Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Paul Adams

Paul Adams — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:04:59 GMT

Thanks for the comments!

@Chris

”...the ability to recognize and target interactions based on how well people may know each other is a pipe dream.”

I don’t think it is a pipe dream. Many companies are working on building tools that extract social graph data and make that available to others. Many research studies have been conducted on Twitter users and usage by using their API to access their data about who is connected to whom.

“I find many of these providers/vendors/etc expect us to be wowed just to be able to add *friends* or *colleagues* because Facebook and LinkedIn do it.”

I think it is up to us to educate others about different kinds of relationships. We need to show people how having one big friends group doesn’t reflect life offline, and presents as many problems as opportunities. It is up to us to push this and get people thinking about doing more than what exists today. You may be tied to a certain technology now, but we need to make sure that people are informed enough so that they might make different decisions next time.

Paul Adams — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:45:05 GMT

Thanks again for the comments!

@Sriyansa Many people use weak ties to describe our interactions online with people we don’t know. I’m glad that my distinction of weak and temporary ties is useful for you, it has certainly helped me in my work.

@Chris I think there is a great opportunity for us to rethink how we represent our relationships in our digital tools. Imagine if we replaced/supplemented our alphabetical lists with representations like you created in your exercise. We could learn a lot of new things.

The relationships between strength of tie and frequency of communication is an interesting one, and it comes up in research. There are people in many of our lives that we don’t communicate with frequently, yet would turn to for support in an instant if we needed to. These are also the people that we meet, and despite not having seen each other in many months, it feels immediately natural. People describe it as immediately feeling “like the old times” and “like you’d just seen each other a few days ago”. So frequency is a good signal for strength of tie, but it doesn’t always show us the full picture.

Paul Adams — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:10:59 GMT

@John “So in some ways I agree with Chris Avore, many enterprise companies are buying products and expecting amazing results. But that is not happening.”
I’m really interested to hear what their goals are. What does “amazing results” mean to them?

@Chris It’s interesting how expectations of how communication technology should be used changes over time, and between demographics and cultures. One nice example is how many younger people feel that calling someone on the phone is rude, and that you should send a text message first to make sure they are available to chat.
Here’s another anecdote: I was in China doing research with a merchant store owner. When we were there, a guy walked into the store and introduced himself to the store owner as a new potential business partner. He had traveled 200 miles to make this unannounced visit. When we asked him why he hadn’t called ahead to introduce himself, he said that the first contact between potential business partners must be face to face in order to build trust between both parties immediately. For him, no communication technology would suffice.

@Steve. Absolutely agree re. nomenclature. This is also a problem when we talk about “social”. The social web. Making things “more social”. Often, people have very different ideas in their head when they use that word.

@Khalid I think the key here is how much transparency your system has. Sometimes less transparency for one party is better. Examples where this has been done well include Facebook’s “Ignore” a friend request. People need to know that they can ignore someone without the other person finding out. For many actions people need to take to define relationships, they need the action to remain private. Our real life relationships are asymmetrical, and our online systems need to be designed to reflect that.

Paul Adams — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:57:20 GMT

@Adam, the orange clock icon is to indicate that that person is using Google Talk (instant messenger) and is currently idle. If they are active, the icon changes to green.

Paul Adams — Fri, 07 May 2010 04:35:08 GMT

@Znok I worked on Buzz during development and continue to work on it as part of my job today (I also work on YouTube and other social initiatives). One part of Buzz we worked hard on was making it easy to share with groups of strong ties. We continue to try and improve it. Unfortunately I’m not in a position to talk in detail about it currently.

@Eric Thanks! We do have very small groups of people we communicate with regularly. This pattern is very consistent in our research. There is also some more detail in this recent presentation I gave:
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/bridging-the-gap-between…