Ivy League school and how luck and opportunity may have played a large part in influencing the deep thinking that led one of the world’s youngest visionaries to start coding in his Harvard dorm room.

Status Culture – Public vs Private and Why It Matters

I recently made the decision to stop feeding my Twitter posts into Facebook. The reason is simple – I continually get negative feedback from my non-Twittering Facebook friends on how I update my status. Some hated how often I updated, some didn’t get what “@” and “RT” was, some didn’t like that they couldn’t join in on conversations that weren’t actually taking place inside Facebook’s walls, and some people didn’t like how “impersonal” most of my updates were (I use Twitter like a shared feed reader a lot).

Not all the feedback was bad, of course – I don’t mean to exaggerate. I’ve gotten quite a few Facebook friends into Twitter because they noticed the difference in how it’s used and saw the value. No, my choice was because there’s a significant difference in status culture between the two platforms, and, because I’m a heavy Twitter user, I would continue to violate social rules inside of Facebook (and piss off my friends).

Recognizing the emerging differences in status culture is an important step to understanding how people behave on either platform and how we can shape interaction with good design. In this post I’ll offer some insights into the differences between Twitter and Facebook, how they change people’s behavior, and argue that the differences in public-ness and prive-ness cause fundamental and important shifts in how people interact and use each platform.

Friends vs. Followers: How We Group Contacts And Establish Relationships Matters

How we establish and organize our relationships makes a difference to how we interact on any platform. The design of the connection mechanism drives who we (can) connect with, how we connect, and how we display our (implied) relationships (and social responsibility to others). Makes intuitive sense, right?

Twitter’s got a fundamentally different connection model than Facebook that allows for both one-way and two way relationships, whereas Facebook forces a mutual relationship at the point of connection. The difference can be illustrated in the following way (I’ve split these into 6 different types A-F)

Twitter Relationships:

- Type A: I follow you, but you don’t follow me and anyone can see both of our updates. (Public one-way “Follower” = weak relationship)

- Type B (A reversed): You follow me, but I don’t follow you and anyone can see both of our updates (Public one-way “Follower” = weak relationship)

-Type C: I’m Private, You’re Public: I follow you, but you don’t follow me AND my updates are protected so that you can’t see them (Private one-way Follower = Weakest relationship)

- Type D (C reversed) You’re Private, I’m Public: You follow me, but I don’t follow you and you’ve protected your updates so I can’t see them (Private one-way Follower = Weakest relationship)

- Type E: We follow each other publicly, and anyone can see our updates/conversations (Public Friends = Stronger relationship)

- Type F: We follow each other privately, and only we and the people we explicitly approve can see our updates/conversations (Private Friends = Stronger relationship)

FacebookRelationships:

- Type F: We follow each other privately, and only we and the people we explicitly approve can see our updates/conversations (Private Friends = Stronger relationship)

As you can see, Twitter’s connection-creation model allows a user to create a large combination of weak and strong ties to other users online based on their own interests, regardless of existing real-world relationships. For example, I can follow celebrities like Diddy or Shaq around and send them “@” messages and interact with them, without implying a strong relationship between us (Type A & B). This stands in stark contrast to Facebook’s model which implies a strong relationship from the get-go – a user has to physically “accept you as a friend” before any interaction occurs (Type F). Across vast populations of users creating hundreds of relationships, these subtle differences create very different community streams and drive human behavior in very different ways (which I’ll cover in a second)

Side note: Andrew Chen has a great post titled Friends versus Followers: Twitter’s elegant design for grouping contacts that highlights some of the strengths of Twitter’s one-way follow design. If you’re interested in interaction design, I recommend it. Here’s a nugget from his post that illustrates a little bit of what I’ve covered above:

...[Twitter's one way follow model] makes it possible to have interactions with lots of people (@replies), but your time line only has information you care about, as you don’t have to follow folks you’re not interested in…[additionally] some profiles are inherently appealing to a cross-section of users – these include celebrities, companies, media content, etc. – and the one-way follow design supports all of these nicely…

Public-ness vs. Private-ness: How Where We Interact Changes What We Share And How We Behave

I had some great conversation s with friends on Twitter and FriendFeed today on how status culture is evolving in the online socialsphere. There was a strong consensus that, although many of us started out using our Twitter and Facebook status updates in similar ways (i.e. for personal updates AND for conversations over ideas/interests), the cultural differences between public (Twitter) vs private (Facebook) spaces has shifted the way almost all of us craft and share our posts in the following ways:

- Personal status updates that are an expression of “self” and “real-life connection” are a cultural norm and are expected when (only) strong, private relationships (Type F) have been established and mutually agreed to as part of the system’s design. However, these types of updates are frowned upon when weak public relationships (Types A-D) are also included in the overall social structure. When someone builds an audience of users based on weak-relationships (Types B & D), being personal too often is seen as violating the cultural balance of “signal to noise” (noise = personal minutia).

- Status updates that are an expression of ideas and shared interests tend to dominate status culture when public, weak relationships are built into the social system. In these cases, discussion and information sharing is the norm and a user’s authority is built around participation and adding value. Personal minutia (in the name of adding value) is therefore kept to a minimum as a sign of respect for the overall community (Jeremiah Owyang has a great landing page where he explains how he uses and doesn’t use Twitter that is instructive).

In addition, when what we post starts changing based on the structure of our relationships (as shown in the bullets above) it also changes how much we participate and how we use each platform:

- Platform Usage Splits: In general, we conform to social norms and separate “personal and private” from “less-personal and public”. When discussing the differences between how they used Facebook and Twitter, my friends Vada Dean and Stephen Christopher said it perfectly in under 140 characters – we get a split in how we use each platform – one gets used for “self” and “personal connections” (Facebook) and the other gets used for “ideas” and “interests” (Twitter). While there is some overlap, the reasons we log on and use each platform are fundamentally very different, despite the similarities in the status functionality.

- How Much We Participate Changes: When expressions of “self” and “connection” dominate the status culture, participation (seems to) decrease; Both the number of updates per day as well as the discussion around updates remains lower. This may be because users have less to connect over (personal status is used as news that people keep up with, not discussion points). Conversely, when common ideas and interests domainate, participation increases significantly; Both the number of updates per day as well as the discussion increases. This may be because more updates are used as discussion starters.

While there are clear differences in the types of updates we send in public and private space, it’s always always always about increasing ambient awareness for the user – it’s just that the type of information and interaction that we’re looking for and expect to find when we log on changes.

Public Vs. Private Space – How It Changes Who Participates and Affects Adoption and Why The Differences Are Important

Most people fear Google and privacy is gold. In my opinion that’s one of the reasons Facebook has amassed close to 180 million users. For most people, not all virtual space is “safe” space where they feel comfortable interacting. When people feel safe, not only do more of them sign up, they interact more and share more of themselves, in more ways, and both the variety and volume of user-generated content (hint: data!) you get increases. For that reason private space will always win the revenue game (at least for the foreseeable future). The majority of people out there will completely opt out of ANYTHING public simply out of fear. The knowledge that someone you don’t know (or worse, someone you DO know and don’t like) can find you and judge you will always freak out the majority of people – because exposing themselves represents a lack of control over who sees and uses their content. Facebook has spent millions putting up walls to create “safe” space for it’s users and implementing elegant organization of privacy controls and THAT is why they’ll win.

For anyone interested in data-driven business models, Robert Scoble has a great post up titled Why Rob Diana is right: Twitter gets the hype while Facebook will get the gold that hits on some of these points. Scoble admits:

[Privacy] is exactly why people tell me they use Facebook instead of Twitter. So, Facebook has the numbers (about 180 million for Facebook vs. about 10 million for Twitter). It is also why Rob Diana is right: people will put more intimate stuff, like having a baby, into Facebook rather than Twitter. Only weirdos like me like sharing intimate stuff in a public forum and having conversations. Hint: for every weirdo like me, there are 1000 who are like my wife and only want to discuss that stuff with their “true friends.”

In short, the appeal of privacy is something developers and social media services need to look at closely, because it seems to be something that the majority of people want, and may be a prerequisite for mass adoption in the future on ANY social service. Most of the world isn’t comfortable yet with the idea of living in public, and my never be. Afterall, Facebook has shown people that control is possible and made them USED to it – and they’ve set the bar high for the rest of the services out there. It’s a cold hard fact: Google-protection and strong privacy controls so significantly lower the social costs attributed with adoption and interaction that most social services cant afford to NOT to build them into their systems because of all the potential users they’ll lose that demand it as a prerequisite to adoption.

Summary

I’ve made a lot of arguments in this post, so I’ll try and sum up with a few bullet points.

- How we establish and organize our relationships makes a difference to how we interact on any platform. The design of the connection mechanism drives who we (can) connect with, how we connect, and how we display our relationships. Across vast populations of users creating hundreds of relationships, these subtle differences create very different community streams and drive human behavior in very different ways.

- What we share and how we interact are products of community’s culture. Communities where strong private relationships dominate seem to favor interaction around “self” and “personal connection” whereas communities where weak public relationships are the norm seem to favor interaction based on “ideas” and “interests”.

- When what we post starts changing based on the structure of our relationships (as shown in the bullets above) it also changes how much we participate and how we use each platform.

- The lure or strong privacy controls for users may increase adoption on social services and improve the variety and volume of interaction on a variety of levels. This an insight that is important for developers of social media who are concerned with generating large user bases because they seek to build revenue streams based on selling data.

While this is a lot to digest, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on any of these points in the comments. I’d also like to thank Matthew Clower, Nic Luchiano, Stephen Christopher, Vada Dean and Mikey Reiach for their significant contributions to this discussion.

**Featured Image Credit

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Category Cyberculture