Forums, Social Networking Sites, Social Network Visualizawon History

Home , Internet forum, Lurker

4/7/10

Discussing and socializing: Forums, Social Networking Sites, Social Network Visualizaon

Peter Brusilovsky With materials from Julita Vassileva & Yiling Lin

History

IM, 1965

MUD, 1975 Bulletin Boards, 1978-1998

Usenet Newsgroups, 1979 – 1986 - 1995

IRC, 1988

MMPOG, 1990 Internet Disc. Chat rooms, 2000 Forums, 1995-

Social Network Sites, 1985- Blogs, 2002 -

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Chat

Chat: Synchronous Communicaon • 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 me‐sharing computers of the 1960s. Probably the oldest form of CMC, predang electronic mail. • Chat as a form of commucaoin was made popular by MUDs and MOOs and later by IRC protocol • Exponenal growth in recent years of telecommunicaon technologies has resulted in a new era of interpersonal communicaon

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IRC: Internet Relay Chat • In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen at the University of Oulu, Finland, wrote the original IRC program, a mul‐user, synchronous communicaons 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 reporng the results of Soviet coup aempt amidst a media blackout • There are many IRC clients

XChat: an IRC Client

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Chat rooms

• Unlike mail list and message board, chat room is synchronous. People on different physical locaon communicate at the same me • It can be used for praccal to playful communies‐ e.g. class rooms, interviews and even meengs • 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 me scheduled events – To offer real me 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 informaon and won't control the applicaon appearance – iChat, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger • Host your chat ‐ get soware from vendor and run – unlike free this gives the owner control over the users databases and appearance of the chang applicaon

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Chat Communicaon 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 communicaons, IRC habitués become addicted, form close friendships, fall in love. • IRC does not ﬁt well with convenonal theories of human communicaon because CMC technology makes possible something that human communicators could not do previously, a geographically dispersed group of people now can use the wrien word as a conversaonal medium. • IRC is essenally a playground. Within its domain people are free to experiment with diﬀerent forms of communicaon and self‐representaon.” • Chat was embraced by teenagers who created essenally a new language. Chat was sharply cricized for both “faults”

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Message Boards / Forums

AKA Internet forums, Web forums, message boards, discussion boards, (electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums, bullen boards.

Message Boards

• Like mail lisng Boards are asynchronous. • People don't need to be in same virtual place to have a same conversaon • Can foster conversaons that happen over a long period of me • Great for asking and answering quesons • Friendly to slow‐to‐speak and non‐nave speakers

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Types of message boards

• Linear – Theme ‐ Post – You can select relevant group for you post, but all posts are archived and shown sequenally (chat‐ like) • Threaded – Theme – Topic – Post – In addion to selecng a group, one can start a topic or to reply to one of the earlier posted topics

Bullen Board Systems

• Grandfather of modern internet forums • A soware 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 me (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 unl mid‐1990 and morphed into Web.

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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 distribung threaded discussions • Conceived by Duke graduate students Tom Trusco 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 exisng thread – Not every server carries every group – might need to work with several servers

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USENET Distribuon 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 plaorm • Establishment of nequee • Provided impact on many other areas – Collaborave recommender systems started with USENET recommendaon – Impacted visualizaon and awareness research – First major plaorm for social compung research

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Internet Forums

• A combinaon of a BBS and USENET ideas – a hosted internet discussion forum • Early use – distance educaon (pre‐ BlackBoard) – Non‐Web internet forum clients and severs – A lot of work in early 1990 – E‐learning based on forums beer than classroom • Quickly emerged into Web Forums

Web Forums

• Modern incarnaon of asynchronous discussions • Collected good features and ideas from all predecessors – Old rules (like Nequee) 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

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Beneﬁts of Forums for Social Web

• Provides a sense of gathering place • Can be integrated into a website • Oﬀers visible context to the conversaon 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 posng – express at your best • Ability to express emoons by using images • Record and archive your community evolving history

Issues

• Organizaon and user roles – Admin – moderator – user • Misuses – Flame wars – Trolls – Sock puppets – Spamming – Censoring (Matsushita ‐> Matsus***a) • Research issues – Lurking – Informaon Overload

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Lurking

• The ‘silent majority’ in a forum • A lurker is a person who reads discussions on a newsgroup, forum, or other interacve system, but rarely or never parcipates acvely (Wikipedia). • Research indicates that "lurkers make up over 90% of online groups" (Nonnecke, B.; Preece, J. (2000), Lurker demographics: Counng the silent, Proceedings of CHI 2000). – As of July 1999, there were more than 31,000 DLs using Listserv’s® server soware. 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., noncontribung, resource‐taking members • lurkers as an audience in the theatre, readers to an author, important parcipant in the “show” • lurkers as potenal customers and /or contributors

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Counng the Silent

• Seminal CHI’2000 arcle by Nonneke and Preece • A demographic study of lurking in email‐based discussion lists (DLs) with an emphasis on health and soware‐support DLs. • Studied 77 health forums and 21 soware forums. Quesons: – how prevalent is lurking and do health and soware‐support DLs differ? – how do lurking levels vary as the definion is broadened from zero posts in 12 weeks to 3 or fewer posts in 12 weeks? – is there a relaonship between lurking and the size of the DL? – is there a relaonship between lurking and traffic level?

Results

Lurking levels vary significantly across the two forums.

*lurking defined as no posts during the period of the study

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Results

No clear correlation between number Health and software forums behave similar of lurkers versus number of members when raising the post threshold for lurking, in each DL, both for health and software Lurking levels increase

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 the lowest lurking levels.

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Discussion • Vast majority of members are lurkers. So how do forums survive? • Lurking is not free‐riding; but a form of parcipaon that is both acceptable and beneficial to online groups. Public posng 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 parcipaon • Difference between email‐based forums (DL) here and internet‐based discussion forums

Informaon Overload in Forums • Overload became an issue since USENET mes • Many groups, many threads, many message, how to manage to read and reply when needed? How to make sure that most actual posts are noced and processed? • Even more an issue today with many Web forums • Research Issues – Symptoms of overload – Treang overload

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Coping with Cverload

• Jones, Ravid & Rafaeli explored the symptoms of overload in “An Empirical Exploraon of Mass Interacon System Dynamics “ • Hypothesis: user informaon overload causes impact on the discourse structure – Failing to respond or aend to certain messages – Producing simpler responses – Making erroneous responses – Ending acve parcipaon in the group communicaon

Methodology

• Collecng data from 500 English Usenet groups • Processing the data (using text analysis techniques) to idenfy replies to previous posts and threads – Interesng 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

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Findings

• Simpler Responses – Observed a decrease in complexity of messages (word count) as the size of the interacve 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 aend – On average, messages that seed discourse are shorter than those that fail to seed discourse • Ending acve parcipaon – The larger the number of individuals involved in the discourse, the less stable the populaon of acve parcipants.

Implicaons

• It is important to provide tools at a discourse level to help decrease the informaon overload • How to Focus aenon to a manageable set of posts – Idea 1: Recommender System – Idea 2: Social navigaon • Candidates for social promoon – Most recent posts? – Most highly rated posts? – Posts with most replies/comments? – How to avoid the “rich get richer” eﬀect?

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Community Energy: Comtella Forums

Social Network(ing) Sites

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Social Network Sites

• Web‐based services that allow individuals to: – construct a public or semi‐public proﬁle within a bounded system, – arculate a list of other users with whom they share a connecon, and – view and traverse their list of connecons 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 Deﬁnions

• A social network service focuses on building and reﬂecng of social networks or social relaons among people, e.g., who share interests and/or acvies. A social network service essenally consists of a representaon of each user (oen a proﬁle), his/her social links, and a variety of addional 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 somemes 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, acvies, events, and interests within their individual networks (Wikipedia, 2010)

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History

• The WELL (1985), Theglobe.com (1994), Geocies (1994), Tripod (1995)… – focused on chat‐room interacon – personal homepage publishing tools  precursor of Blogs • Classmates.com (1995), SixDegrees.com(1997) – focused on represenng the links between people – “friends lists” of email addresses – allowed creaon 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)

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MySpace

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Friendster

Facebook

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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)

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Odnoklassniki.ru

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

Webkinz: SN for kids

www.newwebkinzauctions.com/Getting-Started.htm

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Why SNS?

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

• Emoonal Support and informaon ﬁnding

• Maintaining social es and social searching

• Surveillance funcon

Surveillance as Awareness

• Aim to foster relaonship building by allowing users to track other members of their community. (A “surveillance” funcon ) – allows an individual to track the acons, 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” funcon of online systems – supports one’s ability to remain aware of increasing large and diverse oﬄine communies, thereby increasing social capital.

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Searching vs Browsing

• Social searching – invesgate speciﬁc people with whom they share an oﬄine connecon 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 arculate and make visible their social networks which are frequently between "latent es" (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some oﬄine connecon.

• Social networking sites – "Networking" emphasizes relaonship iniaon, oen between strangers.

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

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

• There seems to be lile “social browsing,” or searching for users online inially with the intenon of moving that relaonship 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 es) 2. Passive contact, social surveillance 3. Re‐acquiring lost contacts (build social es) 4. Communicaon (informaon, maintain social es) 5. Photographs (informaon source ) 6. Making new contacts

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Uses of SNS (6/8)

• Study 2: Idenfying uses and graﬁcaons • 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, occupaon. • Results: – Females visit more frequently – Younger users spent more me – Younger users have more friends – Users registered for longer me and with more frequent visits have more friends

Some conclusions

1.Diﬀerent goals for using FaceBook are reﬂected both in the usage paerns and privacy sengs. 2. Users want to control (restrict) the informaon they give away, but want to survey the informaon of others.

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Privacy Concerns about SNS

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

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

Infamous “Beacon” and Privacy

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

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

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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 adversers • http:// www.theregister.co.uk/ 2009/09/23/ facebook_beacon_die s/

FaceBook’s 3rd party applicaons • Opening APIs for 3rd party applicaons. – Great parcipaon, 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 …), contribung 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)

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The Future of Social ‐ Cyworld

• 20 Million daily users ‐ over 25 percent of the South Korean populaon 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

hp://english.ohmynews.com/arcleview/arcle_view.asp? menu=c10400&no=179108&rel_no=1&back_url

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What Facebook Could Become: XuQa

• 1M registered users • XuQa is purposefully racy, full of game‐like features • Game‐like social network => brings people back