Start with the problem, not with the data
Share data to get data
Align interests of all parties
Make it trivially easy for people to contribute, connect, collaborate 
Base the equation of your business on customer centric metrics 
Decompose the business into its “atoms”
Let people do what people are good at, and computers what computers are good at 
Thou shalt not blame technology for barriers of institutions and society

In today’s increasingly digitized world, we are creating data in unprecedented ways. Ubiquitous and conspicuous social and mobile connections have empowered social consumers to broadcast their locations, opinions, thoughts and emotions to the world in real-time with nothing more than a few clicks, many times a day, on multiple platforms.

The omnipresence of this data is changing the relationships between individuals, as well as between businesses and their customers. However, most companies are not well positioned to take advantage of this Social Data Revolution (wikipedia). While new market research tools allow us to observe differently how consumers make their decisions, the fundamental shift is that consumers now make their decisions differently. Today’s social consumers are weaved together in the social fabric of social data for their purchasing and lifestyle choice. How prepared is your company to participate and take advantage of this shift?

Traditional enterprises face numerous challenges: views on privacy focused on the legal department rather than on the customer, traditional approaches to decision making, legacy operations and metrics, and anachronistic data strategies, if at all.

They are threatened by companies that understand the power of social data, building a measurement-focused culture and customer-centric data strategy. Amazon started this approach in the 90′s – product reviews have helped customers with billions of decisions. Netflix forecasts demand and optimizes operations based on the data its customers create.

For incumbents open to change, the data their existing customers socialize are both a threat and an opportunity. What do large firms need to do to navigate this rapidly evolving field of social data?

In the heart of Silicon Valley, next to Facebook, the world’s largest social data factory, the Social Data Lab aims to address this question. Directed by Dr. Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, it helps companies understand the irreversible impact the Social Data Revolution has on individuals, business, and society.

The Lab’s Aldo Briano and Tim Holley, graduate students in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, developed the Social Data Intelligence Test. The test assesses how an organization tracks, analyzes, and acts on social data, information that consumers knowingly and willingly share. Completing it takes about 20 minutes. It is designed to encourage executives to think critically about their current practices and to reevaluate existing assumptions.

Scores are represented across four dimensions: Product, Organization, Customer-Centricity, and Company Reputation. They benchmark a company’s competencies and highlight opportunities for improvement, creating a starting point for a strategic realignment in this new era of social consumers.

The Social Data Intelligence Test is available online at socialdatalab.com/intelligence. Please take it and let us know what you think!

Aldo Briano, Tim Holley, Asha Gupta, and Léo Grimaldi are graduate students in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. Ron Chung. Gabriela Maford and Hin Leung and contributed to this article.
Dr. Andreas Weigend (@aweigend) teaches the course The Social Data Revolution: Data mining and e-commerce at Stanford, directs the Social Data Lab, and was Amazon’s Chief Scientist.

In 1993, The New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner of two dogs at a computer that became an instant classic, tacked up on bulletin boards everywhere.  The caption: “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

A recent survey of a group of 98 tech-savvy Stanford students shows that the world Steiner depicted may be behind us.  Asked about how they behave—or would behave—in a variety of situations online, students painted a picture that looked surprisingly like real life.

“Talking online is like talking in public,” summarized one student in the class.

That’s a huge shift from the thinking of a generation ago, when the internet was largely seen as an anonymous frontier—a place where alter egos thrived and people could escape the constraining shackles of real-world social pressures and norms.

Why the change?  Certainly, the increasing ubiquity of online social networks and their role in bringing people’s “true” identities to the internet has been instrumental.  As services such as Facebook and LinkedIn bring real life social networks to the digital realm, it appears that reputation, social capital, and many of the other constructs that govern our real life behavior are coming with it.  As one student readily admitted, “I am extremely conscious of my online social image.”

Indeed, in a world where anything that you put online can be tied back to your identity and seen by others—in particular those you know—you might think twice before chiming in.  In fact, many students felt that these traditional social pressures were even stronger online than in real life.

“Everything online can be tracked and measured,” noted one Management Science & Engineering graduate student.  “If you make unfair, disparaging remarks anywhere, this history could be attached to your persistent online identity.  In some ways, you can be more anonymous offline than online.”

“For me, spoken words are taken away with air,” said another student, “but written words stay forever.”

So why not just remain anonymous?  Increasingly in today’s online world, it seems that in order to be heard, one must also be seen.  As one student pointed out, if you remain anonymous online, you won’t be taken seriously.

“Having the anonymity of the computer is a nice luxury, but I think my opinion won’t hold as much credibility,” she said.

Many companies have recognized the self-enforcing power of these social dynamics.  Amazon.com—which has been at the vanguard of the social data revolution—long ago started publishing the real names of its customers alongside their reviews.  Quora, a leading social question-and-answer service, relies even more heavily on identity and reputation to keep the quality of its users’ contributions high.  And with an ever-growing number of online services leveraging Facebook Connect, the notion of a single, persistent identity that travels with you across the web is not far off.  Those who choose to remain anonymous will likely be pushed increasingly to the fringes of online society.

Changing norms and expectations about privacy in the digital age have only reinforced these pressures.  While online privacy was a core concern for many students, most surveyed also recognized the reality that any information they chose to share online was essentially public, as it could be relatively easily found by anyone who wanted it badly enough.

“I think there’s a general misconception that what you put on the internet won’t be found,” said one student.  “What people need to realize is that no matter what you blog, upload, tweet, etc., you’re responsible for it and it should be something you would be happy to stand behind.”

Watching what you say (and share) is not the only real world phenomenon beginning to permeate the online world.  If these Stanford students have anything to say about it, a fundamental shift will also be taking place in people’s purchase decision-making—toward something that looks a lot more like how people shopped before the internet came around.

It was the internet that spawned crowd-sourced reviews and enabled the wisdom of the masses to inform which products and services we should buy.  New restaurant you’ve been thinking about trying?  Let’s see how many stars it has on Yelp first.  Less than four, you say?  In that case I might only go if a Groupon comes out for it.

Prior to having this data at your fingertips, you had to rely much more on friends’ recommendations to make buying decisions.  And while this fundamental change in behavior isn’t going away, the irony is that online social networks are starting to actually bring us “back to the future”: the clear consensus among the students is that the social data they will leverage in the future will be sourced less from generic public opinion, and much more from their trusted networks of friends.

As one student summarized it, purchasing decisions will be based on “information from people I trust who own the products I want to buy.”

“I will take advantage of social data by taking into account which of my peers have purchased from which retailers or brands,” said another student.  “I could also post my own questions on social network sites to seek more targeted and personal responses.”

There is a clear expectation that with this social overlay will come customization in every facet of the shopping experience, drawn not just from data on an individual’s habits (as Amazon does today), but also from those closest to them.

“There will be an app that recognizes my tastes (based on my profile and behavior) and will match it with those of people who I trust (friends who have recommended things in the past and on which I acted positively),” predicted one student.  “The app will know what stage of my life I am at, and will be able to predict what I have and do not have (based on my online consumption behavior and general online queries).  Therefore the app will suggest the products that I will want to (and be able to) purchase, cross-referencing them with suggestions/reviews from my friends (or other people who have a similar profile to mine).”

What can a survey of a group of computer science, engineering, and business school students at the epicenter of online innovation tell you about online behavior?

It won’t tell you what a grandmother in Urumqi is doing right now.  But it may very well tell you what her grandkids will be doing next year.

Jason Lee and Sameh El Amawy are currently MBA students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Evelyn Larrubia is a national award winning investigative reporter and editor from Los Angeles who is spending a year as a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford.  Michael Marcotte is also a Knight Journalism Fellow.

“What are other online services [besides Facebook and Twitter] where you frequently share things?”

“What is the most useful app/site/software/etc that you discovered in the last year that you think most people don’t know about but should?”

“What is the coolest startup you know that you think [Prof. Weigend doesn't] know yet?”

The reception in Beijing will be on Sunday 12 Sep from 4pm to 7pm at 798 Art District. We already have some great participants to celebrate the launch decision. Please email me if you are interested in attending.

Invitation (pdf)

How the Social Data Revolution Changes (almost) Everything

Why do people share, what do people share?
And how does this influence their behavior?

Speaker: Andreas Weigend (@aweigend)
Location: One South Van Ness, 2nd Floor Atrium
Date: Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Time: The speech begins at 4pm, and is followed by a reception at 5pm, sponsored by Open-First.

youtube.com/socialdatarevolution
facebook.com/socialdatarevolution
wikipedia.org/wiki/social_data_revolution

Andreas Weigend studies people and the data they create and share. He works with companies that are eager to develop strategies to realize the untapped power of data, including Alibaba, Best Buy, Lufthansa, Nokia, and Thomson Reuters, and fun startups including San Francisco-based MrTweet.com and Skout.com (Boy Ahoy).  Previously, as the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, he helped build the customer-centric, measurement-focused culture central to Amazon’s success. As a partner with San Francisco-based Open-First, he helps organizations absorb a set of insights based on data, mobile and social technologies.

Andreas teaches at Stanford and shares his insights at top conferences, such as the World Innovation Forum. He received his PhD from Stanford in physics, and lives in San Francisco, Shanghai, on weigend.com, and on Facebook.

Here are a few related press mentions (Summer 2010):

• Fast Company: Who are the New Influencers?
• London Evening Standard: Are these Online Nobodies the New Somebodies?
• NPR Marketplace: Data Mining Pushes Marketing to a New Level
• Minnesota Public Radio: Privacy… Just a Blip in History? and How Recommendations Now Use Entirely New Data Types e.g., Gotta Hunch?.

Shanghai, China. Quite early, 3:30am local time. (Or maybe very late? Actually just only barely back to my condo from a relaxing foot massage.) My US mobile rings. Austin Carr calling  from New York. Austin Carr? Sounds like a superposition of two friends, Austin Ku who took me to see CHINGLISH by David Henry Hwang in New York last month, and Jeremy Carr, my Stanford TA who kept the class in shape last quarter. But we right away started having a fascinating conversation… which made it into Fast Company very fast (and served as starting point for a great article Are these Nobodies the New Somebodies? with the London-based Evening Standard)! Here you go:

Amazon’s Former Chief Scientist on Influence, Twitter’s Fake Audience, and iPad Sex Appeal

by AUSTIN CARR Wed Jul 14, 2010

Andreas Weigend knows how to influence people. As the former chief scientist at Amazon, Weigend helped implement a series of ingenious tools to help customers “make better decisions,” from recommended purchases and one-click checkouts, to wish lists and book-interest sharing. With our recent launch of the Influence Project, we spoke with Weigend about what “influence” means on the Web. Weigend, a professor at Stanford, approached the subject philosophically, picking apart the complicated concept of influence by each attribute and nuance.

Austin Carr: Does influence exist online, and if so, who has it?

Andreas Weigend: Let’s unpack this. When we talk about this, we have to figure out what it is we want to measure. This isn’t about “influence” in the abstract, but influencing behavior. What does an influencer do? An influencer changes behavior, garners attention, and helps people make better decisions. One dimension of this is active versus passive. Active relates to push, and passive to pull. Here’s what I mean by this. Typically, when we talk about influencers, these are very much “push” people, who spread their meaning into the world, and then the world dives back, changing its behavior. There is a very strong connotation of having a presence, of “pushing” outward, rather than being passive, with a reputation.

Here, the concept of reputation is worth disentangling from influence. You might have a great reputation when it comes to finding Chinese restaurants in New York City, but a lousy reputation when it comes to recommending doctors in Shanghai. Is this true for influence, or is influence a global variable? Do you have influence in different areas, but not in other areas? If I want to find a doctor in Shanghai, I’m not going to an influencer. I’m going to go to an expert. But are influencers and experts a dichotomy?

Take a professor of partial differential equations. He probably isn’t an influencer, if you picture your gray-haired mathematics professor, who mumbles facing the blackboard. But he is an expert in his field.

Could you give me some examples of influencers?

Malcolm Gladwell, I think, is a great influencer, and he can do anything: this topic this year, and another topic next year. So maybe influencers can be experts, but the influencers have to reach the bulk of the distribution, as opposed to the head of the distribution. Another influencer is Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, who I’m speaking with at the Geo-Loco Conference next week. Of course, he’s an influencer, and an expert too.

At the World Innovation Forum recently, you spoke about social media having an “illusion” of an audience. Could you elaborate on this concept?

For me, the “illusion” of the audience means: Why do people tweet? What is the driver of them spending time doing this? I think it’s because they think they have people giving them attention, and they do everything to play with that attention. The reason Twitter works so well is that they don’t have a feedback-loop, where people can realize just how little attention they’re getting. I’m not saying the system was set up that way deliberately, but it’s a very well setup system. People can fool themselves into believing that others are listening, which is not easy in real life. When you’re talking to other people on the street and nobody is listening, after a while you sort of have to stop talking. Not so on Twitter.

Businesses today are trying to capitalize on social media. Companies more and more want Facebook fans and Twitter followers, but what kind of impact does that have? How influential can they be?

We have grown up in our pseudo-scientific society to run after numbers whenever they are present, whether they make a difference or not. Megapixel! As if the number of megapixels matter to where we are right now. In this world, we don’t know what it means to have even 100 friends, let alone one thousand. All that we’re left with is this fixation on numbers.

So if you define the metrics, then you own the space. If maximizing the number of followers you have is what you want, then okay, you can do that.

Does that have an affect?

It’s a poor metric; it doesn’t really measure how the behavior of individuals actually changes.

What company do you feel has created the best social media strategy? Which company is most influential?

I think you know the answer: Apple. But it doesn’t really have much to do with social media strategy. In terms of influence, I don’t know any other company that does it better than Apple.

What advice do you have for other companies that are trying to gain influence on the Web?

The ultimate answer is: build good products and have good service. My belief is that you will always be more influential if you have a product that people will like. Ultimately it really is about attention. Think about Apple! If you’re running around with the latest iPad, which by the way you can get for a third of the price here in China and they are the same, then, well, I would say, you get laid more! But it really boils down to attention. Influence is the ability to garner attention; or, from the other side, you are influenced by people who you think will increase the possibility of getting you attention.

Read more about The Influence Project, or join in the experiment.

Done? Not yet! Austin was curious about what Stanford students see as the differences between Twitter and Facebook, Poll: Facebook Has More Real Friends Than Twitter as well as what they would do if Facebook shut down tomorrow. Study: OMG, Facebook’s Ending Tomorrow! What Do You Do?

But luckily Facebook Connect is still up: Please share your thoughts as comment below. Thanks!

1. Play or download the mp3 of the speech,

2. Leave your comments on the slides and see the annotations of others,

3. Leave your comments on the transcript and see the annotations of others, and

It was exciting to be part of the World Innovation Forum, an event packed with insights and a turnout of more than 800 thought leaders and a fantastic line-up of speakers. I had great company on stage, speaking between Chip Heath (who I went to grad school with) and Biz Stone (who co-founded Twitter).

I have put up the audio of my talk [mp3, 35 min, 32MB], the transcript [pdf | docx], and the slides [pdf | pptx]. And in terms of press commentary, check out what The Huffington Post, FastCompany, HSM, OnInnovation, and Steve Todd write about it, and please add your own thoughts via the comment box at the bottom of this post.

I am fortunate to present the insights on WIF2010 and the Social Data Revolution by two guest writers: Noah Burbank, a student in Stanford’s Social Data Revolution class this Spring, and Ted Shelton, the CEO of Open-First. And, as always, please do tell us what you think by leaving a comment below. Thanks!

WTF is WIF??

by Noah Burbank

This last week I won an essay contest. The first prize was a trip to New York and pass to the World Innovation Forum (WIF). I had only one question when I got the congratulations email: WTF is WIF? It would be easy to be cynical about WIF. Why do people come to these things? Does each employee that you send to the conference really come back $1,699 more innovative, not to mention travel costs and lost work? But after two full days in my ill-fitting suit with ill-matching and equally ill-fitting shoes, I think I figured it out. Don’t expect your insurance company to transform into a new and shiny machine when the innovation delegation returns to the office. But if you take a broader view about shaping corporate culture and increasing mindfulness, then it’s hard to say this wasn’t a bargain. Those looking for answers probably went home disappointed, those looking for questions came returned much richer.

There were three kinds of information offered at WIF: histories of innovations, broad paradigms of thought, and new and actionable frontiers for future innovation. The histories inspire hope for future innovations, like Michael Porter’s story about the Western German Migraine Center, which coupled integrated, life-cycle migraine treatment with high-volume specialization to dramatically increase outcomes at a reduced cost. The broad paradigms of thought, like Chip Heath’s elephant and rider metaphor about how motivation is both emotional and rational, provided a common language with which to frame problems. While this is all good and well, without giving some hint about where future innovations can come from, it’s somewhat like giving a captain a compass and sextant but no maps: he can head north and keep a steady course, but he doesn’t really have any reason to go in any one direction rather than another. It was in this third area that Andreas excelled. Blazing very quickly through a number of exciting and complicated themes, Andreas gave the audience something to do.

Having taken a class with Andreas, I already knew a number of the tricks up his sleeve, but more importantly, I knew about what his goal when he speaks. He wants to discuss his thoughts and opinions about culture and technology (the zeitgeist, to use his native German), but he also wants to give people the first actionable steps to participate in the social data revolution. We all understand that the Internet is full of information, but until I actually started writing Python scripts and trying to use that information, I didn’t really understand. Similarly, while everybody can nod their heads along with Andreas about the transition from e-business to me-business to we-business, until you actually start seeing the data, you’re not seeing the whole picture. Not unlike in his class, Andreas gave the WIF audience four concrete homework that anybody could implement:

1. Put a plus sign (+) after a bit.ly link
If you put a plus sign (+) after a bit.ly link, suddenly you’re seeing all of this information about how many times the link was clicked and when. Just seeing the information makes you start asking questions, for example with the link Andreas used, http://bit.ly/16Zidx+, you notice that all 5,630 clicks occurred on the same day, the day the email was sent out. This tells you about the distribution channels. How about Twitter embeddings – who decided to repost this link? The right questions only appear when you’ve gotten your hands dirty and seen some of the data.

2. Ask for the last 1,000 queries entered on your website
Andreas talks about the voyeuristic pleasure of having everybody tell you their darkest secrets – but this is precisely what people enter into their search queries. Go to your IT person and ask for the logs of the last 1,000 queries on your website. Do you notice trends? Are there keywords that you’re not using which people tend toward naturally? Does something odd stand out? Are your competitors being searched on your site?

3. Engage with an individual on twitter who has been following your company or a competitor company
Is someone lamenting about the bad service of your company over twitter? Or, even better, your competitor? Reach out to people who are complaining about your company and assist them to make their experience better. And if they are complaining about your competitors, offer them solutions right when they need it!

4. Reverse mentoring
Does your company know what the latest social trends among the younger generation are? How do the twenty-five year olds spend their time, how do they communicate and think? A great way to find out is by hanging out with them, and learn from them! Get to know your youthful interns, learn about their friends and social lives to gain insights.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to participate in the WIF, and I think that I’ve come away smarter for it. Not smarter in the concrete, now-I-can-do-linear-algebra-but-before-I-couldn’t sense, but smarter for having spent two days thinking about how people have asked fruitful questions in the past, how to frame my questions for the present, and where to find the new questions for the future.

Results of the Open-First Survey at WIF 2010

by Ted Shelton

Speaking at last week’s World Innovation Forum in New York, Dr. Andreas Weigend outlined what the social data revolution is about and how these tools, methods, and data can contribute to innovation. In a survey completed by over 100 of the attendees after the talk, we had the opportunity to sample a cross-section of current thinking on data and innovation, with some expected and some surprising results.

The survey asked attendees three questions, what they felt was most interesting in the material that Dr. Weigend presented, how these ideas might be applied in their own companies, and what barriers they anticipated encountering in trying to implement these ideas.

Most attendees focused on the core tenant of the social data revolution: that people are willing to share information, indeed that Internet services we use every day are creating enormous pools of data. And that they are easily and inexpensively accessible and, if used properly, that they may be of enormous value to the enterprise. As one attendee put it, “you have opened my eyes widely to data and our digital air!”

While innovation was the primary topic of the conference and the talk, the importance of engagement with customers was another strong theme of the talk and one that was emphasized by many survey respondents. People’s willingness to share data is in part a function of the relationship that the company forges with them. And the balance of power in what Dr. Weigend calls “WE-business” is clearly shifting in favor of the consumer. One attendee put it this way, “…consumers have more power and control over companies than the companies themselves.”

A few clear action items came out of this talk for attendees. Armed with knowledge that vast amounts of valuable information are just a few keystrokes away, the majority of those surveyed stated that they intended to immediately look at how their companies collect, share, and use data in their innovation practices. One particular recommendation frequently cited was the suggestion to examine a company’s web logs in order to determine what search terms visitors are using both to arrive at the company’s site and, once there, what they are hoping to find.

One of Dr. Weigend’s messages that clearly stood out for attendees was that small steps could be taken quickly and inexpensively, and could be used to demonstrate value to the organization before larger investments had to be made. Showing the http://bit.ly site and examples of social networking and viewpoint services gave attendees a set of clear starting points for their own investigation (a full list of sites shown during Dr. Weigend’s talk is listed at the bottom of this article).

Nonetheless, one of the most frequently cited barriers to getting started was a lack of resources, particularly money. This was overshadowed though by the enormous number of comments on how difficult it can be to get an organization to do something new, summed up by one attendee with the simple comment, “change is hard.” For innovators this is, of course, the recurring deep challenge we have in every organization and the perceived barrier of limited resources or perception of exposure to risk are often protective coloring for an organization that is resistant to change. Numerous comments to this point were made:

“Culturally we still have people who protect data rather than share.”

“We are still operating in the old cathedral-like style of consumer management”

“The ideas can be seen as scare and out of the realm of control.”

Overall, however, World Innovation Forum attendees participating in this survey were optimistic that small scale experiments can be done that help the organization recognize the benefits of the social data revolution, and begin to accept the changes that it brings. As one participant noted “We need to make the case of why sharing opens us up more as a company and provides us with greater opportunities.”

Ideas abounded on how to start these experiments. A number of people noted that a great way to start is with one local branch or group that may be more forward thinking. Another noted that listening in the hallways and the lunchrooms to the company’s own employees could provide a simple small scale example of the power of social data. And utilizing online tools to gather customer feedback that is already available is another example given of how an organization can inexpensively show how social data can change how we think and work.

List of tools, social networking, and viewpoint sites discussed in Dr. Weigend’s speech:

Foursquare.com – geolocation check-in
bit.ly – URL shortener
Oakland Crimespotting – geolocation crime mapping
DataSF – open data for San Francisco
Bigapps – open data for New York
Fitbit – feedback data for behavioral change
Levi’s – sharing opinions via Facebook’s “Like” button
Groupon.com – collective buying power
Nike running – feedback data for behavioral change
Nokia Betalabs – concurrent engineering with consumers
My Starbucks Idea – product design with consumer input
Threadless.com – product design with consumer input
Stack Overflow – QnA with feedback and review system
Flatseats.com – airlines’ seats reviews
SeatGuru.com – airlines’ seats reviews
Tripkick.com – Hotel rooms reviews

Please post before Thursday noon as comment below or on facebook.com/socialdatarevolution one question you would like her to address. Be bold! Questions are at least as important as answers.

To come up with a question that has a good chance to be selected, just search the web for some good video interviews with Esther related to our topic (e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lheZeSoDgTA ), and/or some relevant posts (e.g, http://www.project-syndicate.org/series/net_world/description) , and/or listen to the mp3 of a conversation on Digital Exhibitionism two years ago.

Curious about the best response to the question from IDEAS PROJECT last week?

1. Ron Chung won the prize for the “best answer”.

Here is what Ron said about a “friend” in the era of the social data revolution:

There are two types of ‘friends’, (i) real ‘close-to-heart’ personal friendships, and (ii) online social friendships.

(i) In real personal friendships you more carefully screen and maintain that relationships.  In these situations, you provide more physical and emotional attention compared to online relationships.

(ii) Online social friendships form to maintain touchpoints with people we interact with (sort of like a large addressbook). In the context of consumer internet and social networks/media, an online ‘friend’ is someone you form a weak connection through some form of engagement. This engagement can occur through real world meeting or simply an online exchange (e.g. blog comments, Twitter message, etc).

Also, in these online friendships, there is ambiguity around bilateral versus unilateral ‘friendships’.  For example, Twitter uses ‘followers’ & Facebook uses ‘fans’ to represent unidirection relationships and Facebook uses ‘friends’ to denote bilateral friendships.  However, some Facebook ‘friendships’ are not truly bilateral. They are simply ways for one side to collect ‘friends’ for the sake of amassing a large audience. All of this points to a desire for people maintain touchpoints with people through online medium should they ever want to re-engage them.

In the end, online social friendships give us ambient awareness of what is going on with people, giving us a type of “reality-TV news” channel.

2. A few thoughts by Andreas Weigend:

Daphna Oyserman suggested:

• Someone whose happiness makes me happy and with whom I feel eager to share my own happiness (knowing that the feeling is mutual).

My favorite one-liner came from Jason Wei in my Stanford class:

• Someone I’m comfortable being myself with.

My own points (to the degree anyone can have their own points after reading through hundreds of responses) would be, that a friend to me is:

• Someone whose eyes I want to see the world through.
• Someone who can make me laugh until tears run down my cheeks.
• Someone who brings the best out of me, accepting me the way I am (or want to be).
• Someone who manages to pull me out of a (real or imagined) bad situation.

Please use the comment box below for your comments. Thanks!

3. Finally, Chuanyang Chee shares his insights on the longer SDR survey.

This survey on the Social Data Revolution was developed by Chuanyang and Andreas and taken by Spring 2010 students at Stanford’s The Social Data Revolution, and Tsinghua’s The Digital Networked Economy.

Finding that long-lost best friend from elementary school has become trivial ever since Facebook hit a total subscription of 400 million active users. But having not kept in touch for a couple of years or decades, what is the point of connecting now? Does he even still consider me a friend? Remember me?

The meaning of friendship, as most respondents to a survey revealed, often include descriptions such as caring for each other, trust, sharing personal information and thoughts, and mutual helping. Many of us have more friends than our attention can handle. On average, a survey respondent has 474 friends on Facebook. After a certain society catches the “Facebook fever”, a large proportion of each user’s social circle can be found on it. In the survey, the respondents were asked to come up with an analogy for Facebook and almost 15% of the responses compared Facebook to high school or a year book. Many felt like they were being constantly watched and judged for the things they do on Facebook. One interesting response even compared Facebook to an “online version of society”. To a certain extent, Facebook IS like a society because of the flexibility and scalability that it offers. Fluid like a society, Facebook allows members to join or leave altogether, create and share, hide in a corner and watch, and form groups and networks among willing parties. The versatility of how Facebook can be used also explains why the respondents find Facebook to be less personal than Instant Messaging and email but less public than twitter and blogs.

Facebook has made real-time connectivity (through notifications) possible for the users and it has the key features of IM, email, twitter and blogs. Users can choose to give third-party applications permission to access their information in return for some benefits such as access to games or using the application to find friends near them (geo-location). All these contribute to the surface reason for why people are attracted to Facebook. Going beneath the technological capabilities’ appeal, we need to understand why friends play such a big role in the success of Facebook.

In the survey, respondents were asked what they would do if Facebook was going to shut down in two days and all data would be destroyed. Most of them chose to download photos shared with and shared by others and record down contact information of their friends. Generally, we don’t like to lose the feeling of being connected with others and shared experiences that we have with our friends, regardless of whether we are close to them or not.

Friends are like social mirrors, we use them to know our inner self. We like to hang out with people who are similar to us so that we can know our “self” better. Without our friends, we can’t share things, we can’t form collective memories of what we experienced together, and we certainly can’t receive help when we need it. As Facebook gradually transforms into an online society, the friendship network becomes the glue to keep users from leaving; especially for users with a long friends list. Therefore an efficient way to manage these friendships gradually becomes more important. Unfortunately, Facebook does not seem to prioritize our 1047 friends the same way we would in real-life by collecting and analyzing relevant data.

The process which can be used to categorize our friends is generally observable through our behavior and the explicit information which we share. For close relationships, we tend to have more memorable shared experiences, allow them to see more personal information and would be more willing to help them. We simply form more connections by talking about them, posting and taking photos of them.

The earlier versions of Facebook allowed users to fill in information on how they are related to friends that they add. That was interesting data which could be used to analyze the closeness of a relationship. By collecting such data, Facebook can create different web-like networks to represent and understand each user’s relationship with his or her friends. Friends can be represented with simple nodes and the strength of relationship represented by the length of the links between the nodes. Relevant data collected can be used to adjust the length of the links between the each user’s node and the friend’s node. The physically closer two nodes are to each other, the stronger their relationship is. This is akin to the cognitive associative model in organizing semantic memory where strong associations are formed when two nodes are often activated simultaneously. When two friends update relationship details about themselves, tag photos with both of them in it, chat daily on IM, regularly messages each other and click on each others’ shared items, they generate clues to the strength of their relationship.
When such data are amassed, clusters of friendships would appear and being able to identify such clusters might be valuable for businesses. Instead of advertising indiscriminately to the different friendship clusters, businesses can target the “ring leader” of each cluster and focus their resources on getting the leader to participate in try-outs for certain idea or product. By the block-leader approach, the clusters may then be subsequently influenced through word of mouth.

Presently, Facebook allows us to manage our friends by manually grouping them into certain categories. But if Facebook does not want to be replaced by a new social media network, then the improved version will need to take data collection and analysis into the next level by tracking individuals’ online social behavior. By doing so, Facebook can play a part in managing the relationships by recognising relevant updates, notifications and recommendations coming from each individual user using some algorithm. However, we should not solely focus on strong relationships and forsake the weak ones. This is because Granovetter’s notion of the strength of weak ties suggests that we benefit from having not-so-close friends from different social circles. So what we need is to use technology to manage our network of friendships more efficiently such that we can readily distinguish the friends who will be recommending us our next job from the friends who we get emotional and social support from.