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Google Plus, Minus Social Value

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Or: Facebook, Youth Culture, & the Success of Social Networks

This essay is some immediate thinking about Google+ that I’ve been throwing around for the past couple weeks. Context: I joined G+ in the first wave of invites, so I’ve been watching the service for what amounts to “a while.” Most of my observations below come from 1) my experience working with danah boyd on her research projects at Microsoft Research New England over the past year, and 2) my personal experience as a Facebook early adopter (ie., only college students) in 2005.

Introduction

I’ve read dozens of articles over the past few weeks about how Google Plus (hereafter Google+) presents a challenge to Facebook (and Twitter), but I’m here to say that Facebook will maintain its dominance over Google’s social competitor because of one reason: Facebook’s social value.

What do I mean by social value, especially now that social, social network, social graph, and other uses of the buzzword have infiltrated and inundated the tech industry and start-up sector? Instead of defining social value directly, let me position it up against another term: informational value. If we think of a communication technology having social value, the technology allows us to inform and be informed about matters relating to our identities and our relationships. Communication technologies also have informational values: that is, supplying relevant data, stories, and news that don’t necessarily reflect our interpersonal connections. A simple distinction between these two values might be illustrated like this:

Status update reflecting social value: “I ate a hamburger today at lunch with Mary.”
Status update reflecting informational value: “I ate lunch today at Five Guys, and it was really good! [link to website]“

So, let me propose this observation: In its current structure, Google+ has no social value. It appears to have a great potential for informational value. Yet because Facebook’s structure allows its users to derive a high social value from the platform. Facebook will continue to maintain a large user population that uses Facebook specifically for its social value.

This is not to say that Facebook has no informational value. Actually, over the years, it’s quite obvious that Facebook has moved its strategy from emphasizing social value to informational value. For instance, the dominance of the News Feed as a major hub for interaction and the eventually-prominent practice of sharing and gathering news and links means that more and more users have found Facebook to be a great platform for producing and gathering news and advice.

However, Facebook’s history tells us a lot about its social value, and an important demographic of Facebook users — namely American teenagers — illustrates why Google+ might not be adopted for the reasons most tech-savvy adults want.

Facebook & Social Value in Collegiate Life

Although a lot of people criticized The Social Network for warping the truth behind Facebook’s history, there are actually some really interesting points that are emphasized throughout the film that not many critics picked up on. One of the most important, I believe, is the importance of college networks to Facebook’s success. This scene in particular stood out to me, where Mark and his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Erica talk in Grendel’s Den (a local bar in Harvard Square):

Erica Albright: I have to go study.

Mark Zuckerberg: You don't have to study.

Erica Albright: [Exasperated and angry] Why do you keep saying I don't have to study?

Mark Zuckerberg: Because you go to BU!

Erica Albright: [Erica stares at him, furious]

I thought this joke was quite funny (disclaimer: I went to Boston University), but it also picks up on an important bit of Boston college culture that people who haven’t lived in the city don’t understand: networks between colleges are very important to student socialization. Each school is connected to each other through students’ IRL social networks.

The initial success of Facebook was built upon these collegiate connections. It’s readily apparent in The Social Network, when Mark explains the rollout strategy to Sean Parker at dinner: target universities developing their own Facebook-like online social networks by connecting all the colleges around them with Facebook. Of course, the key to student adoption of Facebook was contemporary collegiate youth culture itself: socialization over education, hook-up culture, cultural importance of parties. Another extremely important scene in The Social Network (again overlooked) is when Mark impulsively adds the “Relationship” status to users’ profile pages — important because it eventually played so a large role in college relationships (or time spent figuring out who was in one or who was single).

I bring up youth culture because for its first few years with college students — and eventually with high school students as well — Facebook played a gigantic social role in the lives of teenagers and young adults. Facebook connected youth, and we didn’t share links: we shared ourselves. The summer before I entered college, I spent countless hours looking through the “Boston University” network, searching out potential connections, figuring out who was in my dormitory and classes. Some of my friends even contacted random students and made friendships before school even started. The role of the profile in collegiate culture reigned supreme from around 2004 to 2008.

It’s also important to note that Facebook’s success within youth networks helped it dominate other services. MySpace’s popularity at the time took two paths: 1) those who were on MySpace saw value in Facebook’s clean interface and “safer” way for connecting real-life friendships with online relationships (and vice versa), and 2) those who were not using MySpace (like myself) saw immediate value in Facebook because it was a practical technology to organize the chaos of college life. MySpace’s demise began in 2008; the transition really took a hit as high school students began transitioning to Facebook in late 2006, who also saw it as a “less sketchy” online hangout spot (and the death knell truly rang in 2007 when the site opened up to anyone over age 13).

Today, a high majority of college and high school students maintain Facebook profiles. Students continue to structure their interpersonal relationships through Facebook: managing interesting, chatting with close friends, discovering gossip, bullying: all of which melds real-life with online life. This is especially pertinent for kids who don’t have as much mobility in their daily lives (eg., it’s difficult to hang out with friends after school), so many teens hit Facebook as a suitable replacement for the mall, park, library, etc.

Facebook Tensions: Adults & Differing Social Values

I’ve always had an issue with adults who say “I’m quitting Facebook; I don’t have a use for it.” (Sometimes this sentiment comes out as “I don’t like Facebook’s privacy issues. But it’s not like I had a use for it anyway.”) It especially irks me when these same adults chastise the younger generation for spending so much time on social network sites: what could kids possibly be doing on them? The answer is frequently “not much.” Teens are bored; Facebook provides them an outlet. But I realize that many adults see teens’ online social practices as similar to their own, which they are not. While it’s true that both kids and adults are constantly negotiating relationships with other people, students have infrastructure for those negotiations: schools. Schools continue to be the primary structure for many kids’ lives, and dynamics within schools heavily impact kids’ socialization. Adults may have something similar (like the workplace or an interest group), but youth interact with one another in school settings on a hyperdeterministic social level comparatively.

Even so, a lot of adults have managed to find similar social value in Facebook’s platform, primarily structured by interactions around the profile page: meeting old friends, keeping up to date about family, the social minutiae that make up everyday social life. But the tech-savvy adults who don’t find this value — the “I’m quitting Facebook”-ers — don’t because they have already established and maintained their personal networks in other spaces, usually email. It’s the same adults that were surprised about kids frequently using IM in the early 2000s — we teens hadn’t established networks yet, and IM was easier to keep on top of our friends… especially because AIM profiles in 2001 played the same role as Facebook profiles do now!

The ultimate issue with Facebook’s social value is its long-term sustainability. As we move through the rapidly-fluctuating phases of early life — from high school to college to young adulthood to 30+ — our social networks change with us. At the onset of Facebook, the social norm was to accept (almost) everybody you met in real life (in class, at a party, friends-of-friends) on Facebook. Why? It’s a difficult question, variable across different types of people. Personally, I’d wager it was half-cataloguing (contact info, keep track of people at college) and half-trend-setting (everyone Friends each other, so it’s easy to say “We’ll friend each other” after you meet someone). But over time, these saturated networks gave rise to issues, such as context collapse (of which Alice Marwick and danah have written extensively). In 2011, teens transitioning to college (the focus of Fred Stutzman’s work) must navigate a revised set of social norms for friending acquaintances; those exiting college face an entirely different set of norms. Teens may transition to email to maintain their connections in the work and professional environment; if not, we’ll probably see a mish-mash of various technologies struggling to maintain coherency.

Informational Value: Twitter as “Social Network”

I’ve talked a lot about social value, but let me tackle the concept of informational value before discussing Google+. The occasional comparison to Twitter is something I also want to address in this essay.

If we consider Facebook to be the purveyor of social value, Twitter embodies informational value. Twitter does away with the profile structure (maintaining only minimal details) in favor of sharing information: it curates an environment that is more news and links than personal, quotidian updates. Twitter also creates a physical structure of equality: every user’s tweet takes up at most around 250 pixels of space in the timeline. The maximum of 140 characters per message enforces brevity but also form: you get headlines rather than details, allowing the user to follow up on anything interesting after the initial glance by clicking a link (if provided). Facebook embodies similar design principles: matching profiles, similar updates (with separate Note pages for longer mental expulsions), equivalent photo albums. And as I stated before, over time, Facebook has attempted to force the emergence of more informational value by de-emphasizing the profile in favor of the Newsfeed.

Twitter, though, provides limited social value. The platform does not do a good job at helping users to manage interpersonal relationships or personal information (about yourself or others). While at their simplest, both Twitter and Facebook let a user manage “status updates,” but Twitter’s role equates more to blogging as Facebook feels more similar to instant messaging. Twitter, therefore, acts as a social network for managing users-as-information-carriers.

Google Plus: Poor Social Value, Lacking Informational Value

So let’s finally talk a bit about Google+. My argument is two-fold: Google+ has poor social value yet also lacks enough informational value. Google+ will probably not overtake Facebook as a platform for interpersonal socialization (for those that prefer that use of a social network), nor will it replace Twitter, because its design is not as streamlined and optimized for fast information filtering and curation.

It’s clear that Google+ was constructed for two reasons: 1) to maintain Google’s social graph as a valuable asset that could unite the company’s products, and 2) to create an appealing alternative to Facebook that approaches issues and ideologies of privacy in a more practical way. Millions of users have Gmail accounts and curate contact lists on Android phones; additionally, millions of other users (I can’t estimate the overlap) are concerned about Facebook’s past privacy debacles and the company’s general ideology to maintain a “public” culture.

But as much as the publicity/privacy issue is a major player in the push for popularity of this new platform, I don’t think that’s what’s ultimately at stake — especially if Google wants to reach the same level of use that Facebook currently boasts. The primary issue that Google+ should be concerned about is the balance between social value and information value.

Google+ currently features a profile system, but the profile is de-emphasized in favor of the Stream (informational > social). Also, there’s an issue with discovering streams: namely, you need to know the person (ie., have their email address) in order for them to appear as a potential contact (at least initially: eventually you can find other people through friends’ profiles or as content is shared by your friends). The conflict therefore is that the social network is built on existing relationships and hinders discovering new people: in either informational or social circumstances.

It goes without saying that one of the most important features to Facebook’s success was the Wall on each profile. Without a (public or private*) one-to-one communication affordance, every piece of information dispersed through Google+ is broadcast to the masses. The issue with broadcast, though, is that even with a system build around privacy (Circles), various users can follow other users, so one user can have thousands of followers (à la Twitter) but no understanding of who is actually following them or why. It’s a complicated mish-mash of Facebook and Twitter, but I don’t necessarily understand the full purpose of the combinations.

Overall, the people-you-already-know limitation, I think, is the largest barrier to participation on Google+. It also doesn’t help that the varying size of posts makes gleaning information from the Stream very difficult; in other words, Google+ does Twitter worse than Twitter.

*Apparently a private messaging system will be rolling out soon.

Conclusion: Google Plus & the Cultural Issue of Early Adopters

It’s clear that Google+ is still in beta: one quote of current user demographics set them at 88% male. It’s also clear that the invitation push went out through Google employees to their friends in a wave disseminating from the Silicon Valley tech industry. Are there issue with this? Most definitely. I think it’s actually worse than a Quora situation, which is a hangout for tech geeks to get their celebrity on (namely hope that tech industry elites answer their questions). The early adopters will shape the focus of Google+. And the fact that Facebook had one of the most unique early adopter communities (all college students) meant that it evolved in very particular and peculiar ways.

As I mentioned in the previous section, I don’t understand the intentions of the combination of Facebook’s and Twitter’s features. If we were to look back at social network site history, all the way to Friendster, we can see similar patterns in the initial structure: making connections with people you know already. But the platform allowed the discovery and interaction of unknown users, such that practices of flirtation and dating emerged within a very local context (namely, San Francisco; at least initially).

By designing for strict privacy, Google+ inhibits social value to emerge from the platform, unlike with Facebook, where the initial publicity within a structured social context (colleges) allowed for social norms to develop. Probably the looming issue is the consolidation of such social contexts outside of privileged and structured spaces.

Teens as Culture Hackers; or, Facebook Relationships vs. the Photo Recommendation System

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In the spring of 2010, Facebook experimented with a new feature called Photo Memories. Basically, the interface places old photos on the right side of your browser in a sidebar module while you explore various Facebook pages. It’s an interesting feature, because it directly conflicts with the attention economy that Facebook has cultivated, where users sit for hours refreshing their Newsfeeds, checking for updates from their friends. And occasionally it’s nice to come across an old photo long forgotten, especially if it’s a hilarious or memory-worthy photograph.

But there’s been a controversy in the relationship arena. Since the feature had been implemented, a large number of users have been faced with seeing photos of their current significant others, but those pictures are old memories of when said S.O.s were photographed with ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. This InsideFacebook article about the feature lists comments about how annoying and painful these photo recommendations are. A Facebook group called I HATE PHOTO MEMORIES was created to protest the implementation internally. Even my own girlfriend has complained to me about Facebook recommending her photos of me with former exes.

Recently, though, Facebook solved the Photo Memories That You’d Rather Not Remember problem by implementing a change in the recommendation system, so that any recommended photographs would not include users with whom you have had a Facebook relationship. According to a second InsideFacebook article, Facebook’s photo project manager, Sam Odio, commented, “Hi All – I’d like to let you know that we’re listening to your feedback. The photo memories product no longer shows tagged photos of your friends if you were previously in a relationship with them.” So it seems like the problem has been solved.u

Not quite. Let’s take a step back and look at profiles as spaces for teen culture to see the new conflict at work with Facebook’s “solution.”

Since I’m working under danah boyd at Microsoft Research, I’m going to draw from a lot of her writing to tease out the issue.

danah’s written a lot on identity creation online, specifically within the context of teenagers: how they form relationships with friends, how those relationships manifest online, etc. Opposed to that, she’s also written a fair amount on user configurability: that is, how mediated online platforms, like Facebook, structure what a user can do with the system they’re given. For example, Facebook configures a user’s presentation of him- or herself by allowing only certain information to be placed in certain areas (Hobbies go here, Political Affiliation goes here, Jobs go here, etc.). Of course, these two issues — contextual creation versus structured configuration — are at odds with each other, and usually the former dominates the latter. And because a lot of users — especially teens — don’t want to be corralled into the limits of an egocentric social networking site’s platform, they tend to go out of their way to “hack” the profile system, either literally through code (eg., MySpace profiles) or culturally. And it is this last point that conflict with Facebook’s solution.

The cultural behavior of users crafting the visibility of their friends in their profiles is an interesting point of contention on Facebook. One of MySpace’s major features was its Top 8 list, where a user could list eight of his or her friends out of the aggregate list of hundreds. Top 8 is important particularly for younger users, whose daily lives are consumed with fashioning their identities around the fluctuating relationships they share with friends, family, coworkers, teachers, adults, etc., because in choosing eight “favorite” people, the list defines a part of who they are.

Facebook, though, does not have a Friend-parsing widget like MySpace. Some third-party apps were developed to enable those sort of options, but the low level of adoption across a social network site like Facebook — especially one that now boasts over 500 million users — means an insignificant module like that would not hold its popularity over a long period of time. So a question remains: how do teens situate themselves in relation to their friends on Facebook, when it’s not a central part of the platform?

One of the more recent behaviors in response to this question is the case of Facebook siblings and relatives. A user — most likely a teenager — will invite his or her closest friends to be a “sibling,” which means that the friend’s profile is linked on the user’s profile in a very distinct and visible position on the “Info” page. It’s a trend among a lot of high school students that wish to make their friends more a part of their Facebook identity. And more often than not — or at least it’s my assumption — teens will list their friends instead of their actual parents and siblings, to retain a barrier between their social lives familial lives.

But the ability to list relatives is a fairly recent addition to the Facebook profile. Before that, the only basic feature to show distinctly a relationship between one user and another was the Relationship Status.

And I hope by now that just by mentioning Relationship Status, you understand where I’m going with this.

When I was in college, only a couple years ago (and let’s be honest — it’s still a huge factor today with all teenagers), the Facebook Relationship Status changed youth culture radically. That you could see if an acquaintance was single or taken, or who they were dating, or who they recently broke up with, and then also comment on all those developments, was a game changer in college, and then high school, culture. But the Relationship Status wasn’t necessarily used for relationships. A good number of my friends would set themselves up “in a relationship” with a best friend. I even know a couple people that are dating others, but list a different friend in their Relationship Status. So there was and still is a significant trend in pairing yourself up with a buddy on Facebook, even if you’re not dating.

So this interesting bit of youth culture immediately conflicts with the changes that Facebook implemented to avoid current significant others to see their partners’ exes. If you’re “dating” a friend on Facebook — just so that your acquaintances will understand that you’re best friends — Facebook will never recommend a photo of your friend if you cancel that relationship.

This social media “cultural hacking” takes place on all sorts of Web platforms, in direct opposition to any sort of “user configuration” by which the platform intends each and every user to abide. For example, YouTube implemented the ability to add links to YouTube videos, but some users use those links to combat the “Recommended Videos” displayed in the right-column module, or we can even look at the change in video form that has developed from YouTube users including three different optional endings that a viewer can choose to click on. But the implications of user configuration on youth culture are even more interesting, because thousands of teens growing up with Facebook and other Web 2.0 technology are shaping their identities in part because of the social interactions and connections they maintain on these websites. And no matter the mantra that companies give to users — such as Facebook being a place where users should share everything — the users will tend to behave differently.

A New Perspective on Viral Videos: FCKH8

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How does your video spread around the internet? Do people talk about it? Do they share links via email? Do they post it on Facebook? Or…

Do they upload it?


Are you one of those fuckwads who has a fucking problem with my gay son getting married?

FCKH8.com is a new initiative by non-profit media campaigner Luke Montgomery in support of LGBT issues. The website gives a big, ol’ Fuck You to the haters of gay marriage and the proponents of denying gay couples benefits like health insurance.

I came across FCKH8 because a gay friend from high school had posted the video to his Facebook wall, and it had turned up in my newsfeed. The bright pink background caught my eye, and the “You will be offended.” tagline inspired the final clickthrough.

Although the embed contains enough expletives to ward off some viewers, especially if they’re viewing in their workplace, it’s a professionally produced video: great aesthetic quality, good caliber of sound, and an energetic cast that gets the point of “screwing hate” across strongly and proudly.

And the marketing has done pretty well so far. Spanning across all of the major sharing sites — Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon — the pink FCKH8 message has already as of yesterday raised close to $30,000 selling T-shirts and other schwag.

But the most interesting part of the FCKH8 campaign is the video strategy. And this strategy is bringing a whole new perspective to how we think about virality, spreadability, whatever you want to call it.

The FCKH8 channel hosts two official videos on their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1amIrR-VMAI (“NSFW”) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwLaOtOlQ8 (censored).

However, yesterday, the FCKH8 Twitter account announced that the video had been flagged for removal: “YOUTUBE CENSORS: H8ers campaigned to flag R main video. Uploaded again! Share the FCK out of it!,” seemingly by anti-GLBT protestors.

The interesting note to be made about this message, though, is that “Share the FCK out of it” meant more than just “Share the video, embed it, send the link to your friends, etc.” Instead, dozens of users were inspired and allowed to reupload the original FCKH8 video on their own YouTube channels. Searching “FCKH8″ on YouTube yields “96″ videos, most of which are the original with its iconic hot pink background, with a sprinkling of other response and support vids.


To which I have to say… Fuck. Yes.

When we think about online video strategy by brands, entertainment companies, and producers, we tend to focus on two elements:

1. A piece of media uploaded in lieu of the copyright holders is considered by them, and then — given a positive reception of the illegal uploading — allowed to remain online, an existence from which the copyright holders can reap additional monetary benefits (usually in the form of ads).

2. A piece of media is intended to be spread by users, moving from the “influentials” to their followers and hopefully spreading amongst diverse communities. But this usually includes spreading one piece of media through multiple groups. If there are multiple pieces of media to be spread, companies tend to follow some sort of “transmedia” initiative, where the brand or media is adapted — or sometimes just copied without any change — to other media forms (such as from TV to film to webisode, etc.).

But with this FCKH8 case study, I believe it’s one of the first times when an initiative to spread has allowed users to copy the original media and subsequently spread it, be in via the same or entirely new communities and networks. If we think in terms of the current discourse on piracy, this is astounding.

What makes this case study doubly interesting is that we’re talking about collaborative disruption. Although this initiative is small (less than 100 videos), they are in practice bombing YouTube with repetitive information. Yes, it’s in the face of censorship — although it appears that YouTube has collaborated with the videomakers to reupload the original video after it was flagged for removal. And we can’t necessarily call it “bombing,” because all of the videos either have the same title or append a [MIRROR] tag to the video. In other words, it wouldn’t be difficult for YouTube to suppress the collective action.

But we can compare this to the DDoSing recently by 4chan against the MPAA and other anti-piracy websites or even Justin Bieber fans taking over Twitter’s trending topics (and Bieber’s subsequent complaint about the removal of his fans’ signs of devotion).

Of course, the benefit of FCKH8′s grassroots mass uploading is the eventual spread of a meaningful human rights campaign. Go check out the video, and share it with your friends!