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Social Networks Lead Zeitgeist

Google released its annual tally of search terms for 2009 yesterday. Although “michael jackson” was the fastest rising global search term on the Google Zeitgeist list, it’s more telling that the other top five terms were all social networks. Slots two through five were occupied by “facebook”, “tuenti”, “twitter” and “sanalika”. Tuenti is a Spanish version of Facebook and Sanalika is a Turkish virtual world similar to Second Life.

Under the category Around the Home, Google listed the top How-To queries. These requests for instruction don’t change much from year to year, so it was no surprise that “how-to kiss” topped the list again this year. Here’s the whole list:

1. how to kiss
2. how to draw
3. how to knit
4. how to crochet
5. how to flirt
6. how to meditate
7. how to hack
8. how to sing
9. how to dance
10. how to fight

Google Trends provides more information about the popularity of this query over time. Apparently, curiosity about the osculatory arts remained constant until the middle of 2008 when “how to kiss” queries took off, as the chart below shows. Is there a correlation between recession and kissing? Well, they say the best things in life are free.

Growth of "how to kiss" query over time

FCC Endorses Net Neutrality

FCC chair Julius Genachowski laid out the principles of Net Neutrality in a speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday.

As the Washington Post reported, this is just the beginning of the process. However, the net neutrality guidelines are being drafted in response to moves already made by ISPs to curtail service. “This is not about protecting the Internet against imaginary dangers,” Genachowski said. “We’re seeing the breaks and cracks emerge, and they threaten to change the Internet’s fundamental architecture of openness.”

The Wall Street Journal covered the reaction of telecom lobbyists, most of whom were not happy.

Brookings has the full transcript of the speech and video on their events page.

Facebook and the Fleeting Crowd

Trendmongers at the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have noticed a funny smell at Facebook lately — the unique odor given off by the death of an expired fad. Virginia Heffernan’s piece in the NYT Magazine, Facebook Exodus, put it most succinctly: “Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit?”

It wouldn’t be the first time a world-uniting social network was reduced to a footnote in the annals of internet history (remember Friendster or Dodgeball?). Creating something as ephemeral and fragile as a community can be a tricky thing. Putting a value on that social grouping is even more difficult.

Depending on who you talked to, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal of a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo in 2006 was either a stroke of genius, or an act of incredible hubris by a kid who didn’t know any better. A June 2009 article in Wired, The Great Wall of Facebook, made much of the potential revenues of the network with 200 million registered users, but also noted that Facebook burned through an estimated $75 million in 2008, not including the capital it took in from investors like Microsoft and Digital Sky Technologies. The actual worth of the privately held company has left many analysts guessing, as noted in Facebook is Worth … What, Exactly?

In the real world, community is usually defined as a group of people living in the same place or sharing common interests. Online, common interests typically supplant location.  Other characteristics of a sustainable online community are:

• It fulfills a need for information or support; it must sustain interest
• It fosters interaction and dialog
• It allows users to control their own self-representation, or identity, through profiles or other means
• It has some moderation or self-regulation
• Some would also add that a successful community must have a purpose; it must reward the time put into it.

Arguably, Facebook has all of the elements of a successful online community. In its first draft, Facebook was tied to the real-world community of the Harvard campus, a group with shared interests and extensive offline interactions. As it expanded off campus, Facebook added great functionality, making it really easy for anybody to set up a personal web page and share photos and stories with their friends. Giving users the ability to accept or deny friend requests also promoted a sense of control and self-management over one’s social sphere (even while forcing some awkward choices).

So what has gone wrong at Facebook? Maybe it’s a victim of its own popularity. Clay Shirky in Communities, Audience and Scale (2002) makes the point that when communities grow beyond a small group in which most members know each other, they become audiences. This would account for some of the creep-factor felt by Facebookers today: the most active members seem to be performing their lives instead of actually living them.

Or maybe Facebook no longer provides much useful information. Maybe your extended circle of friends isn’t interested in what you had for breakfast, the fact that you’re hungover, or that the Quentin Tarantino character you most resemble is Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction.

Perhaps Facebook fails on the point of purpose: it just doesn’t reward the time you put into it. Or it could be just the fickle nature of online attention: Facebook has lost its cachet and the digerati have moved on.

Google Earth Spurs Spy Hobbyists

Totalitarian states beware: Google is watching you. As reported in The Age of Melbourne today, amateur spies are puzzling over a large structure spotted in the Burmese jungle.

The structure, which looks like an Olympic swimming pool, is a big shed partly buried in the ground. Speculation is that the building may be a staging site for Burma’s nascent nuclear program.

Perhaps more startling is the discovery of an “open source military analysis community”, exemplified by the Arms Control Wonk blog. We’re not sure if this sort of volunteerism is a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly demonstrates how new tools can influence human behavior.

Social Media Defined

Couldn’t resist this concise commentary on recent social media developments by DespairWear. Naturally, the format for this missive is a T-shirt.

Anti-social media