Web2.0 is global tribalization

It is much easier to talk about web2.0 from technology perspectives such as round corner css design, ajax javascripting, RESTful APIs, RSS/ATOM feeds, CDN, cloud computing, or the social application buzz words like wiki, blog, podcast, SNS, etc. However, it is difficult to reach consensus on the wikipedia definition. Tim O'Reilly coined web2.0 for "web as a platform". The immediate question could be, what the heck is the "platform"? Marc Andreessen even defined 3 levels of platforms in defending Ning's position against Facebook social platform.

Web2.0 is a culture movement
The evolution of web platform constantly reshapes our cyberculture in terms of the way people interacting each other. The collective view of our social intercourse that morphed in cyberspace is a cultural phenomenon, as we have experienced with AIM culture, Myspace culture, Facebook culture, Twitter culture. It is prominent in digital divide among age groups. The usage of fast pacing digital media distinguishes cultural demographics. As a sociologist discovered earlier based on social class analysis, Facebook was favored by rich kids from private universities, while poor community college students felt more comfortable to hang out in Myspace. When web platform functions as media, the usage of such media shapes our culture. Moreover, the culture morphing is the natural selection process in technology evolution chain. Cool and fancy technologies can die in cradle if there is no cultural adaptation.

Global village as a result of mass media
From wikipedia:

Global village is a term coined by Wyndham Lewis in his book America and Cosmic Man (1948). However, Herbert Marshall McLuhan also wrote about this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). His book describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media.

From newspaper, radio, television, to Web1.0 version of Internet (Yahoo portal and Google search), the mass media made the world small, flat, and within instant reach. Mass media as a part our postmodern life, the culture of the global village created the problem of "singular modernity" as summarized by Fredric Jameson. The singular ideology or totalitarianism built up with the assistance of mass media, in Jameson's opinion, "secures the notions of progress and the future under the auspices of global-capitalism while preemptively dismissing any alternative as un-modern, outmoded, or old-fashioned". Global village is the colonization of the singular cultural sphere.

Tribalization as a result of web2.0 culture
Youtube (or UGC in general) could highlight the cultural anti-colonization in web2.0 culture movement. Time magazine's Person of Year in 2006 was "You". Social apps connect these individualized identities throughout tribalized explicit social networks or implicit social connotations (e.g. sharing same tags in del.icio.us). World wide tribalization is coming!

Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past - Fredric Jameson

Why FriendFeed is hot?

FriendFeed is the current hype. Some bloggers compare it with Twitter frenzy happened last year. It is a simple (at least today) social message aggregator and definitely it's not the first one (Mashable listed 8 aggregators). I have FriendFeed installed on Facebook and quite enjoy "spying" what my friends are doing, specially I love to follow my sociologist friend's new posts and book reading updates for my research purpose before I become a big fan of Twitter.

So, why FriendFeed is hot?

FriendFeed is a continental beacon
Facebook beacon and news feed are most compelling social messaging mechanism. The passive messaging makes social utilities evolved into the third generation of social networks - behavior centric. However, Facebook is an Internet island (note that the island is not a walled garden as Facebook is an open social platform). FriendFeed breaks the island effect through message aggregation. Hence, it is a continental beacon.

As Facebook demonstrated the business model that social messaging will be the key for social ads, which envisioned by many insiders that will potentially surpass Google in the future, FriendFeed indeed raised the attention on how far the social messaging can be reached. Yet another land grabbing!

3 categories of social messages

There are three basic categories of social messages:

1) Conventional greeting: In Myspace, the hotspot of social messages are thanks for add for new friend, birthday, holiday, congratulations to graduation, raise, etc. The greeting is similar to Hallmark greeting cards bought in department stores. Users can get fancy and flashy virtual "cards" from lots of image sites.

2) Social grooming: Facebook widgets expand the scope of message beyond conventional greetings. One popular widget "X me" just for sending "Jane chest bumped me". Another "Food fighting" widget delivers non-conventional social message like "Jane threw an icecream to David". Those "non-sense" social signals are subtle but important in social relationships in the way like animal grooming each other.

3) Passive: Facebook invented passive communication or passive social message. When you login into your facebook account, the first page is a news feed about what's going on with your friend, like "Jane and Mark now are friends", "Jane threw an icecream to David with Food Fighting" (Food Fighting is the link to the widget install page).

Dunbar's number and language invented for social grooming

If we follow Prof. Dunbar's theory, social networks as a new communication tool is simply the advancement of natural language. The whole purpose is to make the social grooming more efficient. However, the efficiency has its limit - the magical Dunbar's number - about 150. The question is: by leveraging intelligent agents, can we handle relations beyond 150? Looks we are getting into a scifi scene - "I need your response in real person, not your program".

Dunbar's number from wikipedia:

Dunbar's number, which is 150, represents a theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person. Group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion. Dunbar's number is a significant value in sociology and anthropology.

Dunbar's major work from Google Books

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
What a big brain we have for all the small talk we make. It's an evolutionary riddle that at long last makes sense in this intriguing book about what gossip has done for our talkative species. Psychologist Robin Dunbar looks at gossip as an instrument of social order and cohesion--much like the endless grooming with which our primate cousins tend to their social relationships.Apes and monkeys, humanity's closest kin, differ from other animals in the intensity of these relationships. All their grooming is not so much about hygiene as it is about cementing bonds, making friends, and influencing fellow primates. But for early humans, grooming as a way to social success posed a problem: given their large social groups of 150 or so, our earliest ancestors would have had to spend almost half their time grooming one another--an impossible burden. What Dunbar suggests--and his research, whether in the realm of primatology or in that of gossip, confirms--is that humans developed language to serve the same purpose, but far more efficiently. It seems there is nothing idle about chatter, which holds together a diverse, dynamic group--whether of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, or workmates. Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in relationships among males during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's original and extremely interesting studies suggest otherwise: that language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up to date with friends and family. We needed conversation to stay in touch, and we still need it in ways that will not be satisfied by teleconferencing, email, or any other communication technology. As Dunbar shows, the impersonal world of cyberspace will not fulfill our primordial need for face-to-face contact.From the nit-picking of chimpanzees to our chats at coffee break, from neuroscience to paleoanthropology, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language offers a provocative view of what makes us human, what holds us together, and what sets us apart.

Category of roles and relations on social networks

Users in social network will typically assume one or many of social roles and relations under the communicative paradigm:

1) family member in family relationship
2) dating relationship and love relationship
3) close buddies with strong trust relationship
4) common friends bonded by physical connections (e.g. classmates)
5) playmates sharing common interests, can be virtual relations (e.g. "friends" at online forum or chatroom)
6) co-workers in job related relationship
7) consumers related to business entities (e.g. online stores, dentist, lawyer, consumer brands, publishers, music labels, movie producers, pop stars, etc.)

The first 3 are quite strong relations in daily social life and help to maintain a healthy personal psychological conditions. Ironically, since the bonding is so strong and natural in family and close buddies, we tend to invest least effort in social networks. The perceived social distance in online world can never compete with the close natural relations. In contrast, the top investment regarding networking efforts is the dating relation. Seeking such relation is the primary objective for most single people.

Depending on the user's role and personality, typically there's a "hub", or "anchor", or "lead" person in a small and closed personal network. The anchor person could be wife in family, mother for children in natural relations. As just stated, family relations are not most active in social networks. Among friends circles, people having hypersocial type of personality will assume the role of organizer for conversation flow, virtual events, and the glue to connect other friends, including introducing new friends. Interestingly, hypersocial personality may not necessarily consistent between physical world and virtual world. A shy person could be hypersocial and becomes a hub in social networks.

Second to dating relation, common friends relation (category 4) is quite rewarding for relation investment and there is less risk involved. A social skillful person could easily leverage regular friends base for both personal life and career. Good social apps or social utilities will enhance relations and help to overcome social skill shortage. Common friends relation is the twilight zone between 2, 3, 5 and 6 because "friend" here has very broad range of definition.

Working relation (category 6) is the key for career success and also could be high risk relation. People carefully invest and mitigate the risk by following social codes or social norms more strictly. Given the risk factor, enterprise or corporate social networks is less popular than social networks for other relations.

Relation 5 and 7 are important in leisure life. Since there's no risk involved in the relations, usually users are also least responsible in the virtual world, specially with disguised identities.

Relation 7 is the key to generate advertising revenue when the social network can be used as a powerful marketing tool. Social network operators' core business is to bridge all other relations with consumers. The difficulty remains in intent vs. interest. Consumers searching Google for product info is taking consumer role and the relation has shortest distance to business entities. Dating and friend roles distance from consumer role by orthogonal relations. Social ads attempt to fill the gap. However, the only possible success is the transmedia approach, i.e. ads become a part of social message and remix with normal social messages in order to enhance non-consumer type of relations.

Fans, entourage, and hypersociability

Fans are the core public social relations in Myspace since day one. At least, the original vanilla version of Myspace as public community was made up of music artists surrounded by their fans. In Myspace, fan relation is just a special kind of friend. It's relatively easy to get friended as most artists really pay attention and take care of precious fan relations. More interestingly, aggressive artists often send add friend request to "steal" fans.

in early days, fans didn't exist in Facebook. The vanilla Facebook never cared much about virtual relations in virtual community. Facebook differentiated from Myspace by focusing on physical world relations happened in campus. Last year, in the game of Myspace catching up, fans feature was finally added.

Fans in facebook is a dedicated feature and it is an explicit social relation, while in Myspace, fans are implicit "friends" to the artist. Mixing regular friends with fans, the cons is that two different relations belong to two distinct social circles. However, fans having entourage attitude may leverage such hypersociability. The pros is that fans could feel closer to the artist and could easily make entourage relations once the fans can be mixed with the artist's personal friend circle and perceptively involved. In Myspace, the entourage relations is perceived though top friends and message board. It can appear hypersocial but the relation indeed helps the artist to build fan base.

Hypersociability could further allow fans involve into artists creative activities. From different perspectives, today artists may explore transmedia approach. Some artists in Myspace provides music sample loops and ask fans to do the remix. The remix later got posted on the message board for share.

How mobile social networks differ from Internet social networks

Internet social networks have become mainstream online activities. However, mobile counterpart has not yet taken off. As we carefully evaluate the difference, we can foresee the huge potential.

Technology, usage, and user experience
Obviously, Internet browser has the advantage of browsing and capable to deliver rich user experience. Given the larger screen, faster connection and processing power, rich media is pervasive on Internet. In this sense, the usage of Internet is more media oriented. On the other hand, mobile device is historically more communication oriented. Today, mobile computing is becoming more powerful as we experienced with iPhone, once the cost barrier is overcome by volume, eventually rich media will penetrate into mobile world. However, mobile device is not ideal for browsing behavior, there must be innovative ways for users to acquire content more efficiently and effectively. So far, social networks along with widgets and social media are most promising solutions for mobile user experience.

Social graph
Internet users need to add friends one by one in order to build up their social graph. Friends discovery is only possible on large networks. In mobile case, the social graph is pre-existed in the form of contact list or phone book. There is virtually no extra effort to bootstrap the individual network.

Physical relations vs. virtual relations
Mobile phone book represents the real life relationships in physical world. It is not convenient to establish virtual relationships, and the users are not used to engage people they don't know. In contrast, Internet users tend to enjoy the relationship without physical contact at various virtual communities (e.g. fans of music bands at myspace).

Public and semi-public profile
One primary attraction of Internet social networks is the profile presentation. It could be completely public or only available to friends. Self expression could be a main objective. Users spend significant amount of time in profile page construction and decoration. The expressive profile is not easy to build and to show on mobile devices. The device constraint and usage habit prevent mobile social networks from profile centric social messaging.

Activity and behavioral social messaging
Since mobile devices allow users stay connected on the go, conceptually, mobile social networks are perfect candidates for activity centric or behavior centric social messaging and interactions. IM type of messaging, Twitter type of micro blogging, FireEagle type of location based mobile social apps, and facebook type of social widgets prefer mobility by nature. The usage pattern differs from Internet in that the access could be more frequently and time span would be shorter. The overall user engagement might be higher than Internet counterpart, specially when rich media is embraced.

Social equity
Aside from self entertainment (media oriented activities), the objective of mobile communication is social interaction and it is the process of accumulating social equity. Since mobile social networks favor real life relations, the social equity is easier to "cash out" in physical world. In other words, users should have more incentives in mobile social interactions. In contrast, building social equity in virtual communities requires more investment in time and effort, the reward and the equity value are more difficult to realize.