Discussing and socializing: Forums, Social Networking Sites,

Social Network Visualization

Peter BrusilovskyWith materials from

Julita Vassileva & Yiling Lin

HistoryIM, 1965

IRC, 1988

MUD, 1975

MMPOG, 1990

Bulletin Boards,1978-1998

Usenet Newsgroups,1979 – 1986 - 1995

Internet Disc. Forums, 1995- Chat rooms, 2000

Social Network Sites, 1985- Blogs, 2002 -

Chat

Chat: Synchronous Communication• Chat systems that enable one person to send

typed words directly to the screen of another person who is logged onto the same system date back to the first time-sharing computers of the 1960s. Probably the oldest form of CMC, predating electronic mail.

• Chat as a form of commucatioin was made popular by MUDs and MOOs and later by IRC protocol

• Exponential growth in recent years of telecommunication technologies has resulted in a new era of interpersonal communication

IRC: Internet Relay Chat• In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen at the University of

Oulu, Finland, wrote the original IRC program, a multi-user, synchronous communications tool designed to work over Internet.

• IRC is an open protocol based on TCP. An IRC server can connect to other IRC servers to expand the IRC network

• Famous for its role in reporting the results of Soviet coup attempt amidst a media blackout

• There are many IRC clients

XChat: an IRC Client

Chat rooms• Unlike mail list and message board, chat room is synchronous.

People on different physical location communicate at the same time

• It can be used for practical to playful communities- e.g. class rooms, interviews and even meetings

• When to use it – To provide a sense of immediacy and presence unlike message

board and mailing list that are good for Q&A– To hold scheduled events, it could work really well for real

time scheduled events– To offer real time support and guidance i.e. from community

staff• There are so many ways to incorporate chat into a community

depending on the needs of the community.

Types of Chat rooms and IRC

• MUDs and MOOs – textual VR• Web-based chat, they don't require separated download and

are easy to use• Free chat / Instant Messager services, different IRC could be

run on safe, free hosted environment.– The owner of chat wont own the members database and information

and won't control the application appearance– iChat, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger

• Host your chat - get software from vendor and run– unlike free this gives the owner control over the users databases and

appearance of the chatting application

Chat Communication media• Text based

– mostly used, word based• Graphics based

– involves use of avatars• Voice based

– It is becoming popular by the day as most computers comes with built-in audio ports, microphones & video camera

– Hearing someone is more revealing than seeing words typed on a screen

– Lack of anonymity is a drawback for voice chat

Chat and Society• Despite the anonymity and ephemeral nature of their

communications, IRC habitués become addicted, form close friendships, fall in love.

• IRC does not fit well with conventional theories of human communication because CMC technology makes possible something that human communicators could not do previously, a geographically dispersed group of people now can use the written word as a conversational medium.

• IRC is essentially a playground. Within its domain people are free to experiment with different forms of communication and self-representation.”

• Chat was embraced by teenagers who created essentially a new language. Chat was sharply criticized for both “faults”

Message Boards / Forums

AKA Internet forums, Web forums, message boards, discussion boards,

(electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards.

Message Boards

• Like mail listing Boards are asynchronous. • People don't need to be in same virtual place

to have a same conversation• Can foster conversations that happen over a

long period of time• Great for asking and answering questions• Friendly to slow-to-speak and non-native

speakers

Types of message boards

• Linear– Theme - Post– You can select relevant group for you post, but all

posts are archived and shown sequentially (chat-like)

• Threaded– Theme – Topic – Post– In addition to selecting a group, one can start a

topic or to reply to one of the earlier posted topics

Bulletin Board Systems• Grandfather of modern internet forums• A software run on a modem-enable computer

– allows other users to dial-up, connect and do a range of things – like exchange files and messages or play games

– Pure text-based interface– Frequently one user connected at a time (modem!)– A typical BBS has several “message bases”

• The first public BBS was developed by Ward Christensen and went online on February 16, 1978 in Chicago. BBS grew in popularity until mid-1990 and morphed into Web.

Example: Commodore DTJ-BBS

Users with sufficient access could create rooms (message bases or discussion forums). If a room did not get enough usage, it could delete itself automatically.

USENET

• Internet-based system for distributing threaded discussions

• Conceived by Duke graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979

• User prospect: – A hierarchy of topic-oriented newsgroups– Need a USENET client and server to access a group– Can browse or subscribe to a group– A message can be posted as a new thread or a reply

to the existing thread– Not every server carries every group – might need to

work with several servers

USENET Distribution Model

• System’s prospect– Started with UUCP – poor-

man ARPANET– Decentralized nature– Each server carries a set of

newsgroups and synchronizes new messages with connected servers

– Each server, which carries a newsgroup can serve as a point to submit a message

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usenet_servers_and_clients.svg

USENET Impact

• A major social phenomenon– Huge number of users, huge volumes of content, all

kinds of topics– Major group discussion platform

• Establishment of netiquette• Provided impact on many other areas

– Collaborative recommender systems started with USENET recommendation

– Impacted visualization and awareness research– First major platform for social computing research

Internet Forums

• A combination of a BBS and USENET ideas – a hosted internet discussion forum

• Early use – distance education (pre-BlackBoard)– Non-Web internet forum clients and severs– A lot of work in early 1990– E-learning based on forums better than classroom

• Quickly emerged into Web Forums

Web Forums

• Modern incarnation of asynchronous discussions• Collected good features and ideas from all

predecessors– Old rules (like Netiquette) and research results also

inherited

• Established set of state-of-the-art features• Can be integrated into many context from news

to e-learning, to MMRPG• An important feature or any social system

Benefits of Forums for Social Web

• Provides a sense of gathering place• Can be integrated into a website• Offers visible context to the conversation by showing

content of previous message• Encourages branching and sub grouping hence you

can communicate with people of you interest group• Does not require synchronous presence• Allow to think before posting – express at your best• Ability to express emotions by using images• Record and archive your community evolving history

Issues• Organization and user roles

– Admin – moderator – user• Misuses

– Flame wars– Trolls– Sock puppets– Spamming– Censoring (Matsushita -> Matsus***a)

• Research issues– Lurking– Information Overload

Lurking• The ‘silent majority’ in a forum• A lurker is a person who reads discussions on a

newsgroup, forum, or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively (Wikipedia).

• Research indicates that "lurkers make up over 90% of online groups" (Nonnecke, B.; Preece, J. (2000), Lurker demographics: Counting the silent, Proceedings of CHI 2000).– As of July 1999, there were more than 31,000 DLs using Listserv’s® server

software. The 69,000,000 members of these DLs receive in excess of 29,000,000 messages per day. Lurkers are reported to make up over 90% of several online groups.

Views on Lurking• lurkers as free-riders, i.e., noncontributing,

resource-taking members• lurkers as an audience in the theatre, readers to

an author, important participant in the “show”• lurkers as potential customers and /or

contributors

Counting the Silent• Seminal CHI’2000 article by Nonneke and Preece• A demographic study of lurking in email-based discussion

lists (DLs) with an emphasis on health and software-support DLs.

• Studied 77 health forums and 21 software forums. Questions: – how prevalent is lurking and do health and software-support DLs differ?– how do lurking levels vary as the definition is broadened from zero posts

in 12 weeks to 3 or fewer posts in 12 weeks? – is there a relationship between lurking and the size of the DL?– is there a relationship between lurking and traffic level?

Results

Lurking levels vary significantly across the two forums.

*lurking defined as no posts duringthe period of the study

Results

Health and software forums behave similarwhen raising the post threshold for lurking, Lurking levels increase

No clear correlation between numberof lurkers versus number of membersin each DL, both for health and software

Results

Lurking levels for all DLs were negatively correlated with traffic (Pearson’s correlation coefficient of -.426 is significant at the .01 level). Figure 5 shows that for a given DL size, lists with highest traffic levels generally have thelowest lurking levels.

Discussion• Vast majority of members are lurkers. So how do

forums survive?• Lurking is not free-riding; but a form of participation that is both acceptable

and beneficial to online groups. Public posting is but one way in which an online group can benefit from its members. Members of a group are part of a large social milieu.

• A resource-constrained model may not apply to online groups where the centralized cost of servicing 100 members isn’t much different from that of serving 1000, or even 10,000. In large DLs the danger could be in not having enough lurkers.

• Impact of traffic levels on participation• Difference between email-based forums (DL) here and

internet-based discussion forums

Information Overload in Forums• Overload became an issue since USENET times• Many groups, many threads, many message, how

to manage to read and reply when needed? How to make sure that most actual posts are noticed and processed?

• Even more an issue today with many Web forums• Research Issues

– Symptoms of overload– Treating overload

Coping with Cverload

• Jones, Ravid & Rafaeli explored the symptoms of overload in “An Empirical Exploration of Mass Interaction System Dynamics “

• Hypothesis: user information overload causes impact on the discourse structure– Failing to respond or attend to certain messages– Producing simpler responses– Making erroneous responses– Ending active participation in the group communication

Methodology

• Collecting data from 500 English Usenet groups

• Processing the data (using text analysis techniques) to identify replies to previous posts and threads – Interesting facts: 90% of responses occurred in

the first 2.5 days, 99% - in the first 2 weeks; 78% of the study sample messages turned out to be replies

Findings• Simpler Responses

– Observed a decrease in complexity of messages (word count) as the size of the interactive group increases approaching asymptote

– Observed a decrease in complexity of messages (word count) as the number of discussion threads in the newsgroup increases, but not approaching asymptote

• Failing to respond or attend– On average, messages that seed discourse are shorter

than those that fail to seed discourse• Ending active participation

– The larger the number of individuals involved in the discourse, the less stable the population of active participants.

Implications

• It is important to provide tools at a discourse level to help decrease the information overload

• How to Focus attention to a manageable set of posts– Idea 1: Recommender System– Idea 2: Social navigation

• Candidates for social promotion– Most recent posts?– Most highly rated posts?– Posts with most replies/comments? – How to avoid the “rich get richer” effect?

Community Energy: Comtella Forums

Social Network(ing) Sites

Social Network Sites

• Web-based services that allow individuals to:– construct a public or semi-public profile within a

bounded system, – articulate a list of other users with whom they

share a connection, and – view and traverse their list of connections and

those made by others within the system.

Boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. ttp://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Other Definitions• A social network service focuses on building and reflecting of

social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Although online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service in a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks (Wikipedia, 2010)

History

• The WELL (1985), Theglobe.com (1994), Geocities (1994), Tripod (1995)… – focused on chat-room interaction– personal homepage publishing tools precursor of Blogs

• Classmates.com (1995), SixDegrees.com(1997)– focused on representing the links between people – “friends

lists” of email addresses– allowed creation of profiles, sending messages, searching

friends of friends, or by interest…

• Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), Orkut (2004), Facebook (2004), Bebo (2005) MAP

Popularity• Myspace (no longer No.1 ; every band on this

planet has at least one Myspace page)• FaceBook (No.1 now, tops 300 million users as of

Sept, 2009)• Orkut (Brazil and India)• 51.com (China), vkontakte.com (former USSR) • Bebo (Ireland, NZ),Hi5 (Mexico, Balkans,

Mongolia), Perfspot (Iran, Vietnam), Friendster (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore)

MySpace

Friendster

Facebook

LinkedIn

Business and job-oriented. Connections rather than friends.

Xiaonei

• Xiaonei: “a shameless knock-off of FaceBook”

• Huge number of users in China

• ( provided by Yuan Wang)

Odnoklassniki.ru

Russian version of Classmates with some twists. Over 25M users

Webkinz: SN for kids

www.newwebkinzauctions.com/Getting-Started.htm

Why SNS?

According to Cliff Lampe’s studies, the uses of FaceBook are mainly for:

• Emotional Support and information finding • Maintaining social ties and social searching • Surveillance function

Surveillance as Awareness

• Aim to foster relationship building by allowing users to track other members of their community. (A “surveillance” function )– allows an individual to track the actions, beliefs and interests of

the larger groups to which they belong– helps the watcher search for social cues that indicate group

norms

• Resnick [10] has framed this as the “peripheral awareness” function of online systems– supports one’s ability to remain aware of increasing large and

diverse offline communities, thereby increasing social capital.

Searching vs Browsing

• Social searching– investigate specific people with whom they share

an offline connection to learn more about them.

• Social browsing– find people or groups online with whom they

would want to connect offline.

Social Network Site & Social Networking Site

• Social network sites – allow individuals to meet others– enable users to articulate and make visible their

social networks which are frequently between "latent ties" (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline connection.

• Social networking sites– "Networking" emphasizes relationship initiation,

often between strangers.

A Face(book) in the Crowd:Social Searching vs. Social Browsing

• Facebook as a surveillance tool for maintaining previous relationships, and as a social search tool which they investigate people they’ve met offline.

• There seems to be little “social browsing,” or searching for users online initially with the intention of moving that relationship offline.

• Lampe, Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield (2006), A Face(book) in the Crowd:Social Searching vs. Social Browsing , ACM 1-59593-249-6/06/0011

Why SNS?• Adam N.Joinson (Univ of Bath,UK), a study of FaceBook• Asked 137 FaceBook users to describe how they used

FaceBook• Top Results of Uses (1/2): 1. Keeping in touch (maintain social ties) 2. Passive contact, social surveillance 3. Re-acquiring lost contacts (build social ties) 4. Communication (information, maintain social ties)

5. Photographs (information source ) 6. Making new contacts

Uses of SNS (6/8)• Study 2: Identifying uses and gratifications• 241 Facebook users asked to rate the importance of

the 46 different uses derived from study 1– Analysing the answers w.r.t. factors: gender, age,

occupation. • Results:

– Females visit more frequently – Younger users spent more time– Younger users have more friends – Users registered for longer time and with more

frequent visits have more friends

Some conclusions

1.Different goals for using FaceBook are reflected both in the usage patterns and privacy settings.

2. Users want to control (restrict) the information they give away, but want to survey the information of others.

Privacy Concerns about SNS

• In order to be socially searched by friends, users are most likely to provide real information, and loose control on privacy.

• In order to allow surveillance, the user has to allow his or her activities published via News and Feed

Infamous “Beacon” and Privacy

• Beacon: a market initiative allows FaceBook to publish the user’s “outside” activities to their FB profile and “News and feed”

So if you buy something at eBay or overstock (a online discount store), the information about the transaction and product will be put into your FB profile and your friends’ News and feed

FaceBook as Big brother• Some people think FB

should provide users with the ability to opt-out of data sharing, both at a friends level and advertisers

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/23/facebook_beacon_dies/

FaceBook’s 3rd party applications • Opening APIs for 3rd party applications.

– Great participation, both by developers and users

• FB is becoming social network OS– Facebook Connect and Open Stream APIs– Users don’t need to log into FB to communicate with their

friends, they can access their network from any of 10,000 partner sites (including Digg, CitySearch, Gawker, TechCrunch, CNN.com …), contributing even more valuable data to FB’s servers

– Redefining search – massive amounts shared on private FB servers, growing “blind spot” for Google

• Selling targeted ads everywhere (all partner sites)

The Future of Social - Cyworld

• 20 Million daily users - over 25 percent of the South Korean population has a Cyworld account, with up to 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20's have an account

• Global Cyworld: USA , Korea , China, Japan, and Taiwan

The Future of Social - Cyworld

• Game-like social network– Mini room– Mini me– Forming kinship

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=c10400&no=179108&rel_no=1&back_url

What Facebook Could Become: XuQa

• 1M registered users• XuQa is

purposefully racy, full of game-like features

• Game-like social network => brings people back