Facebook Groups versus Groupings

Facebook has announced a new implementation of Groups:

Mark Zuckerberg, Giving You More Control

We’ve long heard that people would find Facebook more useful if it were easier to connect with smaller groups of their friends instead of always sharing with everyone they know. For some it’s their immediate family and for others it’s their fantasy football league, but the common concern is always some variant of, “I’d share this thing, but I don’t want to bother 250 people. Or my grandmother. Or my boss.”

Until now, Facebook has made it easy to share with all of your friends or with everyone, but there hasn’t been a simple way to create and maintain a space for sharing with the small communities of people in your life, like your roommates, classmates, co-workers and family.

We set out to build a solution that could help you map out all of your communities, that would be simple enough that everyone would use it and that would be deeply integrated across Facebook and applications so you can communicate with your different groups in lots of different ways.

We approached this problem as primarily a social one. Rather than asking all of you to classify how you know all of your friends, or programming machines to guess which sets of people are likely cohorts, we’re offering something that’s as simple as inviting your best friends over for dinner. And we think it will change the way you use Facebook and the web.

Today we’re announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group.

Groups will make Facebook more corporate, and less like the open web.

The tech world is falling over themselves about this great advance.

But this isn’t a great step forward. Groups — addressable collections of people who become associated by invitation from the group’s owner, and who have symmetric relationships with each other — are as old as the web. You have them in Yahoo Groups, Flickr, and all over the place.

One of the most interesting and exciting advances on the social web have been ‘groupings’,  where people are spontaneously members of free-form and ad hoc associations without invitation.

For example, all those people that follow me on Twitter are in effect members of a Stowe Boyd grouping. Or all of those people that use a given tag, or follow it (I wish Twitter would implement that, by the way). Or all the people that have liked the same artist in Ping.

Consider Last.fm’s ‘virtual neighborhoods’, based on people’s music play. Wandering around in my Last.fm neighborhood introduced me to more great music in a few hours than all the people I know had played for me in years.

If I were only connected to people on Twitter that I already knew — that I invited to be friends with me — my world would be much much smaller.

Don’t get me wrong: groups have their place, especially when privacy or secrecy is needed, as in many business situations, or when planning a surprise party. But openness, transparency, and serendipity are more interesting as general principles than closedness, opaqueness, and knownness.

Groups will make Facebook more corporate, and less like the open web.

With services like group chat Facebook is taking a run at Google, preemptively, since Google is known to be building a ‘Facebook killer’ that will leverage Google advantages, like Google Talk.

This really feels like the instant messaging wars between AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, all over again.

I find it astonishing that so few people seem to think this ‘advance’ isn’t. Oliver Chiang is one:

Facebook’s Fundamental Flaw, And Why Its New Groups Misses The Mark

The new Groups interface will also have three components: shared space, group chat and email lists. The latter two are exactly what they sound like. Shared Space is a section within Facebook where groups can share communications, photos and other content.

Taking aim at competitors Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, Zuckerberg says “Most people use them as email lists, but we think that what we’ve built here in version 1 blows everything else away.”

Zuckerberg compares to the way groups will spread to how photos spread. Though a small percentage of people upload photos, 95% of users are tagged in photos. Likewise, though a small percentage of users may form groups, Facebook is betting that this “social solution” will get most of its user base to be tagged in groups. In addition, Facebook will rely on users and their social norms to form accurate groups. For instance, if someone adds a non-family member to a family group, the group members will be able to see who made the addition and contest the addition with that user.

But the problem with the new Groups is lack of incentives. Tagging people in photos is one thing. Tagging people in groups and then expecting accurate and agreed-upon groupings to arise naturally is an infinitely more tricky thing. Groups in real life aren’t easily defined, and are dynamic, slippery things. Even something seemingly as simple as a family group raises many issues. Who is considered family? The nuclear family? Extended family? God-parents and second cousins? Who gets to make these final decisions within a group? Asking group users to explicitly name these groupings on an online social network in black and white could easily lead to conflict and disagreements.

[emphasis mine.]

related articles

• New Facebook Offers Cliques for Privacy [Facebook] (gawker.com)
• Facebook’s Fundamental Flaw, And Why Its New Groups Misses The Mark (blogs.forbes.com)
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces more new features: Friend Groups and Group Chat (techvibes.com)
• Facebook Embraces Group Chat and Lets You Export, Too (wired.com)
• Facebook Groups to Encourage More Private Interactions (gigaom.com)
• New Facebook Groups Encourage Private Interactions (nytimes.com)

updated articles 10/7/2010

• New Facebook Groups Encourage Private Interactions (nytimes.com)
• Why the New Facebook Groups Suck on So Many Levels (technmarketing.com)

updated articles 10/8/2010

• Facebook Groups demonstrate the downside of “social design” (venturebeat.com)

The key to social design, Cox said, is that “the interactions of one person … affect and organize the interactions of the people around them.” Cox repeated the phrase during his speech and called it “profound”, prompting me to snicker along with some of the other journalists around me.

Maybe we should have been paying closer attention. There was a dark side to Cox’s statement that I didn’t really catch until today’s complaints. When someone’s actions “affect and organize” your life, that can be useful, but it can also be a huge pain.

Source: blog.facebook.com

6 October 2010 1 Permalink

The Coming Real Time Revolution

[originally posted on Get Real, January 19, 2005]

[These are the prepared notes for my introductory remarks for yesterday’s Get Real Show, largely derived form a report I wrote for Cutter a few years ago, called Time to Get Real: Growing the Real Time Enterprise (still seems fresh though).]

To imagine a zero latency organization – with near frictionless communication between applications and people – you have to grapple with an even more difficult idea: a network of companies, linked through a cascade of commercial transactions and communications, which all together represents a real time meta-enterprise.

Truly, no company can become real time enabled in isolation. And as individual companies seek to improve their operations through the operational application of real time techniques and technology, they will find that the biggest payoffs come from the touch points with partners, suppliers, and customers. The net effect of these thousands or millions of partial solutions is a social transformation, as the business economy moves from traditional, slow-time operational models, to a revolutionary real time footing.

The real time organization is not a starry-eyed quest for the unattainable, even though squeezing out the last iota of latency in every business process and interaction is an unachievable goal. It’s an adjustment to a new economic context, where new survival strategies will need to be tested, refined, and applied, and where much of what worked before will not only become obsolete, but dangerous. Business processes and market positioning based on the premises of even a few years ago could spell disaster today, in many sectors. The economics of real time business will require a reassessment of sources of value, and areas of risk.

What are some of the features of this new real time landscape? Even without introducing the more esoteric, controversial, and complex elements of my rants from the past few years, I can enumerate a short list of principles driving the move toward the real time enterprise:

1. Today’s performance enhancements will largely come from cross-enterprise communication improvements, rather than the internal improvements of the past decades. Companies have invested billions to soup up internal processes, but they will need to revisit those processes again.


2. Real time communication is not just slow-time communication sped up. Linking applications and people around the concept of zero latency means that processes and applications will have to be rethought, rebuilt, or — in some cases — jettisoned. There is a qualitative shift in how things work when they’re moved to a real time basis, independent of the quantitative benefits of doing things faster.


3. Real time principles are applicable in all contexts. Analysts who suggest that companies that don’t compete “on speed” are missing the point. There is a qualitative change in all operations of a company when it’s organized around real time principles, not just a quantitative one. Even those who compete on customer intimacy or engineering excellence can cut costs, increase customer satisfaction,
   and increase innovation through the ‘side effects’ of applying real time techniques and technologies.


4. Real time organizations will be much more tightly linked to their commercial ecosystems to reduce the risks associated with market volatility, and to gain better information about market trends. Connectedness has its dark side, since tighter links means more volatility because of synchronization across the ecosystem: we have to relearn how to react in such a brave new world.


5. There will be much more communication going on in the real time organization, but fewer wasted communication, and less store-and-forward mechanisms. Many researchers suggest that as much as 40% of all business phone calls lead to voice mail, for example. This is a glaring waste of time and money. Likewise, we will see much less e-mail, nightly batch files, and weekly inventory updates, but more
   direct, synchronous communication between applications and between people. We will soon look back on today’s style of business communication and wonder how it ever worked at all.


6. Perhaps the most disruptive factor of the real time revolution is presence, the Siamese twin of instant messaging. Instant messaging has exploded upon the world, growing to more than half a billion users. It is, however, still considered a teenager’s toy by many in the IT community, which is both silly and pointless. As Ed Simnett of Microsoft pointed out, those teenagers are entering the
   workforce today with the assumption that instant messaging is productive, cheap, and ubiquitous, not a novelty to be analyzed, but simply a tool to be used. The idea of presence – the ability to know if an agent is available to communicate – is being carried forward into group and corporate scope and past the ‘buddy list’ of today’s consumer IM networks, and will change business communication almost beyond recognition as presence is threaded into everything – every app, every phone, every device, every part on the warehouse shelf.


7. The Internet has become the Petri dish in which we’re creating a new business culture, and we’re entering the exponential tail of the value curve due to the connectedness that modern information technologies offer to business. The real time Internet that is emerging through several key technologies – higher bandwidth, wireless connectivity, voice-over-IP, and instant messaging/presence – that are amplifying the potential for creating more and richer social groups.


8. The value of the network has risen exponentially, and extracting that value requires mobilizing around real time Internet technologies. The means to tap the exponential value growth of the real time revolution is through real time communities – social groups linked through real time technologies. Integration of legacy applications or processes, even across enterprises linked together in complex value chains, will only yield linear returns on investment. This is a course
   that has been followed for years, and while the results are positive, they are limited. However, exponential value growth comes from the reorganization of cross-enterprise operations around support for real time communities – social groups organized around specific activities or functions. Rethinking applications and processes to support the needs of these meta-enterprise social groups will be the path to achieving and tapping this exponential value.


9. All this means a new model for enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture has been approached in recent years as a means to automate the business processes within a company, and perhaps to integrate with the business processes of other companies. The new model for enterprise architecture will be driven by the goal of supporting social processes across the meta-enterprise, which will require not only new technologies (such as web services, mobile connectivity, and instant messaging), but a radical departure in how we architect
   systems. The platforms being rolled out by the companies on our panel today will form the basis of future real time enterprise architecture, but global services – global identity authentication and presence services, for example – will be threaded into every company’s architecture as well, so that social groups can be formed in real time, on demand, allowing teams of companies to respond collectively to real time events on the fly.


10. Operating in the new real time economy will be in many ways an extension of what we already know, but will also require the adoption of a new mindset, and a new set of management principles. In the past 10 years, we have witnessed a decision-making shift from “the center” or “the top” (centralized management) to “the edge” or “the bottom” (front-line managers and team members). This trend will accelerate as real time technologies come online and disrupt the corporate reporting topology. As such, senior management’s role will increasingly shift from time-based decision making (responsive decision making in the face of opportunities or threats) toward space-based decision making. By space here, I’m speaking figuratively, as in choosing the markets or market niches in which to operate, the bases upon which to compete, the alliances to structure, and so on. But space is not just an externally focused, macro-economic dimension; it also has an internal side. The other critical role for management is inward-focused: supporting the capacity of the organization to support rich social groups; to, in essence, create an environment in which the organization can monitor and respond to threats and opportunities effectively. And “effectively” will come to quickly mean “in real time.” The mechanism of monitoring and response will be much more fluid social groups, created in some cases on the fly to respond to real time events. This will be the end of the organization chart as we have known it. The lessons of successful online communities will change the way organizations work and how cross-enterprise work is accomplished. Management is being shown the path to a better way to manage for the real-time era we are entering.

[I dug this out of the archives to respond to Marc Benioff’s comments at the Techcrunch Real-Time Crunchup, today.]

20 November 2009 Permalink

Instant Messaging Decreases Interruptions

Those that have followed my work will know that I don’t buy the microeconomic reasoning that requests for assistance should be minimized because they lead to a decrease in personal productivity. On the contrary, I have been arguing that the willingness to trade personal productivity for connectedness is a hallmark of web culture, and that drive for connectedness trump any personal productivity hits [Boyd’s Law]. I also maintain that the productivity of the extended network of web denizens is the only sensible way to measure productivity, if it is relevant to measure it at all.

There is new evidence that suggest that the personal productivity hit may be negligible. or perhaps even a productivity boost, decreasing the overall numbers of interruptions when workers use instant messaging as a medium for interoffice communication and coordination:

[from Instant Messaging Proves Useful In Reducing Workplace Interruption]

Employers seeking to decrease interruptions may want to have their workers use instant messaging software, a new study suggests. A recent study by researchers at Ohio State University and University of California, Irvine found that workers who used instant messaging on the job reported less interruption than colleagues who did not.

The study challenges the widespread belief that instant messaging leads to an increase in disruption. Some researchers have speculated that workers would use instant messaging in addition to the phone and e-mail, leading to increased interruption and reduced productivity.

Instead, research showed that instant messaging was often used as a substitute for other, more disruptive forms of communication such as the telephone, e-mail, and face-to-face conversations. Using instant messaging led to more conversations on the computer, but the conversations were briefer, said R. Kelly Garrett, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State.

I still argue that responding to requests — whatever their source — from people that you want to remain closely connected to is a positive thing, and worth whatever the productivity hit might be, but that doesn’t mean that you should try to minimize the time consumed.

This is a strong argument that the use of presence-based social tools — not just IM — will decrease the costs inherent in interruptive communication, and increase the overall benefits from connectedness.

[via Vicki; original research here.]

20 June 2008 1 Permalink

LinkedIn and Plaxo: Adapt or Die

Dan Farber’s scoop about LinkedIn’s plans to adapt to the new world that Facebook is making is almost anticlimatic:

[from � LinkedIn to open up to developers | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com by Dan Farber]

I talked to LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference about Facebook’s rapid growth and potential incursion into his territory. He told me that over next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook, and create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LlinkedIn notifications.

One half of that message is just sensible: if you have a huge social network, why not allow others to build on top of it? The second half almost suggests conceding leadership to Facebook, as if Facebook is the really social social network, while Linkedin is some more functional thing that just so happens to work based on social relationships. Which is really what I have always thought was wrong with LinkedIn: it’s a bunch of business processes that are partially automated that rely on a large database of people’s relationships. It is, however, not the sort of place where you make or foster relationships. So, in a way, Reid is conceding nothing, since what Facebook is doing is intensely social, not just leveraging a big dataset of contacts.

In a similar fashion, Plaxo’s Ben Golub and I spoke the other day, and the ‘contact unmanagement’ company has released a beta of Plaxo 3.0: a real category shift, in many ways. Along with a long roster of synchronization options (like Google Calendar, Mac OS X Address Book and Calendar, Outlook, and especially, LinkedIn, which represents a whole new angle: syncing social networks (to be expanded in another post)), Golub and company have added a ‘Pulse’ feature that plants the product over in the camp of flow apps, like Twitter, Jaiku, and Facebook.

Pulse pulls new media traffic from your Plaxo contacts: photos from Flickr, blog updates, address modifications, and so on. I have already requested some kind of desktop tool (like Twitterific) for Pulse.

I find the Plaxo sync stuff sort of awkward, but that’s because I have my calendars and contacts spread out in a very unique way. I use Google Calendar as my actual calendar, and only sync to the Mac OS X iCal so I can sync to my phone. And I have addresses all over, primarily because I can’t sync between my Mac Address app and Google. If Plaxo fixes that I would be happy, but the Google address sync is still planned for the future.

I see Plaxo breaking into two twinned parts: synchronization of various sorts of coordinative data caught up in calendars, address books and to-do lists (yawn… useful, but so twentieth century), and a new (less boring) collection of services that are traffic-and-flow based.

Pulse is another run at the Nerdvana meme I have been pursuing for a long, long time. The basic notion of Nerdvana is that we want to have updates of all sorts from our contacts collated into a buddylist representation, which is where Golub tells be Plaxo is headed. I could see Brian Solis’ online presence, most recent status message, last five blog posts, and recent Flickr pictures, but linked to the buddylist icon for Brian.

[I can’t tell you how many IM companies I have have suggested this too, over the years, by the way. But again, we have to look to the upstarts to do the breakthroughs, I guess.]

If Plaxo heads this way, my recommendation will be to break Pulse out as a separate application, one that relies on data managed within the Plaxo platform, but sylistically and operationally separate. It has nothing to do with sync of data, and everything to do with media traffic flowing through personal relationships.

Both Plaxo and LinkedIn seem to be making serious business model adjustments, based on the new world.

24 June 2007 2 Permalink

Feed Crier Acquired By IMified

Adam Kalsey hipped me to the acquisition of his Feed Crier business into IMified recently, and he’s announced it officially today:

[from Feed Crier climbs into bed with IMified :: Feed Crier]

For the last couple of months, we’ve been talking to IMified, sharing war stories, and helping them out with some ideas on how best to manage the signed on bot portion of the service. The more we’ve talked, the more we’ve liked each other. We started exploring ways we could partner and work together, with IMified providing a publishing backend for Feed Crier and us providing an alerting service for IMified.

The more we talked and planned the integration, the more we realized how much more we could do for each other. One thing led to another, and today I’m happy to announce that IMified has acquired Feed Crier.

I have switched over, happily, to getting my RSS feeds via IM bot, but I certainly want more. Even though I am trying to use Feed Crier as one element of my overall traffic stream (or lifestream) it is not enough today. I want to be able to pull up a log of RSS emelemnts I might have missed while offline, and I’d like to be able to query the stream app to get all sorts of information that I can’t today. For example, I’d like to be able to say ‘show me the last 20 posts from Brian Solis’ stream’.

I hope that IMified will be pushing in this direction.

14 May 2007 Permalink

Out Of Time: We Are Working Less, But Watching More TV

Recent research on how we spend our time shows that we have more free time than ever before:

[from The land of leisure]

A pair of economists have looked closely at how Americans actually spend their time. Mark Aguiar (at the diaries ask people to give detailed information on everything they did the day before, and for how long they did it. The beauty of such surveyFederal Reserve Bank of Boston) and Erik Hurst (at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business) constructed four different measures of leisure.[“Measuring trends in leisure: the allocation of time over five decades”, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston working paper, January 2006] The narrowest includes only activities that nearly everyone considers relaxing or fun; the broadest counts anything that is not related to a paying job, housework or errands as “leisure”. No matter how the two economists slice the data, Americans seem to have much more free time than before.

Over the past four decades, depending on which of their measures one uses, the amount of time that working-age Americans are devoting to leisure activities has risen by 4-8 hours a week. (For somebody working 40 hours a week, that is equivalent to 5-10 weeks of extra holiday a year.) Nearly every category of American has more spare time: single or married, with or without children, both men and women. The only twist is that less educated (and thus poorer) Americans have done relatively better than more educated ones (see chart). And that is not just because unemployed high-school drop-outs have more free time on their hands. Less educated Americans with jobs—the overstretched middle class of political lore—do very well.

These findings will no doubt be scoffed at by many Americans who are certain that they, and nearly everyone they know, are overworked (and who may find time to write letters to the editor saying so). Indeed, a 1992 book by Juliet Schor, “The Overworked American”, became a best-seller by telling people something that they thought they already knew.

In fact, most of the official numbers have shown that American toil has not changed that much over the past few decades. Americans may put in longer hours at the office than other countries, but that is because average hours in the workplace in other rich countries have dropped sharply. In America, official studies tend to show women working more and men less, but the average working week has been fairly constant.

How then have Messrs Aguiar and Hurst uncovered a more relaxed America, where leisure has actually increased? It is partly to do with the definition of work, and partly to do with the data they base their research upon.

Most American labour studies rely on well-known official surveys, such as those collected by the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau, that concentrate on paid work. These are good at gleaning trends in factories and offices, but they give only a murky impression of how Americans use the rest of their time.

Messrs Aguiar and Hurst think that the hours spent at your employer’s are too narrow a definition of work. Americans also spend lots of time shopping, cooking, running errands and keeping house. These chores are among the main reasons why people say they are so overstretched (especially working women with children).

But the researchers go on to show that the number of hours spent on housework has dropped significantly, even for working women, so the sense of ‘having no time’ is a strange paradox, all around.

One other interesting trend is the rise of multitasking. Those recording their time in diaries for the studies reported an increase in blended activities: writing email while watching TV, talking to customers on the phone while making dinner, or working while flying. It may be this subtle bleeding together of work and non-work contexts that contributes to the paradoxical sense of being busy all the time, even though we are working far, far less.

And of course, there is the oddest element of the glut of leisure time: people spend it watching television:

[from What’s Offline Sunday New York Times by Paul Brown]

“Since 1965, there’s been a six- to eight-hour weekly increase in leisure for the average worker age 21 to 65,” Mr. Hurst told Kiplinger’s.

Mr. Hurst explains where all that free time is coming from: men are working less, with part of the increase attributable to stay-at-home dads.

“For women, all of the increase is from a decline in housework — less cooking, cleaning, laundry and grocery shopping than 40 years ago,” he says.

And what are we doing with all our additional free time? “Roughly two-thirds of the increase in leisure is spent watching television. That’s been consistent across population groups since 1965. More recently, we’ve spent more time on the Internet, less time reading and a little bit more time exercising. We’re going to church about a half-hour a week less.”

That’s 4 to 5 hours of television watching every week. Sheesh. It’s like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day: when given immortality and an endless time to educate himself, he instead spent the time flipping playing cards into a hat. We are granted a full day of additional leisure time, and squander it watching Ameridan Idol and Jerry Springer (oh, and all those other “really great” shows that people always talk about whenever I start on this topic).

I believe that the decrease in social involvement and the rise of commuting are psychological factors that make us feel time-crushed. We are spending more time going to and from work than in earlier generations, and we are less involved in community, social activities. We have replaced the latter with the structured and scheduled — taking the kids to dance classes, sunday soccer, the friday night poker circle — and it’s my contention that the increased orientation toward scheduled activities, rather than extemporaneous hanging out at the local pub, makes us feel time pressured. Its the act of scheduling things that brings the notion of time pressure into our thoughts.

I am sure that all of us remember those days in childhood when time seemed both endless and instantaneous, when we were playing in the neighborhood park with friends or in a treehouse in a neighbor’s yard. I believe that we have lost that feeling of being outside of time by scheduling every last event in our lives.

I think that’s one of the charming aspects of instant messaging. People see I’m online, and just ping me. “Hey, Stowe, did you read such-and-so?” I break out of the sequence of structured work for a few minutes of impromptu socializing. Time steps back. I feel at least an echo of that distant summer day, hitting fungos to my buddy, Carl, in the park. Momentarily, I am outside of time instead of out of time.

8 April 2006 Permalink