On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connecto by Rosabeth Moss Kanter | 1:00 PM November 16, 2009 In the World According to Twitter, giving away access to information rewards the giver by building followers. The more followers, the more information comes to the giver to distribute, which in turn builds more followers. The process cannot be commanded or controlled; followers opt in and out as they choose. The results are transparent and purely quantitative; network size is all that matters. The significance of Twitter is yet to be determined; it is a simple, impersonal, and transient application of technology. America in the 20th century was called a “society of organizations.” Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. This changes the nature of career success. Connectors have always been more promotable, even in traditional hierarchies. To be known is to be in the know.
Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do | Psychology Toda One of my all-time favorites among all the scientific papers that I have ever read in my life is “Why your friends have more friends than you do,” published in the in 1991 by my old sociology friend Scott L. Feld, who is now Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. The title of Feld’s paper says it all, and here’s a little demonstration you can do to confirm his conclusion. List all of your friends. Then ask each of your friends how many friends they have. No matter who you are, whether you are a man or a woman, where you live, how many (or few) friends you have, and who your friends are, you will very likely discover that your friends on average have more friends than you do. But how can this be? Feld demonstrates (and explains) the seeming paradox with a simple example in his paper. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll figure out the source of this seeming paradox (although this simple insight did not occur to before Feld published his paper in 1991).
Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go F A description of symmetry and how it affects relationships in social networks. Also, a prediction that Facebook will eventually go asymmetric. Recent events have made it clear that Facebook sees Twitter as a serious threat to its business. First, Facebook tried to buy Twitter for $500,000,000 in stock. In addition, Facebook redesigned their Pages feature. This, of course, is how Twitter works. Relationship Symmetry In general, there are two ways to model human relationships in software. Facebook, on the other hand, has always used a “symmetric” model, where each time you add someone as a friend they have to add you as a friend as well. Andrew Chen recently described one advantage of the Twitter model. People who follow you, but you don’t follow backPeople who don’t follow you, but you follow themYou both follow each other (Friends!) Attention Inequality & the Power of Asymmetry As Andrew points out, an asymmetric model allows for more types of relationships. What of Other Networks?
Why I Love Twitter - O'Reilly Radar If you care what I think, you know that Twitter is just about the best way to learn what I’m paying attention to. I pass along tidbits of O’Reilly news, interesting reading from mailing lists and blogs I follow, and of course, tidbits from the twitterers I’m following. These are all the things I could never find time to put on my blog, but that I spray via email like a firehose at editors, conference planners, and researchers within O’Reilly. A lot of my job is, as we say, “redistributing the future” – following interesting people, and passing on what I learn to others. And twitter is an awesome tool for doing just that. Like a lot of people, I tried out Twitter early on, but didn’t stick to it. I thought I should outline here some of the specific things I find so compelling about Twitter, with suggestions about architectural features to be emulated by other internet services. Twitter is simple. What’s different, of course, is that Twitter isn’t just a protocol.
Early Tremors: Is It Time for Another Social Network Shakeout? - Faint rumblings have begun in the social networking landscape. Facebook acquired smaller rival FriendFeed in August. Friendster, viewed as an also-ran in the U.S., has refocused its operations on the Asia-Pacific region, where it is among the leaders in traffic. Social networking sites allow individuals to connect online and share content like photos and video. When Knowledge@Wharton wrote about social networking sites back in 2006, experts noted that some high-fliers may go from “hot” to “not” quickly. What’s unclear is where social networking goes from here. For instance, Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed revolved largely around a talent and technology grab. Indeed, experts at Wharton expect the Facebook-FriendFeed scenario to play out repeatedly in the next few years. Kendall Whitehouse, director of new media at Wharton, notes that “social networking sites are still popping up” but with questionable prospects. Multipurpose Sites with Scale Emerging Business Models News Corp.
An investigation into user appropriation of a web-based communic RECAP: 2014 Polis Journalism Conference| The 5th Polis Journalism Conference on the topic of Transparency and Accountability was the biggest and most successful yet. The LSE now hosts the UK's most important annual gathering of international journalists. There were at least 700 attendees throughout the day to watch more than 40 speakers from the media industry.
Venessa: Is Twitter A Complex Adaptive System I've seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me. Insight #1 An article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter was just published today on the Harvard Business Review website, titled On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors. She also points out that success today is based on a person's ability to leverage power and influence within their social networks, to act as "connectors" between people and information, and in turn build social capital. She leaves the evaluation of the significance of Twitter open-ended, but she lays out a few characteristics of Twitter that I found most interesting: In the World According to Twitter, giving away access to information rewards the giver by building followers. (just keep those points in mind, I'm going to come back to it) Insight #2 From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong.
33 Bits of Entropy Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective This is a guest post by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, a on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup that helps online businesses measure, manage, and monetize better. He was previously a venture capital analyst and currently serves as an advisor to several New York startups. A few weeks ago, my former employer led a $100 million investment into Twitter and I must admit that I was quite jealous of my former colleagues. Rather than wonder about what I missed, I decided to figure out what I could from the outside looking in. Twitter's user growth is no longer accelerating. Read on for some detailed charts a deeper dive into the data. How We Did It In most cases, this kind of outside-looking-in exercise wouldn't be possible. In the end, our sample size consisted of about 85,000 users and just over 3 Million tweets. Number of Twitter Users This analysis leverages the fact that Twitter uses auto-incrementing ID numbers for both users and tweets. Wow!
Introduction to Social Network Methods: Chapter 4: Visualizing Introduction to social network methods 4. Working with NetDraw to visualize graphs This page is part of an on-line text by Robert A. Hanneman (Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside) and Mark Riddle (Department of Sociology, University of Northern Colorado). Feel free to use and distribute this textbook, with citation. Contents of this chapter: Introduction: A picture is worth... As we saw in chapter 3, a graph representing the information about the relations among nodes can be an very efficient way of describing a social structure. A good drawing can also help us to better understand how a particular "ego" (node) is "embedded" (connected to) its "neighborhood" (the actors that are connected to ego, and their connections to one another) and to the larger graph (is "ego" an "isolate" a "pendant"?). There is no single "right way" to represent network data with graphs. table of contents Node attributes Figure 4.1. Figure 4.2. Relation properties Location, location, location
The Speed Of Share Facebook has a problem. One of its main goals now is to be the center for sharing everything on the web, but the key to that is to make the process as quick and easy as possible. And in that regard, its rival Twitter destroys it. That’s a problem. Now, Facebook isn’t in any immediate danger because of this, it can coast on its sheer size (300 million users). A Tale Of Two Buttons The reason I bring this up is because this weekend, TechCrunch installed a new Facebook Share button on every article, next to the Tweetmeme Retweet button. The first time I clicked on the Facebook button to test it out, I could not believe how long it took to populate the information to share. With the Facebook button, it took quite a few seconds to load this new small window. While 10 to 15 seconds may not seem like a lot of time, compared to Twitter’s 2 to 3 seconds, it’s an eternity. And the gap is actually much larger if you’re logged out of both services to start. A Need To Connect Sharing Is Caring
Twitter CEO on the Future of Twitter The co-founder of Twitter unveiled new innovations on the horizon for the popular social networking site, including user-generated lists to follow tweets from many originators on a particular subject, and geographical location datelines to show where tweets are coming from. Evan Williams, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who co-founded Twitter, also said Twitter is working on a reputation validating system to address isues of credibility for the site. Twitter became a major newsmaker this year when Iranians sent tweets about the brutal Iranian government crackdown on protesters. Williams said the role Twitter played in showing the world what the Iranian government was doing was "clearly gratifying." But he said he understood the concerns of news media in how to handle such information, which is essentially unverified and reported by anonymous entities. Williams said Twitter is working on several things which will help give the network more credibility as an information source.