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| | The Social Networking Newbies Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | Letter from the Past - 2006 | Views: 570 | | Nov 23, 2009 12:41 pm | | Letter from the Past - 2006 | # | 
John Stephen Veitch | | Michael T. Zimmer, in 2006 gave me a link to the 2006 version of this page. (No point in giving you the original link.) Danah Boyd, is one of the leading academics studying the use of social networking sites.
http://www.danah.org/SNSResearch.html
From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org
On Behalf Of John Veitch
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 5:19 AM
To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Social networks research (was Definitions)
Thank you Michael for the link above, and thank you Danah Boyd for the effort in putting together the list of research work being done.
For an old guy like me this is unsettling. If people want to do research work on a network, places like Ryze, Ecademy, OpenBC and LinkedIn are stable, and have a long track record of people being active with continuous memberships. You can quite easily track the posts of individuals over several years on Ryze, Ecademy and OpenBC.
Thank you all for the hint. I've just joined Facebook. Apparently that's where the action is. However the way Facebook is set up it's going to very difficult to get any groups running where useful conversations can happen. I need to do a lot more exploring there. Anyone with any hint's might send me private mail.
I'm also a member of MySpace. That's a site where people who have serious purposes have actually built some very interesting pages. I've been spammed with porn since joining MySpace. That could never happen of the four networks I first mentioned. The mixture of people with their first experimental web sites, people trying to sell something and people who want to communicate and converse on MySpace is intensely interesting.
Here is a link to a letter I wrote on Ryze about the observed changes in people there.
http://www.ryze.com/posttopic.php?topicid=738706&confid=1031
However the most interesting thing about these networks to me, is the failure of most of the people who join to do ANYTHING at all. As I said in a previous letter, my own small survey indicated that most people never join any networks or groups. Of those who do, (I use Ryze as an example) +50% of people achieve in one year what the best 10% achieve in one week. The failure rate, often referred to as the long tail is at least 80% of all members. After that depending on your criteria there is some success but only obvious and sometimes spectacular success in the top 6% or so.
You can see the same pattern everywhere.
I imagined that once people got online, that they would soon learn about the internet and that they would develop both knowledge and skills at their own pace to become self educating. A tiny number do. That's probably true of everyone here.
But the vast majority of people don't get it. For me the clue was spam. The average person in my group hardly ever, and sometimes has NEVER seen any spam. (3 years ago I was getting 100 plus a day.) One man who had been on the Internet for 5 years asked, "What's this spam, people talk about?" In 5 years he had exchanged mail with less than 30 people.
I found the video's on YouTube by searching for "OWD" very interesting. As a market researcher I can tell that the sample was not a random sample. The two people who were much like some of the people I've interviewed were remarkable for what they didn't say. The questions asked expected them to have knowledge (biased), and they tried to
oblige. The assumptions behind the questions didn't expose their real behaviour.
Choose some people at random. You'll only need 5 or 10 to see the picture. Don't say or ask anything, just watch what they do at their own computers in the beginning. Then ask what else they regularly do?
Finally do some counting, emails a day, is the email personal of list mail or spam, look at the history file on the browser. How much activity is there? People say "Gee the Internet is great!" But when you look at what they really do, almost nothing, you'll see why there's such a long tail of failure on the social networking sites. The hype and the facts don't match.
Researchers are so keen to demonstrate "success" that they set up the research so the failure is masked. Of course the easiest way to do that is to start with a biased sample.
Regards
John
John Stephen Veitch; The Network Ambassador
Open Future Limited - http://www.openfuture.co.nz/
Innovation Network - http://veech-network.ryze.com/
Building an Open Future - http://openfuture-network.ryze.com/Private Reply to John Stephen Veitch | | |
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