Dissecting Twitter: The Social Bridge

I was having a conversation with my co-worker today about how I just started using Twitter and really like it. She’s been an avid tweeter for years and began to describe her relationship with it. She explained how comfortable she is communicating in the Twitter platform and having a bunch of strangers follow her, but when a stranger tries to follow or friend her in other social networks (like Facebook or Google+) it somehow crosses a boundary and makes her uncomfortable. This was very enlightening for me, because I feel the same way! Just yesterday I had two people I didn’t know start following me on Twitter and I immediately investigated my new followers with a sense of excited curiosity. That has never happened on Facebook. Whenever a stranger tried to be my friend I would immediately become guarded and skeptically investigate their profile for any similarities or reason to reciprocate (and I’m usually doing this with a very smug look on my face).

This really revved up my curiosity. Twitter has managed to seamlessly bridge the two types of social networks that I assumed were always disparate, (1) personal networks where you connect with people who you already know and (2) interest driven networks where you connect with strangers. The underlying assumptions being: it’s taboo to friend a bunch of strangers in your personal network, like Facebook, and it is uncanny to friend a bunch of real-life friends in your interest-driven network, like Second Life (excluding job related uses, of course). But nobody thinks twice about actively seeking a bunch of strangers to follow in Twitter one moment and directing tweets at your friends the next. This just amazes me.

I’ve spent a lot of time parsing apart how the design of sites like Facebook and Second Life facilitate the behaviors that reflect their key demographic. So, what I want to know is: how does Twitter’s design encourage this social bridge? By comparing it to Facebook and Second Life I hope to understand how it manages to survive in this “no man’s land.”

:: The Dissection

The big difference between Facebook and Second Life is the level of anonymity encouraged by the interfaces. Facebook is designed to have the real you conveyed, while-in stark contrast-Second Life has you assume the identity of an avatar. The last time I was on the site you could only access real information about the person behind the avatar from the very last tab in the profile—and even then it was usually blank or contained some common variation of “I use second life to get away from my real life, so don’t ask.” So, where does Twitter fall in this spectrum? It tries to make your twitter-handle some variation of your name, so it’s moving you towards conveying your real-self, but after signing up you’re immediately prompted to follow strangers. What I found interesting about this approach is how Twitter “verifies” accounts (indicated by a check mark icon) to overcome fears of authenticity or stranger-danger.

Although Twitter has a profile, they never actually hold your hand to walk you through it. So there is this balancing act between ‘yeah, be yourself’ with ‘okay, we don’t really care.’ Maybe since Facebook prompts you to outline every detail of your life before you even see the homepage this preempts you to approach the space more personal and sacred. If I wanted to make my personal information available to the public on Twitter I would have to actively seek out ways of doing it, and even then there is always a length restriction. 140 for tweets and they’ll give you 20 more characters to describe yourself in the bio.

Once you’re adjusted and using the site, it’s interesting to notice what the buttons in the navigation bar suggest. Twitter emphasizes ways to reach out to people in the community via the search bar, ‘Home’ page, or ‘Who To Follow’ links. Meanwhile, the Facebook interface tells a different story. They put you in the center of your social world with a notification hub for alerts that relate to you, a search bar that automatically skews the results towards your network, and your profile link. So, the navigation bar is another place to assume that Facebook centralizes ‘the self’ while Twitter centralizes ‘the other.’ Appropriately, Second Life’s navigation bar is filled with immersive chatting features; If I can say a joke and then make my avatar do a coinciding gesture I’ve just helped you take one step further into our little world. But Twitter doesn’t facilitate chat, per se, you are either getting publicly mentioned or privately messaged. It has an acute ability of letting you be a social voyeur—or connecting from a safe distance—because let’s face it, chats are personal.

I really admire how Twitter has balanced its design between personal and interest driven social networks. By not quite centering on the self and creating channels of communication with a percieved “safe distance,” participants don’t create boundaries too personal for strangers. I haven’t used the interface long enough to have insights on tweeting, as compared to status updates, as compared to…but maybe in the near-future.  [To be continued??]

I [love/hate] Facebook

I was updating my Facebook today and realized how much I’ve grown more and more dissatisfied with the new direction of the social service. Now before I get accused of being drunk when I update my blog, since I openly display my love/hate relationship with Facebook, let me explain. Facebook is currently (and slowly) transitioning to a new design. Therefore, I have been using this blog to record my gut reactions when the newsfeed got updated (-2pts ), the Timeline and Open Graph got announced (+10 pts), and after having interacted with the new timeline—which most people don’t have—for  over 2 weeks (-5 pts, today). With this behavioral trend, I’m good for future changes of opinion: after the timeline and open graph officially get implemented  (-20pts), and I use it over a long period of time (+15pts). I guess that would leave them at -2 fictional points? What you may see as fickle, I see as an honest platform to explore my warranted indecision, but I digress.

What used to be a space where I meticulously curated an online image for sharing and connecting to others, is now geared towards passively sharing my life in real-time with others. The ‘online presence’ is being amplified, and while adults may demand transparency from big businesses, they don’t like their behavior being so transparent to others. It makes it harder to seem like I Facebook ironically—and have better things to do in the physical world—when the real-time ticker fills up with my back-to-back comments and likes. All of a sudden, and out of my control, I may look over-eager, bored, or addicted. Am I even gaining anything in return? And I don’t know if it’s a result of their new algorithm now deciding what’s “interesting,” but I’ve gotten significantly less feedback from my friends than before. I know this could just mean I’m boring my network, but for now I’ll keep it under question.

I say that this probably benefits Generation Z, or all those kids who don’t know what a grass stain is, because they would totally crave this level of transparency and immersion. Being a Facebook “tweenager” (I’m talking about tweens and teenagers) means virtually hanging out with your friends while you’re actually stuck at home because your parents suck. It also means getting feedback that you are part of a group and liked, which is of course what you base your self-esteem on. And if that includes watching television shows and listening to music with your friends online, versus in your room  feeling  alone, well the answer is a no brainer. Tweenagers live in a time of identity formation compounded with dating confusion. Since that guy you like keeps communicating with that girl you hate the newsfeed becomes a hunting ground where peers are stalked. You are thankful with how Facebook helps you get a pulse of your social network; Heaven forbid you be in the dark about these matters!

I hope this is just a temporary defect, but changing my profile picture and featuring the cover image completely seized my screen real estate. Makes for an underwhelming profile page at the moment.

While I was initially excited about the new time-diving capabilities that the timeline facilitates, it only marveled me the first time I experienced it. Since I don’t dig into my history on a regular basis—and I can’t dig through anybody else’s at the moment—I’m finding myself questioning the 2-column layout of the “new and improved” profile page. The widget look of the timeline feels clunkier, harder to scan, and doesn’t seem to out-benefit the previous single-column layout. So this makes me wonder: different for difference sake? Assuming how amazing Facebook UX’ers are, I’m sure the double columned format actually solves a problem faced by the new Open Graph integration. It’s only a matter of time before I find out. But for now—and I’m sorry to say—it’s an indefinite dislike during this beta release (mid-transition) Facebook. If only I was 15 again.

the new facebook

My Facebook page with the new timeline.

I caught the end of the Live f8 developers conference last night, and then watched Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote and—while I would probably be happy never hearing the word “experience” or the phrase “express who you are” ever again—I am very excited about the work Facebook is doing!

I knew something was up with that crappy redesign we were handed (see previous post), it seemed so unstrategic and flawed. But now it is clear how everything will come together when Timeline and Open Graphs are integrated. I’m not going to sit here and summarize these changes (so you can check out Mashable’s handy-dandy guide) because it’s all anyone will be talking about for a while.

Graduate school project: fbminder

Back in graduate school, my final project speculated about how we could access all of the information we’ve ever put into Facebook to learn from the patterns of our behavior. It seemed like a missed opportunity for all that information to just disappear. Since I did not want to disrupt established social networking experiences, the tool lived in the back-end of Facebook. This made sense because it was a hypothetical tool for online safety, but I never thought about how cool it would be if all that information became fore-fronted instead.  Zuckerberg was spot on in his keynote when he said, “People have spent years curating the story of their lives and today there is just no way to show that.”

I had assumed they purposefully designed the site to make old information hard to get at—as if your past was something to be ashamed of or completely unrelated to your present. Now, I realize that those time-diving difficulties were just baggage from the original layout designed in 2004. Therefore, facilitating the ability to summarize your Facebook history required a completely retooled platform. Take it one step further, and juxtapose that ability to cruise back in time with the Open Graph model of sharing and you’ve got a paradigm shift: forever changing the way we look at the world.

Right now I’m still marinating on exactly what this means, but it’s a very exciting innovation.

recently orphaned social networker

Let me preface this post by saying that I tried my best to not come off as just another Facebook ranter, and no, I’m not getting paid under the table by Google.

Yesterday, Google opened the doors of their social networking service to the public. I really liked the site, but couldn’t see myself committing since I’m already such an avid Facebooker. Like most people, I don’t want parallel social networks (I mean, I can’t even justify having a twitter account because it’s too similar to my status updates). So, while I had strong convictions about not switching yesterday, I’m not sure where I stand today.

The new Facebook changes are impossible to ignore. There had been a variety of recent changes already (groups and subscribing), but I could still maintain my original social networking experience by ignoring them. Now, the page I probably visit most on the internet, the Homepage, has me a little disoriented. They promise that the information is being sorted to our benefit by an algorithm, but it just translates to the public as a loss of control and increase in complexity (-2 Trust points).

Facebook members have a history of backlashing against redesigns, but in the past there was nowhere else to go (assuming you already revolted against your tacky MySpace). Now, with Google+ on the scene, there is  another social network who would be more than happy to take you in and nurse your wounds.

Facebook is changing to try to maintain a competitive advantage (and I’m truly convinced they have our best interests at heart), but they’re kind of coming off as capricious and authoritarian. You WILL Facebook this way and like it! No wait, Facebook THIS way and like it! For starters, this wasn’t even a staged integration. They could have warmed us up to the change, like the time they gave us that false sense of agency by letting us “choose” to adopt the new look, until in eventually overrides anyway.

All I’m saying is the last thing you want to do when your competition opens its doors to the masses is give your devoted members a reason to leave. Part of why people put off Google+ was the fact that there was a learning curve. It’s easier to stick to what is familiar. Unfortunately, Facebook is slowly stripping away everything that made it familiar. So, maybe I don’t want to relearn Facebook and be hassled with grouping all my friends or meta-subscription related actions. Instead, maybe I want to use that energy to learn Google+ and hangout with will.i.am (tonight at 9p ET!)! I don’t know, but a fresh start is tempting.

why social”social”

Hi, I’m Laura Rodriguez and I currently work as a User-Experience Designer at IBM. Despite my undying love for unnecessary quotation marks and the overuse of the term ‘social’ (as jargon to describe…well, anything being marketed to humans), I still ended up with a blog named social”social.“ The truth is: WordPress has a limited amount of blog titles left and I couldn’t think of anything else. (Over-thinking it later, I actually came up with a compelling concept for repeating the word in “witty” quotes!) Nevertheless, as someone who once owned www.laurarodriguezgraphicdesigner.com, I simply opted to keep it short.

Recently I graduated from NC State University, with my Master of Graphic Design, where I cultivated an interest in social media that can be traced in this MGD blog. My final project (abstract below) speculated about a tool for online safety designed specifically for the 18-24 year old demographic group. The research required for that project absolutely consumed me, and once it was over I didn’t want to stop. So, after the recent introductions of Klout and Google+, I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm anymore and had to find an outlet for my design-centric analysis of social media trends.

Curious about the trajectory of online networks and how we connect virtually or (as a rare added bonus) how we use technology to connect physically, I aim to explore our relationship with technology while speculating towards the future. Having used sites like Facebook and Myspace since college, and blogging privately for years prior, I have a tendency to be biased towards the “good ‘ole days” when everything was intimate and generally carefree. Now, mass amounts of information is being shared online, leveraged by big business, and the term social is stuffed to capacity. What is being pushed as a social experience today, like fast food restaurants wanting to be your “friend,” is vastly different from just five years ago. So, with a daring nod towards social-purism, I look to question what we already lost and what is being gained in this fast moving evolution. Join me?

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Abstract:
“Mindful Social Networking: Cognitive Artifacts for Reflective Cognition.” 

Younger generations are redefining privacy by how much information they feel comfortable outputting online. The concept of consequences has not yet resonated among younger online social networkers. The news media is quick to cover the latest stories on our digital fingerprint catching up to us, but there are no tools out there—other than authoritative parental control software—to turn to for help. While we know the potential for harm is out there, we are solely reliant on ourselves to social network more safely. Participants, specifically 18-24-year-olds, are performing online friendships that are extensions of their physical friendships without understanding the unique affordances of networked sociality: persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. All of their old interactions are being prolonged online, contributing to the susceptibility of the future-self, and can be particularly problematic when transitioning into the workplace. This age group is at a pivotal point because they currently output the most information and are no longer under parental control. This project speculates how a cognitive artifact, or man-made extension of our memory, could help social networking participants be more reflective about their information output. My visual research is developed within Facebook’s architecture, but the main idea of my project is not exclusive to this interface. Research towards mitigating risk online is a highly relevant area of investigation that moves digital media forward, all the while helping people manage networked sociality.