Joe's Jottings

Category: The Media

Google Buzz and Google’s incursion in to Social Networking
Many years ago there was a joke in techy circles that likened Microsoft to the Star Trek aliens ‘The Borg’. It appeared at the time (mid 1990s) that Microosft were indeed determined to assimilate everything they encountered and absorb the technology of other companies in to their own. Well, like the Borg in Trek, Microsoft finally found that they couldn’t assimilate everything. But today there’s a new Borg Queen on the block, in teh form of Google.

Google Buzz was launched as an adjunct to Gmail, and Google got themselves in to hot water at the launch by having the system automatically follow everyone in your Gmail contacts list. This was regarded as pretty heavy handed on Google’s part – and Google obviously concurred to some degree as they introduced changes to this part of the system. The problem for Google is that they have a lousy history of handling privacy issues in both their Search tools and Gmail, and I guess starting a new product off with a similar disregard for the perceptions of their users was not a sound move.

So, how relevant is this move by Google? I have to say that I’m not convinced that Google will actually represent major competition to Facebook or Twitter with Buzz (or, for that matter, with Wave). The lock in to Google’s infrastructure of Buzz is something that Facebook doesn’t have, for instance. I don’t have to have a Facebook email account, and I don’t do my searching through Facebook. And therein lies the problem for me – and it all comes back to Google’s database of intentions that I’ve mentioned before in this blog. The more Google can derive about the way in which people use Search, who they interact with, what ‘clusters’ of interests people have – even anonymously – the more value Google’s database of intention is. You might want to take a look at some of my previous articles about Google – Google and The Dead Past, The importance of Real Time Search and Google seeks browser dominance – to get a feel for my views on Google. Google’s strategic moves have been consistently to get Google’s search into everything we do. Gmail was their first crack at this with personal communications, and now with Wave and Buzz they have the tools to map social networks, and the search behaviours of people on those social networks, especially if people remain logged in to Google accounts whilst the do their searching.

Let’s pretend…..you are logged in to your Buzz account and you search for something. Google can link your search interests to those of the people in your social network, and vice versa. They can thus add the collective behaviour of your searches to their database of intentions – remember what I said about the Borg? 🙂 And we’re not even thinking about the additional data provided by Google Apps…

Google are also purchasing a ‘Social Search’ tool that allows people to ask questions of their social groups; I think we can safely assume that the responses will be squirreled away somewhere for future use.

Even when anonymised, this sort of information builds in to a very valuable commodity that Google can sell to future ‘partners’. Google’s behaviour at the moment seems to be to develop or acquire a series of discrete elements of Social Networking technology that they’re bringing together under the existing account system of Gmail / Google Accounts, which makes perfect sense. At one time Microsoft filled in some of the gaps in their various offerings in a similar way to allow them access to market segments that they were still trying to penetrate. Perhaps Google have learnt from the software behemoth.

But they have a way to go – here are what I consider Google’s biggest challenges.
1. The attitude of the public towards Google is not entirely positive, and whilst Facebook have had numerous privacy problems their defined market presence in Social Networking and not in Social Networking, Search, Email, Productivity tools, kitchen sink manufacture, etc.
2. Facebook may easily lose market share to a good competing service; their constant re-vamping of User Interface and buggy code upsets users but at the moment there is no viable competation for most people as Facebook is where their social network is. Google would have to get people to migrate en-masse and over a short period of time to get the sort of success FB show.
3. Wave is certainly buggy; Gmail and Buzz are designed to not run on IE6 and it’s debatable how long Google will support other Microsoft Browsers – I wonder how many people would want themselves tied in to Google at the level of software as well as applications? Like I said earlier – Facebook doesn’t require me to have a Facebook email address.
4. What’s Google’s target market; Wave seemed to be a solution looking for a problem; Buzz seems to be a similar ‘half way house’ affair that in some ways would have been best placed in Wave. Twitter and Facebook tend to provide specific groups of users with a defined user experience and functionality. Quite what Buzz and Wave and Gmail together provide that isn’t available elsewhere is not clear to me.
So….my thoughts? If this is Google’s attempt to park their tanks on Facebook’s lawn, then they’ve invoked the ‘Fail Whale’.
February 16, 2010
We know where you’ve been on the Net, and we don’t need no steenkin’ cookies!

I’m not overly paranoid about people knowing where I’ve been on the Internet; I’m aware that it’s pretty easy for a website to feed your browser ‘tracking cookies’ that can be used for marketing and advertising purposes, and these can then be picked up on other sites, thus providing a path of footsteps that you have followed online.

Which is why I clear my cookies regularly, and set my browsers to only accept cookies from sites that I want to accept cookies from. But I can see that in some parts of the world, your browsing history might be of great interest to Government and Law Enforcement, and I’m sure that many of the larger online retailers would love to get their paws on a good, reliable and hard to circumvent method of looking at what common interests people have. For example, even if you’re anonymous, it can be of great use to companies to know what sorts of sites you visit, because you can then use data mining techniques to derive information on what other sites or products you might be interested in. For example, if you’re an Amazon user, you’ll be aware of the fact you get recommendations of the ‘We see you’re interested in x. Other people interested in x also bought y and z’.

Now…let’s take this a little further. I was browsing around the other afternoon and came across this site. Give it a try – it’s under the auspices of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I don’t know what it came back with for you, but my ‘fingerprint’ was pretty darn rare – I guess it’s inevitable because of the various things I have installed on this computer for work. The site looks at the information sent by your browser to the site, and uses it to derive a ‘uniqueness’ factor – a sort of tag. For an out of the box installation of an Operating System then I’d expect that there would be quite a few people whose finger prints are essentially the same. But the more you tweak and configure and install stuff on your PC, the more unique it gets….to a point at which it can identify your PC uniquely, with very few errors.

And all this without it ever putting a cookie anywhere near your PC. Now, there are ways around this – there always are – but they’re not the sort of approaches that the average man or woman in the street would take.

So what sort of ‘advantage’ would such a technology offer online companies, Government and the Security Services?

Now, this is pure supposition – I have absolutely no evidence at all that this is happening or is likely to happen…but let’s pretend. We’ll assume that a number of large online companies have collaborated on sharing this fingerprint data – basically you visit a site or even a page – or maybe even do searches for certain subjects – and your electronic fingerprint is tagged on to that fact.

Scenario 1. You do a search for information on equipment to help you avoid speed cameras. Later that day you go to buy car insurance. The insurer does a quick check on your ‘fingerprint’ against topics of interest to it – including sites offering legal advice for people caught speeding and also sites that inform or advise on speed traps. You show up – you’re declined.

Scenario 2. You’re interested in computer hacking – maybe even researching a book. You visit a number of sites of interest, look at books on Amazon and such. A few weeks later a major ‘hack’ happens and the authorities look at the electronic fingerprints of everyone who may have researched the topic. You will show up. This fingerprint is then circulated around ISPs who note that it is one that is associated with your Internet account.

Scenario 3. You’re gay in a country run by a repressive regime. You visit web sites where the fingerprinting is being done for commercial marketing reasons. The security services of your country get hold of this data, either by buying it or stealing it, and run a check of those fingerprints against the ones that are on file with the ISPs of that country. You will find yourself in major trouble.

There are ways around this technique – it’s easy to go through proxies, and possible to strip all this sort of identifying data off of the packets that go to web sites. And people who’re genuinely worried (or have reason to avoid this sort of inspection) will no doubt be doing this. But for the vast majority of people this simply would be yet another means of intrusion in to our private lives.

February 12, 2010
BBC bias in favour of globalisation?

As is my habit, I popped in to the BBC Website this morning to catch up on what’s been happening in the world and saw this article, with the link headline from the front page of ‘Why globalisation means you are less likely to be burgled’. Hmmm, I thought – interesting. As I expected, the article led on the fact that globalisation has driven down the price of consumer electronics such as DVD players and computers, and has indeed reduced the chances of being burgled. After all, is it really worth running the risk of breaking and entering someone’s house to steal a DVD player that costs £20? I think even the most desperate criminal would suggest not.

So far, so good – then the not so good news. Apparently the same criminals are now taking to mugging and other crimes against the person. So, another headline that could have been drawn equally validly would be ‘Why globalisation means you are more likely to be mugged.’ I’m used to the more tabloid end of the media doing such biased headlines from stories, but to be honest this BBC selection of headlines from the story was breathtaking in it’s bias.

The link headline at first glance looks like Globalisation good news; the conclusions being drawn from the story are only good news if you value a £20 DVD player as being more important than the physical and mental well being of someone being attacked in a personal mugging. is this what a BBC sub-editor truly believes, that in the name of Globalisation material goods are more important than the well being of a person?

Of course, this IS the point of view adopted by many apologists for globalisation – after all, the cheap goods and services offered by globalisation is usually afforded at the cost of poor and frequently unsafe working and living conditions in the developing world. To anyone unaware of what goes in to cheap goods, take a look at ‘No Logo’. There is no doubt that globalisation has, over the last 20 years, created the consumer friendly, consumption oriented world we live in; after all, in order for large scale multi-national corporates to thrive we have to be encouraged to keep buying the crap they produce, whether we need it or not. But we’re now beginning to see the wider cost of these cheap goods.

For most of this time the true cost of these goods and services has been hidden from us; unless you bothered to read books like No logo or study the reports of the impact of globalisation on local economies in other parts of the world, the only impact here in the UK was cheap stuff. The cost to people’s lifestyles in the rest of the world was hidden from us. But in this article, the research quoted has shown that there is now an emergent threat to our own lifestyles from globalisation – an increasing possibility of violent crime.

Not that you’d guess form that first BBC headline.

February 10, 2010
Social Search = global groupthink?

A few days ago I came acrossthis item in Google’s blog – looking at what they call ‘Social Search. This is a set of applications being developed by Google to allow image content that you and your social circle (as set up through your Google account) have posted on image sharing sites such as Flickr in searches returned by Google Images. So the idea is that you do a search on particular images using Google Images, and prominently featured in the results set would be images that your friends have posted up on these other sites. I assume that eventually this sort of thing will spread out to encompass other sites of user generated content – Facebook, MySpace, personal blogs, etc. Of course, this would require some cooperation between the companies running these sites and clearly there would be financial issues involved, but technically it’s not that difficult.

At first glance social search looks like a very cool concept. After all, we tend to ask our friends and colleagues for advice and guidance on where to buy things or find them online. We take their advice on what web sites are reliable, we are likely to at least look at films or books recommended by people who know our tastes, and so on. If it did become possible to pull together information about searches carried out by groups of friends, and include information posted or recommended by our friends in search results in a prioritised manner, then the results would probably be more immediately relevant to us, and would also be at least partially validated – rather than the results being the equivalent of a cold call, they’d be closer to a personal introduction.

However, it struck me that there’s a potential downside to this approach, especially the more integrated in to the overall search results the ‘personally linked’ social search results become. There is a phenomenon well known in management consultancy circles called ‘Groupthink’. It’s what happens when you get a group of people who’re closely linked in some way – members of the same close knit team or department, for example. What can happen during decision making and problem solving sessions is that the group may come to decisions based upon internal politics and ‘norms’, rather than objective facts that are presented to them. This effect has been seen to be responsible for poor decision making in a wide range of situations. It struck me that there is a good chance of this effect becoming evident in search results should the ‘Social Search’ really take off.

For example, if someone in a social grouping is particularly ‘active’ online then their comments and recommendations might turn out to have a larger impact than other folks who’re less active online but possibly more informed about issues. The overall effect would therefore to bias such social network search results towards the people with the largest online profile rather than those results that are possibly more accurate. Such individuals would thus become opinion leaders and formers in particular social groups, and advertisers could easily seek out these higher profile individuals to sell directly to them, working on the principle that they will sell to their circle of contacts either directly by recommendation or indirectly through the results of social search.

Slightly disturbing. Whilst influencing small groups of people it’s not the end of the world, but how long before we get a situation similar to that in the Phillip Dick short story ‘The Mold of Yancy’, where the behaviour of a whole civilisation was influenced by the tastes and preferences of one man? Far fetched? Perhaps not.

February 9, 2010
The Lost Boys of English football

I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge of football is minimal, and my interest in the game is not that great either. However, for the last couple of weeks it’s been incredibly difficult for anyone in the UK to avoid the story of John Terry, ex-England Captain, and his personal life off the soccer pitch. It seems to be an ongoing saga in the UK over the last decade or so – varying amounts of scandal and titillation around the private lives (often played out in public) of our leading soccer players, and how those issues affect their ability to play the game they get paid handsomely to do.

I’m not going to rehash the stories here; what triggered me to write this was overhearing an interview with Lizzie Cundy on the TV news, in which she referred to various soccer players as ‘boys’ – which immediately hit an old hot-button of mine about infantilisation in society, so here we are!

It really does concern me to hear of young men in their twenties and early thirties being referred to as boys (and also young women in the same age range being referred to as girls, for that matter). Apart form the patronising nature of referring to a man who earns over 100,000 a week, is a husband and a father, and holds line management responsibility in the same way that I was referred to when I was a snot-nosed kid of 8 years old trying to blow up the garden shed, there is a whole raft of cultural and behavioural issues tied up in that word ‘boy’ that is at the heart of the current fuss about the private lives of these men.

The problem is that when you refer to someone as a ‘boy’ it comes loaded with a load of cultural associations. And at the core is that little phrase ‘Boys will be boys’ – just how much of a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card is that phrase? So much of the behaviour of these people is probably predicated on the fact that they think that because ‘they’re one of the boys’ they’ll get away with all sorts of nonsense because that is what is expected. The problem is that we’re not dealing with lovable, tousle-haired little scamps who’ve kicked a football through the greenhouse window. We’re dealing with adults who, to be blunt, have responsibilities to family, team and country.

Their partners, managers, fans and more often than not large sections of the popular media support this attitude until situations like this involving the allegations around John terry arise; then we start the usual round of ‘It’s disgusting, it’s terrible, it’s shocking, etc.’ I heard a couple of Chelsea fans on the news saying that Terry shouldn’t have been fired because he was the best man for the job, etc. I expected this sort of partisan support, an was incredibly gratified that Capello was able to dismiss Terry in less than 15 minutes. Perhaps Capello is proving to be the stern, parental, father-figure to these ‘boys’ that they sorely seem to need.

In the Peter Pan stories, ‘The Lost Boys’ were Peter Pan’s gang – they literally were little boys that had been lost by their nannies. Like Peter, they never grew up. In the 1980s movie ‘The Lost Boys’, the strap-line on the film poster was ‘Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun being a vampire’. Party all night and never grow old seems to be the teenage dream still being lived by quite a few Premiership footballers.

Perhaps we need to start addressing our own ‘Lost Boys’ in soccer and encourage them to grow up a little. And the starting point is to refer to them as men, not boys.

February 6, 2010
Engagement, pandering, patronising or exploitation?

There is nothing new in the efforts to engage pupils at school by combining what is taught in lessons with what interests them in the outside world. In many respects it’s a good way forward – some years ago there were efforts to encourage reading in boys by basically getting them to read anything – comics, football reports, whatever – on the off-chance that they would then start reading books and improving their reading skills and general literacy. This project was geared around encouraging children to read material that interested them, in the hope of that material being a gateway to reading other things. It wasn’t focused on particular comics or films or ‘tie ins’ for example.

So far so good, but when does engagement become pandering? When does it become patronising – and, in some cases, is there an argument to be made for some aspects of this sort of outside world / education crossover actually being exploitative of children and teenagers? For example, developing lesson material like the one mentioned here might work very well with pupils for whom the ‘Twilight’ series is a major interest but would do absolutely nothing for others for whom it means nothing. I have to say that I’d also be concerned about the longevity of such material in terms of it maintaining it’s interest and relevance for future years of students. The last thing that a teacher will want is to either develop material that goes out of ‘favour’ with pupils so quickly that it needs to be revised each year. Maintaining ‘relevance’ is about keeping educational material valid and relevant in the wider world, not in the world of this month’s media hype.

There’s also an element of being patronising here – attempting to second guess what teenagers might be interested in is a dangerous occupation; it can easily fail and be regarded as patronising. Education is surely not about appearing ‘cool’ to the students; surely it’s more important to put ideas and concepts over in an understandable way, that is as far as possible relevant and contemporary so as to engage pupils, but not by jumping on to whatever bandwagon is passing?

As far as I can see, there are some topics taught that are, let’s say, eternal. They’re the basics; the stuff that’s been taught for as long as the subject has existed. In my experience this tends to be confined to the basics of reading, writing and numeracy. Things like the rules of grammar, basic arithmetic and counting, even, dare I say it, things like times-tables. The factual aspects of history and geography (without the interpretation) falls in to this category. Whether we like it or not, any attempt to ‘engage’ pupils with these topics is almost certainly going to be met with resignation or smirks from the class. Perhaps we need to actually get down to business here; the fact is that there are some things we need to learn to get on in life that are just hard work and need to be done. No point in trying to make it cool, or trendy; it just needs doing. best thing we can do is just get on with it.

Of course, it does benefit ‘content providers’ like film companies, computer games manufacturers, etc. to get in to the field of education in this way; it’s cheap marketing to a captive audience, after all. And it’s probably tax-deductible….

February 4, 2010
The next, next, next thing!
Hands up whoever has heard of the Red Queen’s Race? That was the athletic event in Wonderland where the participants had to run very hard to stay exactly where they were. I’m becoming convinced that we’re entering in to that sort of event in the online marketing and PR world – and probably beyond as well. And it worries me.

The article that sparked this off is here – nothing major, really, but it did get me thinking. Does anyone ever give any online or software technique any realistic time to show whether it can deliver the goods anymore? Or is it all a case of ‘MTV Attention Span’? Does everything have to prove itself within a 30 second elevator pitch? If something does the job, does it effectively and meets whatever targets are set for it, why do so many people jump ship as soon as the ‘next, next thing’ comes along?

There seems to be no scope today for a technique or technology to get time to prove itself. Of course, there are going to be some advances that are just so awesomely great that it’s obvious even to a relative techo-Luddite like me that they’re worth using immediately, but for other things, how can you know whether you can get more out of an upgrade when you probably haven’t even measured the value of your current process? If you’re using online tools like Facebook, Twitter, Search Engine Optimisation to market your business, then do you actually know how much business comes to your site via these various channels? Because if you don’t then simply changing techniques to fit with the current ‘fad’ is likely to be a waste of time; you simply don’t know whether the new tool is worse or better than the old one!

Impatience with results from all online marketing methods has always been an issue; people still seem to think that making quick money is posisble on the Internet; I’m afraid the only way to do that is probably to sell people on the Internet ‘Get Rich Quick’ schemes! But flicking from one technique to another and then to another without giving time for them to work or even knowing whether they ARE working is pointless.

So…my advice?

Well, bearing in mind that I am certainly NOT a marketing expert and not a millionaire, all I can say is apply good, sound, marketing techniques, such as:
1. Measure your traffic to your site or business before you start, using a metric that matters – whether that’s page impressions, money earned, downloads made, whatever suits your business.
2. Introduce new marketing channels in such a way that business from them is identifiable.
3. If your business is cyclical in any way, let new techniques run for at least a fair part of that cycle.
4. When you have your baseline, make changes to the channels one at a time and measure any effects based on those changes.
Just remember the old adage that you cannot manage what you can’t measure; just because the technology changes doesn’t mean that common sense approaches to marketing should change as well.
February 1, 2010
Is this a valid test of Social Media Newsgathering?

A few days ago I came across this news story, in which a group of French journalists are to be holed up in a farmhouse somewhere with no access to normal news media but with access to Social Media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. The idea is to see whether news can be effectively and accurately reported via Social media.

It’s an interesting idea, but, just like Celebrity Big Brother, one has to ask Is there a point?’ To start with, as has been pointed out by some commentators, by announcing it in this way it’s quite possible that people will try and game the system and attempt to get some totally ludicrous story in to the news programme that these reporters will be creating in their isolated time. And there’s the lack of ability to follow up alternate sources who aren’t on Twitter, no way of getting a gut feel from the rest of the media, etc. In the last week there was a particularly persistent rumour on Twitter that Johnny Depp had died, which indicated the ‘life of it’s own’ aspect that many rumours have, only this time it was spread incredibly quickly and virally across Twitter, hence reaching, in the words of the beer adverts, parts other rumours in the past could not reach. I have a gut feel that the items that interest the vast majority of people on Social Networks are unlikely to be the content of conventional ‘serious news’ outlets. More National Enquirer than National Interest, more Geek than GATT. I can see some areas of overlap – the major big stories like Haiti, for example.

On the other hand, if by chance the news reported by these reporters reflects to a greater or lesser degree the output of the conventional media, then it has an awful lot to say about the efficacy of the ‘citizen journalist’ in pumping out on to social media outlets news that is editorially similar to that which is reported by the mainstream.

A further possibility is that ‘hard’ news stories that don’t get conventionally reported but that do appear on social networks and web sites such as Indymedia might be picked up and run with. To me, this is the most interesting outcome of all, and if the reporters and their parent stations play the game with a straight bat it could give us all an intriguing insight in to the editorial policies of conventional media and how this form of newsgathering of crowdsourced stories might start showing more sides of conventional news stories than typically gets reported.

One thing that does concern me about this sort of approach, apart from validation and verification, is analysis. Everything is a scoop; the fast nature of Social Media means that the time taken to interpret and analyse what’s happening is time in which any number of other stories will zoom by. This is a pattern we’ve already seen in 24 hour rolling news; everything is reported quickly; the facts (or rumours) are reported with no sense of context. It’s like trying to get a picture of the strategic and political importance of a military engagement from a soldier who spent the whole battle in a foxhole pinned down by enemy fire. It’s a valid viewpoint in one way, but is not a method of reporting that produces truly informed citizens.

January 29, 2010
ACTA – Why is the Government not informing MPs about this Agreement?

Have you heard of ACTA? How about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement? No? Well, you’re probably not alone. After all, here in the UK the Government won’t even put documents regarding the Agreement in to the House of Commons Library. Of course, our New Labour defenders of freedom have lots of reasons for not doing this, most of them playing the ‘National Interest’ card, but one has to wonder whether that’s all there is to it.

To give you a little background, take a look at this brief outline of the provisions and process of ACTA. Like most things that trans-national bodies come up with, they sound bland and almost useful to start with but the Devil is, as always, buried in the details. And not buried deeply here. The Horns and the tip of Old Nick’s tail are definitely visible! Nominally, ACTA was put together to prevent counterfeiting and piracy of branded goods; immediately you can see that it’s beneficiaries are likely to be big corporations. Whilst you might immediately think of dodgy Guffi handbags on the flea-market, or pirated DVDs, it also extends to less obvious things like machine parts, electronic components, drugs, etc. In fact any copyrighted goods. So far, sort of so good – but it also throws in sections dealing with piracy across the Internet and other aspects related to what might loosely be described as ‘means of piracy’, which is where the fun starts.

This BBC item from last yearindicates some of the concerns. Some of the aggressive policies put forward last year against Internet pirates (or suspected pirates) here in the UK were almost certainly a product of ACTA, and the current Deep Packet Inspection trial by Virgin (whilst hitting a few legal issues) would no doubt warm the cockles of ACTA’s stony heart. ACTA will allow for a great deal more intrusive observation by ISPs, Governmental bodies and other interested parties of our Internet traffic, will support fairly swinging penalties and because it’s a very broad-based, international agreement will have the stench of globalisation about it. And it’s not just your Internet connection that’s of interest. If you take your computer across international borders – in principle, ANY form of digital storage – then ACTA would permit it to be searched. And this might easily include the SD cards in your camera, your Blackberry, your iPod.

Concerned yet? Lots of fuss has been made about the ‘three strikes and you’re off the Net’ laws being developed in a number of countries that are likely to be signatory to ACTA when it’s finally agreed and ratified. But that’s just the end of the process. ACTA is the issue of concern as it legalises nothing more than wholesale invasion of privacy by private companies in to our personal lives.

It’s not just the UK Government keeping this business sub-rosa. Here’s a Canadian take. Fortunately, some British MPs (bless ’em) are attempting to get an Early Day motion in place to raise the issue.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised; ACTA will benefit global business first and foremost – the acolytes of massive globalisation will love it. And such agreements are often used to bring in laws that individual Governments would probably lose power over if they tried to do it themselves. National sovereignty and local governance once more yields to the faceless centre.

Perhaps it’s time to act up on ACTA?

January 27, 2010
Facebook friends limited to 150 by the brain?

As anyone who’s ever heard me rant about the ‘numbers game’ side of networking – especially on sites such as Ecademy, Linked in or Facebook – will testify, I’m a great believer in quality rather than quantity, and until the software on such sites can do more for me than it currently does in terms of augmenting my memory and the cognitive abilities I apply when trying to remember ‘Is Fred interested in Mousterian Variability or is that Jill?’ then I use these sites to more conveniently keep in touch with roughly the same number of people I would via non computer based means.

So I was pleased today to read this item, suggesting that the brain has a top limit on how many people we can keep track of. It’s called Dunbar’s Number and is suggested by anthropologist Robin Dunbar to be about 150. It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s been realised for years that there are optimum sizes for small teams of between 6 and 10 people, which fits with the old military idea of the ‘Brotherhood of the table’ – the ideal size of a small, self contained, fighting unit being a section of about a dozen men. In such small teams personal loyalties develop and the team bonds quickly. Larger groupings are employed in companies, but few large companies now look to any ‘business unit’ as having more than a couple of hundred people in them, as management becomes impersonal and the whole unit becomes less effective.

I’ve held for many years, even before the advent of Internet social networking sites, that the quantity over quality brand of personal networking is more to do with train spotting, stamp-collecting or the MI5 Registry than it is to do with maintaining close and friendly business or social relationships. The numbers approach reduces everything to the level of transactions -‘What can ‘x’ do for me today?’, or ‘I need to know ‘z’, who can help me?’ Whilst this is indeed part of social relationships, the more is beautiful version of social networking makes it all there is to having a network, which is painfully sad.

The natural extension to this approach is what we’re seeing now; many ‘numbers based’ networking sites end up as platforms for the exchange of low-value ‘opportunities’ between people, which are rarely of value to the recipient. Spam may be too harsh a word, but what else can you call it? If you have a network of 2,000 people, then you’re much more likely to feel OK about ‘cold calling’ them all than you would if you had a more tightly defined network of respected confidantes, friends and valuable professional associates. Same on Twitter – it’s easy to spam 20,000 people with marketing messages in 140 characters because you simply cannot know them all. You’re working as a publisher. there’s nothing wrong with that but don’t fool yourself in to believing that your relationships with those 2,000 or 20,000 people are anything other than, in most cases, opportunities for you to push your message to them.

Of course, true relationships do develop from these large numbers of what I call ‘transactional friends’, but they enter in to the 150. The vast majority of these thousands of friends and followers seem, therefore, to be just stamps in a collector’s album.

I for one don’t want to be a collector!

January 26, 2010