By
Tunde Cockshott, on October 27th, 2009
This study by Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy looks at the effect of the digital revolution on the geographical distribution of our social networks.
They studied 100,000 Facebook and email users and mapped the volume of communication against geographic distance. It turns out that we predominantly use these digital tools to talk to our geographically close friends.
By
Tunde Cockshott, on June 16th, 2009
Whenever Facebook amends or "improves" an aspect of its layout, functions or UI there is a huge debate about the value, effectiveness and need for the change. Part of this stems from the member’s sense of ownership and a feeling of affront at changes to which they were not consulted or given prior warning of. They feel they "are" Facebook and as such have a right to debate, protest and sometimes insist on revisions back to previous incarnations.
But is there more to Facebook’s desire to improve the service?
If Facebook change something or introduce a new way of doing an already existing task it will introduce ambiguity and novelty which some users may find confusing or difficult to use. When this happens we like to talk about it, both to try and make sense of the changes, to find out how the new system works, and to complain about the fact
Continue reading Does Facebook Make Controversial Changes Deliberately
By
Tunde Cockshott, on June 12th, 2009
As dataportability.org describe it: "Data portability enables a borderless experience, where people can move easily between network services, reusing data they provide while controlling their privacy and respecting the privacy of others." Simple video explaining the problem and potential benefits.
DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo.
The three elements are connect, control, share, remix. While I agree with the first three, I think the idea that one social graph can be transported to another site is wrong. I would not want to mix my Linkedin social graph with my Facebook graph. So for me assuming they can solve the first three elements the crucial one will be how you control and remix the elements of your social data.
