The Real Life Social Network v2

THE REAL LIFE
SOCIAL NETWORK
Hi everyone, thanks for coming.

@padday

So my name is Paul Adams and I work in the UX team at Google. Iʼm the user research lead
for social, and work on things like Buzz and YouTube. I spend a lot of my time doing research
with people on how they use social media. I sit down with people, and have them map out their
social network for me, and we look at how they use tools like email, Facebook, Twitter, their
phone, and so on. One of the things we talk about is the differences between their social
network online, and their social network ofﬂine. Today, Iʼm going to talk about some of the
things weʼve learned over the past few years, what it means for the future of the web, and
some tips for design.
Before I get down into some detail about social networks, I want to start by telling you a story
from our research.

Debbie

I want to start by telling you a story about Debbie, a girl we did research with. Debbie has lots
of different groups in her life.

Her friends from when she lived in LA

her friends from San Diego, where she lives now.

And Debbie is big into swimming, she trains ten year old kids competitive swimming, and has
groups around the kids and her fellow trainers.

In LA, some of her best friends work in a gay bar. They miss her being around, and she misses
them,

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/kevingoebel/4487661674/

so they share photos on Facebook of wild nights in the bar.

She loves these photos, and often comments on them.

Now, the 10 year old kids she teaches are also on Facebook, and they have “friended” Debbie.

When we were doing research with Debbie, we were asking her about her usage of Facebook
and she was showing us the things she does.

Debbie commented on Brianʼs photo.

In the middle of the session, she realized, for the ﬁrst time, that the ten year old kids could see
the photos from the gay bar.
Not surprisingly, Debbie was very upset. She was upset at herself for not realizing, and at the
system for letting it happen.

Facebook itself is not the problem here. The problem here is that these are different parts of
Debbieʼs life that would never have been exposed to each other ofﬂine were linked online.

ONLINE OFFLINE

The problem is that the social networks weʼre creating online donʼt match the social networks
we already have ofﬂine. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.

SOCIAL WEB
CONNECTED
RELATIONSHIPS
INFLUENCE
IDENTITY
PRIVACY
Iʼm going to talk about 6 things today. Iʼm going to start by talking about how the web is
fundamentally changing.
The real life social network. How people are connected to each other offline, and what that
means for their behaviour online.
Relationships. We all have very different relationships with the people in our life and designing
for them is very different.
Influence. How people influence each other, and how that is driven by the structure of our
social network.
Identity. Why identity is a cornerstone of the social web.
And last not absolutely not least - Privacy. Why itʼs critical to give people control over their
data.

THE SOCIAL
WEB IS NOT
GOING AWAY

The social web is not a fad, and itʼs not going away. Itʼs not an add-on to the web as we know it
today.
Itʼs a fundamental change, a re-architecture, and in hindsight its evolution is obvious.

The web is
undergoing a
fundamental
change
Make no mistake about this.
Everyone in this room will need to learn how to design social features on websites.
Whether you like it or not.

1 2 3

The web was originally built to link static documents together (left), but evolved to incorporate
social media (center), and weʼre now seeing a web built around people, where their proﬁles
and content are moving with them as they visit different websites (right).

The toolbar along the top of the New York Times site is an early example of where the web is
headed. Sites we visit will have our identity and social network with us, showing us the activity
on that site from people in our network.

The Real Life Social Network v2

So youʼre going to appear as your Facebook identity on this Government website. Your proﬁle
follows you, and your network of connections follows you.

Hereʼs another example from Yelp. My identity and friends from Facebook are here on Yelp.

When we use search engines today, itʼs a pretty solitary experience. We get millions of web
pages in our results, yet we donʼt see any other people. But notice how often we send other
people links to what we found, search in the company of others, and talk about our search
results when we meet.

Tweet
Review

And now something is happening. Weʼre starting to see social interactions appear in search.

Buy this? No.

People are increasingly using the web to get the information they need from each other, rather
than from businesses.

?

People are increasingly likely to ﬁnd out about products and brands from their friends rather
than from your business. It means that it is much harder to control how people ﬁrst come to
experience your messages.

You should come to our
restaurant, itʼs delicious!

This restaurant is average,
service was slow.

service was slow.

Paul has been here three times
in the last two weeks.

You should come to our
Business
restaurant, itʼs delicious!

This restaurant is average, Stranger
service was slow.

Friend
service was slow.

Paul has been here three times Friend
in the last two weeks. of friend

This isnʼt just true for restaurants. Itʼs true for every business. Yelp might have chosen to
integrate with Facebook, and you may choose not to, but when integration is controlled in the
browser, this is out of your control.

We're also seeing a much bigger shift in how people spend their time online.
People are spending much more time interacting with other people, and much less time
consuming content from websites. This shift is not about any one particular social network. It's
about people connecting to each other online.

So this shift is much greater than any one social network, and much more complicated than
deciding where the 'share this' buttons go. Almost all the sites and apps we design from now
on will have embedded social features.

Itʼs already happening. In the future weʼll know things like who out of our friends has bought
this bag, who has bought this brand, who bought competitor brands, what do people think of
this brand and weʼll have ways to communicate with them to ﬁnd out more. Understanding
sociability will become a core requirement for designing online. Almost all of us will need to
become skilled in social web design.

Controlled

Open

The social web, and all social media that operate within it, is a way of thinking as opposed to a
new channel. Itʼs not about sales, or ads, or click-through rates. Itʼs about pursuing
relationships and fostering communities of consumers. Itʼs about rethinking how you make
plans when your customers are in the center and in control.

Understand
behavior, not
technology

When thinking about how the web is changing, many people focus on the technology. How
many people have heard of Foursquare?
People are using technologies every day that didnʼt exist a few years ago. The rapid pace of
change means that businesses
focus on what technology or application is coming next. But the people using it donʼt care
about the technology; they care about the communication that the technology enables.

New technology doesnʼt change how our brains work. Social networks are not new. For
thousands of years, people have formed into groups, built strong and weak relationships with
others, formed allegiances, and spread rumor and gossip.
The emergence of the social web is simply our online world catching up with our ofﬂine world.
As technology changes the tools we use to communicate, we still use the same behavior
patterns that we evolved over those thousands of years.

No explicit goals

Focus on motivation

There are two problems with focusing on technology.

174,340 fans
Now what?

The ﬁrst is that people often don't know what they are going to do with the things they build.
There are so many Facebook fan pages with hundreds of thousands of followers yet nothing is
happening. So 100,000 people became a fan of yours on Facebook. Now what? This is the fan
page for the magazine seventeen. There are 174,000 fans but no conversation. You need to
look at things like Facebook fan pages and think: “How is this going to fundamentally improve
my relationship with my customers?”

What are you doing?

I’m social networking!

The second problem is more subtle, and it's complicated and messy so people tend to ignore
it.
When have you ever heard this? People donʼt say things like this when they are on social
networks.

What are you doing?

end!
I’m checking out th e photos from last week

I’m social networking!

They say things like “Iʼm checking out what Dave did last night, or Iʼm checking out the photos
from last weekend, or Iʼm checking out what my friends in London have been up to.” The
problems weʼre dealing with are social science problems, not technology problems. The
technology may be changing fast but the underlying human motivations are changing very
slowly, and in many places not at all. We need to ﬁrst understand what is motivating people to
use these services. Not jump on the latest social networking bandwagon.

Social networking is a
means to an end.

You need to understand
what the end is.

Focus on what motivates people to use new technology. Technologies will come and go, but
the fundamental social behavior patterns of people will remain the same. A better long term
strategy for business is to understand peopleʼs motivations for using new technologies, and not
the technologies themselves.

Understanding
sociability is
complex

Understanding the end is not simple. In fact, it's very complex. I'm going to try and map out
some key behaviors that matter.
If you come away from this talk thinking that designing for the social web is complicated, that's
a good thing. It is! We don't have to understand it all today, we just need to start with a solid
foundation from which to build.

Social
networks are
not new.

The most important thing to know about social networks is that they are not new.

OMG!

http://lucasgalo.ﬁles.wordpress.com/2009/01/h-and-g-lg.jpg

They have existed for almost as long as we have. As we saw with Debbie, our online social
networks are simply a crude representation of our ofﬂine social networks. We have a long way
to go before getting anywhere close to the complexity of real life. As designers, this is a great
opportunity. Let's start by looking at how we represent our relationships online.

People donʼt
have one group
of friends.

Friends. When we sign up, most social networks ask us to create our "friends" group.

Making people create one big friends group has many of the same problems as planning
seating arrangements at your wedding. This is my seating arrangement at my wedding.
Suddenly all these people from different parts of your life will be in the same room together.
Anyone who is married and went through this will remember how stressful it is.

Yet that's what is happening online!

Everyone being shoved into this big bucket.
People donʼt have one group of friends.

People have
multiple
independent
groups of
friends.
Ofﬂine people have multiple groups of friends that form around life stages and shared
experiences.

So with Debbie, we already saw what this looks like.

friends from when I lived in New York

And the most common group is family.

Shared
experience
Lifestage

Hobby

Over the past three years, we've done an exercise with many of the people we bring in for
research. We ask them to map out their social network, to put people on post-it notes and
arrange them in whatever way makes sense.

How re al world
l networ ks work
socia

Weʼve learned a lot about how real world social networks work

US, UK, China, Japan.
The similarity we see is remarkable.

3 4

2

5
1

6
People tend to have between 4 and 6 groups,

4
3
2 3
1
3 2
1
1
2 1
2
1 4
3 3
2 1 5 6
4
2 3 7
4 9
5
8
6 7 8

each of which tends to have between 2 and 10 people.

So 4-6 groups of less than 10 people that form around life stages.
One interesting thing about these groups is that they are very independent. When people map
out their social network, we often hear stories about how they tried to mix the groups,

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sp00/3536211311/

For example, it was their birthday, they had a party

College
Friends


Their college friends came

New York
friend


And their New York friends came. Heʼs looking a bit awkward back there.
These stories never end well!

Despite trying to mix them, peopleʼs groups remain independent.

One friends
group means
mixed up
conversations.

I’m going out clubbing
tonight! Yeeaaah!!!! :-)

In research, we often ask people about the updates they post. We probe them about their
motivation for posting them, and whether they are aimed at anyone in particular.

It turns out that often, people have an intended audience, and it's usually a small subset of
their contacts.

Who likes status
updates about
what other people
had for lunch?

I posted about my meal while on
vacation in New York. My intention
was to share with the people who I
had spoken with about the meal...but it
is hard to share it with specific
people on Facebook.

I'm sure we've all been in a situation where we're looking at something someone posts on
Facebook and are wondering why they would post something so odd. But it probably wasn't for
you. So next time you see this, consider that it may be directed at other people.

The word
Friends is
unhelpful

Not only do we not have one group of friends, but the word "friends" itself, is actually pretty
unhelpful.

Friends

George Bush and Tony Blair are friends. But that's not the same as my friend who I know since
I was ﬁve who now babysits my children.

In our research, people named the groups of friends

342 groups

we've looked at 342 groups,

12% “... friends”

Only 43 - 12% - contained the term "friends".

3% “Friends”

Only 3% were called "friends".

85% of the
groups of friends
did not contain the
word “friends”

That leaves 85% of groups without this term. So clearly this is not how people describe the
groups in their life.

61% of the group
names were
unique.

People's groups are very diverse. 61% of the group names were unique.
Clearly, “friends” is not how people describe their friends.

Not new

X
Mixed
conversations

How are people
connected
around your
business?
Avoid the use of the word friend for connecting people. Understand how people describe their
relationships for the behavior you’re trying to encourage.

Allow people to create custom names for groups, and allow people to rename the group if it
changes over time.

Support side conversations. Allow people to fork conversation threads with a smaller number
of people.

HOW PEOPLE
RELATE TO
EACH OTHER

People have
different types
of relationships

We have different relationships with different people and are closer to some people than
others. Each relationship between two people is unique.

Although our groups of friends are small, usually containing less than 10 people, not all
members of the group are equal.

We are closer to some than others.

We trust some people in a group on one set of topics, and others on a different set. We trust
on of our friends more on good places to eat, another on good places to go on vacation.

Think of some of the people in your life. Maybe some close friends. Think of some people
you've known a long time.

This might all sound obvious, but it has profound effects on our social behavior, online and
ofﬂine. And we often donʼt consider these effects when we're designing.

All our “friends” are treated equally on social networks, and all our contacts appear
alphabetically and equal in our mobile phones.

Designing for
different types
of relationships

Let's think a bit more about different types of relationships.

Here's an example. Think about Instant Messaging. People's chat roster contains people they
are close to, and people they are not so close to. They are all there, one big group. IM lists are
not designing to support different types of relationships.

Wife
Not sure

Friend

This is my wife, this is a friend of a friend, and this is someone Iʼm not sure I know. So people
have this list, and they are worried that someone they don't want to talk to might see that they
are online and say hello.

So they turn themselves invisible. Everyone in their list sees them as ofﬂine. This is broken.
This is a broken user experience. It's broken because the people they care about, people that
they would welcome a chat with, also see that they are 'ofﬂine'.

I think really carefully
before posting my status.

This problem isnʼt just limited to IM, we see it on social networks too, people self-censor all the
time.

A good
framework exists
around designing
for relationships

We actually have a framework for thinking about, and designing for, our different relationships.
For decades, people have spoken about strong and weak ties. There is an abundance of
research on strong and weak ties.

Strong ties are
the people you
care about most.

Strong ties are the people you care about most. Your best friends. Your family. People often
refer to strong ties as their “circle of trust.” We rely on strong ties for emotional support
throughout life. Research has shown that maintaining our strong ties is important for our well-
being. People with strong friendship bonds have lower incidents of heart disease, and get
fewer colds and cases of the ﬂu.

How many
strong ties does
the average
American have?

A study of 3000 randomly chosen Americans showed that the average American has just four
strong ties. Most had between two and six.

How many
people do
Americans have
that they speak to
or meet at least
weekly?

Another study of 1,178 adults found that on average, people had about 10 friends they meet or
speak with at least weekly.

On Facebook,
how many people
do users interact
with regularly?

Average of 130
Facebook friends

Only interact regularly
with 4 to 6

Many research studies have shown that the vast majority of usage on social networks is with
small numbers of strong ties. The average number of friends on Facebook is 130, and many
users have many more. Yet despite having hundreds of friends, most people on Facebook only
interact regularly with 4 to 6 people.

In another study, researchers analyzed all the photographs posted on Facebook pages in one
college. When they looked at how many friends people had (based on who was in their
photos), the average was 6.6

80%

Strong ties also dominate phone usage. 80% of phone calls are made to the same 4 people.

80%

80% of Skype calls are made to the same 2 people.

A study in the 1970s showed that the majority of phone calls were to people who live within ﬁve
miles of the caller's home.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/molemaster/3491059121/

And studies in online gaming show that gamers are most often playing with strong ties who
they already know.

Buy this OK

Strong ties often wield the most inﬂuence over peopleʼs decisions. For example, they are often
the biggest factor in purchase decisions. Think about the last time you consulted a friend on
whether to buy something. Chances are, it was quite recently.

Design for

So much of our lives revolve around our strong ties, and we need to think about designing for
them as distinct from other types of relationships.

Let's look at weak ties. Weak ties are people you know, but don't care much about. Your
friends' friends. Some people you met recently. Typically, we communicate with weak ties
infrequently.

Our brains can
only keep up with
a limited number
of weak tie
relationships.
Our brains can only handle a limited number of weak tie relationships

150
Most of us can only stay up-to-date with up to 150 weak ties. This is a limitation of our brain.
This number has been consistent throughout history.

http://lucasgalo.ﬁles.wordpress.com/2009/01/h-and-g-lg.jpg

Neolithic farming villages tended to separate into two once they reached 150 inhabitants.

The Roman army was split into groups of 150 so that everyone in the group knew each other.

It is still true today, online as well as ofﬂine. There is evidence that when online games
involving social interaction reach about 150 active users, group cohesion collapses, resulting in
dissatisfaction and defection.

Similarly, Wikipedia involvement tends to plateau at about 150 active administrators.

150
So we can only stay up-to-date with up to 150 weak ties.

We may know many more, but we canʼt stay up-to-date with what is happening in their life.
Think about your connections on your social network. For how many of them could you
describe something that happened in their life in the last few days? What about the last week?
The last month? How many would you join, uninvited, at a chance meeting in a bar? Itʼs
unlikely to be more than 150. Social networks donʼt necessarily create more connections, they
just make our existing connections more visible.

Online social
networks make it
easier to
reconnect and
catch up with
weak ties

Social networks have changed some aspects of our weak tie relationships. We now have an
easy route to connect to them that didn't previously exist. In the past we would have to meet or
phone them to catch up

but we can now look at what theyʼve been up to via their online social network proﬁle. This lets
us easily communicate with them - it gives us a lightweight route to get back in touch. This is a
powerful route when we're sourcing new information.

But strong and weak ties are not enough when we think of relationships online. We need a
new category of tie, and I call it the temporary tie. Temporary ties are people that you have no
recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with.

Temporary ties
are becoming
more
commonplace
online

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesjin/58723031/

A store assistant,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/truckpr/3788915432/sizes/l/

a call center employee,

the person who wrote the online hotel review,

the person who answered your forum question,

the person who commented on your YouTube video,

the person who you bought from on eBay.

Once the task has been completed, temporary ties are unlikely to interact again. You don't
know these people beyond the one conversation you had, or the words they typed and
whatever online proﬁle they have. Your interaction with them is temporary. With the rise of user
generated content online, temporary ties are becoming more important.

Trust
As designers, the biggest thing we need to think about when designing for temporary tie
interactions is trust.

How can we design in things that help people understand whether they should trust each
other? Here is a nice example from evogear.com. I can start to trust this review because I
know that the person actually bought the skis he's reviewing.

Different
relationships

So let's go back to our diagram. We have different groups. They are independent.
But now, we can also see that we have different types of relationships.

This is the eco-system around which we need to design. But you'll probably never need to
design for them all at once. It's more likely that you'll be designing for one type of tie.

What type of
tie are you
designing for?

Knowing which tie you're designing for can really help you prioritize features.

Consider how to design for different types of relationships. Something designed for close
friends to interact will look a lot different than something designed for friends of friends to
interact, which will look different than something for strangers to interact.

Don’t try to design something for all types of relationships. You’ll simply end up with a
compromised solution for everyone. Understand which types of relationship ties are most
important for what you’re creating, and design primarily for them.

HOW PEOPLE
COMMUNICATE
WITH EACH
OTHER

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People have different audiences for communication. They may need to communicate with one
person, a few people, or many people. There are also times when a few people need to
communicate with each other, or when a few people need to communicate with many people.

The other person and their relationship

The content being communicated

The urgency of reply required

The level of privacy required

Businesses need to consider all these factors when choosing the best communication
features for their consumers (for example, whether they should build a forum or support instant
messaging for customer service).

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Voice calls and text messages dominate social network usersʼ communication habits. On
average, social network users use phone calls and text messages more frequently than social
networks to communicate. This is true for teens as well as adults. Teenagersʼ most frequent
channel for communication with friends is text messaging, closely followed by voice calls and
talking face to face.

7 to 15 people

People interact with very few of the connections in their network. Because attention is a scarce
resource online, people interact with the people closest to them, and the people who
reciprocate their attention. The majority of communication instances happen with a small
number of strong ties. Although weak ties are much bigger in number, communication with
them is very infrequent. Research shows that on average, people have ongoing
communication with between seven and 15 people, but most communication is concentrated
around a personʼs ﬁve strongest ties.

Many people use email for very private exchanges. For example, sharing photos or sensitive
articles that they would prefer not to post on a social network. Some young adults use email to
communicate with their strongest ties because their social network is overloaded with
information from lots of different people, and their message might not be noticed.

Just home from work OMG
what a day!

Status updates are often perceived as a narcissistic activity. But research has indicated that
they support important social functions. People have four primary reasons for updating their
status:
- People update their status to shape how others perceive them.
- People update their status to maintain and grow relationships.
- People update their status to share content that others might ﬁnd valuable.
- People update their status to source information.

Which
communication
channel does
your audience
need?
People’s online communication channels need to support the right types of interaction and
audience. Ensure you know what your users need. A feature that is designed to support one-
to-one communication will look different than one designed to support one-to-many
communication.

Different channels have different attributes that make them more or less appropriate for
communication with different audiences. Understanding these attributes, and when and why
people use different channels, can help companies give people the right communication
options at the right times.

HOW PEOPLE
INFLUENCE
EACH OTHER

Understanding how people inﬂuence each other is not simple.

We rarely make decisions alone. In the 1960s, Tupperware built a million dollar business on
the fact that we rarely make decisions alone. Before Tupperware, many products were sold by
the door to door salesman. Tupperware changed this. They sold to people in groups. If your
friend and neighbor is buying Tupperware, it must be good.

We often look to
others when
making decisions

People try to behave rationally, they try to make objective decisions, but other factors mean
that they can't. The problem is that we all have limited access to information, and limited
memory. Because of this, we have learned to rely on others to help us make decisions. We
assume that other people know things we don't. In fact, we do this so often, that we
automatically look to the actions of others, even when the answer is obvious.

Increasing our
reliance on social
networks to make
decisions

Information Memory

The web is increasing the volume of information available to us, but our capacity for memory
isn't changing. So it's likely that we'll increasingly turn to others to make decisions. There was
once a time when we picked what restaurant to eat in by looking in the window. But now, we
often can't decide without pulling out our phones and searching the web for reviews from
people who have eaten there before.

My decisions are being made over here.

If other people are heavily inﬂuencing our decisions, and in some cases making the decisions
for us, how does this impact what we buy, what sites we visit, how we spend our time? If we
want people to use our products, to use our website, it is important that we design in features
that support our friends making decisions for us. We see it in some simple forms already, like
here where you can email a friend for advice. But we can layer on

We see it in some simple forms already, like here where you can email a friend for advice

The role of
influentials is
over estimated

How people influence each other is complex, and the role of "influentials" in society is over-
estimated

Understanding how people influence each other is not simple. It's certainly not as simple as
many people believe - that there are a small number of very influential people in society, and if
you reach and influence them, they will influence hundreds, thousands and even millions of
others. Many research studies have shown that other factors play a much bigger part in how
people are influenced.

Whether
someone can be
inﬂuenced is as
important as the
strength of the
inﬂuencer.

Influential?

Influenceable?

There may be some individuals who have great influence, but it is without doubt that how
people influence each other has many other factors. A key insight is that when we study how
people influence each other, it's important to focus on the person being influenced as well as
the person doing the influencing.

What their social network looks like

What they have experienced before

There are two primary factors in understanding whether someone can be inﬂuenced:
- What their social network looks like
- What they have experienced before
Iʼm only going to focus on the top one today.

What their social network looks like includes:
- How big the network is
- Who is connected to who in the network
- What messages ﬂow through it and across it
- How long the messages last in the network

Hereʼs a simple example. Letʼs imagine an “influencer” was telling me to buy Adidas. But two of
my other friends are telling me to buy Puma. The more people that give us an opinion, the less
influenced we are by any one of those opinions. So you may think you're targeting the most
influential person in a group or community, but if multiple other people in that group or
community think your product is bad, your efforts in reaching the "influentials" are wasted.

What if everyone else is telling me how great Puma are? How inﬂuential is the Adidas
message going to be? Was it a good idea to seed the highly connected person? Or would it
have been better to seed widely and broadly across the network?

Weʼre heavily
inﬂuenced by the
people around us

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joanna8555/4041537710/

Studies into buying behavior and decision making have consistently found that we are
disproportionally inﬂuenced by the opinions and actions of the people around us. These can be
the people around us in a physical space. Studies have shown that students with studious
roommates become more studious themselves, and diners sitting next to heavy eaters tend to
eat more.

However, it is more common for us to be inﬂuenced by the people we are closest to
emotionally - our family, our best friends, and sometimes some of our co-workers.

Voting studies from the 1940s showed that when it came to deciding who to vote for, people
were less inﬂuenced by the media, and much more heavily inﬂuenced by members of their
family and close friends. This is also true with buying behavior today. This study might be
60-70 years old, but remember that these behaviors are hard wired into all of us.

Buy clothes Ask friends

Buy car Ask friends

Choose bank Ask friends

Choose job Ask friends

Donate money Ask friends

Vote Ask friends

This is how inﬂuence happens.
We need to design things to support these interactions.

Our temporary ties influence us too. On the left, the New York Times shows the stories other
people have been emailing, blogging, and searching. This influences what we might consider
important to read next. On the right, Kayak.com shows the prices that other people paid for the
same flight route over the past 90 days. This affects whether we consider the price we are
being offered as cheap or expensive, and influences our decision to purchase.
Researcher Duncan Watts found that when choosing new music, knowing what music other
people listened to was far more influential than whether the music was of high quality. He
found that the music people downloaded was the music that other people had downloaded
before them.

A study about Amazon.com found that people tend to give items the same rating as people
before them have given. A high average rating means that people are unlikely to give
something a 1-star rating, even if that is what they had intended before they saw other
peopleʼs ratings.

How are you
showing other
peopleʼs
opinions?

Consider how to display multiple opinions, and how different versions might change people’s
behavior. Showing many opinions may result in few of them being inﬂuential.
Show how people are connected, up to three degrees.
When showing other people, consider how the information shown may change the viewer’s
behavior. This also applies to showing people’s previous actions.

HOW PEOPLE
DISPLAY
THEMSELVES
TO OTHERS
One huge part of the social web is how people represent themselves to others. How they
represent their identity.

Crutches

High heels

People care
deeply about
how they look
to others

Online is happening through profiles.
Profiles are really important. They allow me to see that the person I'm looking at is the person
that I know offline. They allow me to figure out whether I should trust someone when reading
their review.

I think really carefully
before posting my status.

One thing we see a lot in research is that people think carefully about what status updates they
post. They think about how it will reﬂect on them. Sometimes they share things because they
are proud, sometimes because they think something is cool. And people often self-censor.
They often decide not to post, because of what they may look like to others. People care
deeply about how they look to others. They care when they dress themselves in the morning,
and they care when they interact with other people during the day.

People have
multiple facets of
identity

The most important thing to recognize about identity, is that people don't have one identity.
There is not one proﬁle that ﬁts for all the people in their life. People appear differently to
different audiences. They act one way with their family, they act another way in work, and they
act another way with their best friends.

Again, the one big bucket of friends becomes problematic. This is because people only have
one proﬁle. Online, it is hard to set things up so that one group to see you one way, and
another group to see you a different way. This has to, and will, change. Let me show you two
examples.

We already saw this with Debbie.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuddland/356325106/

Think about a teacher. She needs to appear one way to her students, another way to their
parents, and another way to her friends.

Can we be
Facebook friends?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuddland/356325106/

What does she do when her students ask her why she won't friend them on Facebook?
This may seem funny, but itʼs very real.

Sometimes
people need to be
anonymous

Half of the top 1000 reviewers on Amazon donʼt use their real name.

Ratings that are
linked to peopleʼs
real names are
20% higher than
those that arenʼt.
People are worried about reciprocation: will that person now go and give me a bad review?
They are also worried about repercussions: will the restaurant owner give me a hard time if I
return?

Managing identity
has high
overhead

Managing our identity ofﬂine is relatively easy as the different groups in our life rarely overlap
in time and space. We see our families at home and act one way; we go to work and act
another way; and we meet our college friends in a bar an act a third way.
Managing identity online is much harder, as groups can easily overlap. People have
workarounds to manage this, including multiple email accounts, multiple Facebook accounts,
and by using certain tools with speciﬁc audiences

After 24 hours: 18%

After one week: 12%

One research study found that only 18% of users updated their proﬁle after 24 hours of
creating it, and only 12% updated after one week. Without live content that updates regularly,
proﬁles quickly become outdated representations.

One
identity

Wears high
heels and
crutches

Another
identity

How are you
allowing people
to represent
themselves?

Allow people to personalize how they appear to others as this helps build their personal
identity.
Consider how the actions of someone’s connections are displayed relative to their own
profile. Give people control over removing the actions and content of other people from their
profile.
Allow people to control the audiences for different parts of their identity.
Consider how you might make people comfortable posting negative as well as positive
reviews.
Remind people about what their profile looks like if they haven’t updated it in a while.

HOW PEOPLE
MANAGE THEIR
PERSONAL
INFORMATION

Privacy is a process of boundary management. Itʼs about controlling how much other people
know about you.

Public content is not the same as publicized content. People may be comfortable disclosing
information in one public setting, but not in a different public setting. If you give someoneʼs
information more exposure than they expect, you may be violating that personʼs sense of
privacy. Iʼm going to show you some examples of what that means shortly.

People of all ages
care deeply about
their privacy

I email my friends the
photos before I put them
on Facebook. They
decide which ones they
want to be tagged in.

Research on Facebook usage showed that only 8% of users had left their proﬁle open to
anyone searching on the Facebook network, and that 64% of users had adjusted their proﬁle
to “only friends.”

44% take steps to limit the amount of
personal information available about
them online

71% change their privacy settings

47% delete unwanted comments on
their proﬁles

41% remove their name from photos

Young adults (ages 18–29) are more likely than older adults to say that they actively control
their privacy online.

We think people care
less about privacy
because they
misunderstand
complicated privacy
settings.

People
underestimate
the size of their
audience

Often this means publishing content that can be indexed by search engines, and surfaced in
search results.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tim166/293161965/

When we think about our behavior in public, it has always been bounded by where we are.
Only people within a certain distance can see what we do. Now, this isn't strictly true as other
people who were there can talk about my actions to others. And of course this happens a lot.
People gossip. But we can generally control what others know about us.

Online things are different. We're missing all those social cues from the real world. So people
are posting content publicly, and they have no idea. I looked up this stuff on Facebook, I've no
idea who these people are.

So this guy is looking to get high.

But he probably didnʼt think about the possibility of future employers ﬁnding this.

It is our job, as
designers, to make sure
that people understand
what is happening.

This problem is about transparency. Our systems need to be absolutely transparent and it is
critical that we design this in. People need to understand the consequences of their actions,
and we, as designers, need to do our best to make these things clear.

People donʼt
realize that their
conversations are
persistent

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mythoto/1234638761/

There is a second part to this problem. Letʼs imagine these girls were gossiping about this guy.
When he comes over, they stop. Their conversation isnʼt persistent. But if this gossip happens
on their Facebook walls, and it does, then it remains there for the guy to ﬁnd at any point in
time. Not only that, but it could be weeks old, or months, or even years.

What does it mean for you - as a 25 year old - when someone can Google you and see that
you were a total bitch when you were 17 years old? The way that things are moving, youʼll
soon be able to ﬁnd any of this public content on search engines. All this content we're creating
is sticking around, attached to our identities. We need to help ﬁgure out how to make good
decisions about what they are posting.

Maintaining
peopleʼs privacy
should be your
top priority

Privacy Trust

Privacy and trust go hand in hand. If people trust you, they'll do business with you. And on the
social web, people need to trust you with a lot of very personal, very sensitive data. How you
manage their privacy will often determine how much they are willing to trust you. So this is
important not just for maintaining people's sensitive information, but important for building long
term repeat business.

Doubt
If your privacy practices arenʼt transparent, then you introduce doubt. Doubt leads to lower
usage.

Not new

Multiple
X
independent
groups

Design for multiple groups

Different
relationships

Strong ties
inﬂuence
what we buy

Design for different relationships

One
identity

Cares deeply
about privacy

Another
identity

Design tools to support how people look to others

Talk with me

@padday

padday@gmail.com

www.thinkoutsidein.com/blog

Please get in touch!
My book is out in August!

The magic number 150.

See the New York Post article “Buddy Brain Drain” where Robin Dunbar
describes how different groups are made up of 150 people.

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have also studied this in modern groups.
See the Harvard magazine article “Networks, Neolithics to Now” for an overview.

For a great overview (with data) of Dunbarʼs number and online games, see
Christopher Allenʼs post “The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes” on his
blog Life With Alacrity.

Strong and Weak ties

Wikipedia provides a good overview of the research literature on strong and
weak ties. Search for Interpersonal ties.

The seminal paper is Mark Granovetterʼs “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

We have a small number of strong ties

In their book Connected (Harper, 2010), Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler
describe one study they conducted with 3,000 Americans.

See also research conducted at the Center for the Digital Future at the University
of Southern California (digitalcenter.org) in 2002 and 2007.

Average number of friends on Facebook

Various research shows that the average number of Facebook friends ranges
from 120 to 180. For two examples, see the 2007 research paper “Rhythms of
Social Interaction: Messaging Within an Online Social Network” by researchers at
HP Labs, and the 2010 paper “Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being” by
researchers at Carnegie-Mellon and Facebook.

Various research shows that almost all friends on Facebook are people that
users first met offline. For an overview, see the 2009 research paper “The
Problem of Conflicting Social Spheres” by researchers at Manchester Business
School.

For interacting with small numbers of our friends on Facebook, see the 2009
research paper “User Interactions in Social Networks and Their Implications” by
researchers at UC Santa Barbara.

Phone usage and strong ties

Most of this data is from ethnographer Stefana Broadbent. See her presentation
at the TED conference, viewable on YouTube. Broadbent has done much
research into how people communicate with each other. You can follow her work
at usagewatch.org. In particular, see the article “The small size of our
communication network”.

Usage of communication tools

The Pew Research Center have much research into this topic. For example, see
the 2010 report “Teens, Cell Phones and Texting”, the 2009 report “Social
Isolation and New Technology”, the 2010 report “Social Media and Mobile
Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults”, and the 2009 report “Twitter and
Status Updating”.

Different types of friendships

For a detailed look at empirical research on friendships, see the book Rethinking
Friendships (Princeton, 2006) by Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl.

Influence

For an introduction to cognitive biases, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
For a full list of social cognitive biases, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Social_biases

The fact that we make decisions based on our limited information is part of a
theory called bounded rationality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

The Tipping Point is nicely summarized on Wikipedia, including key ideas and
challenges to those ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point.

In their book Connected (Harper, 2010), Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler
describe how mutual best friends are most influential, how three degrees of
influence works, and the concept of hyperdyadic spread.

Other research papers that I reference frequently are the 2010 research paper
“Identifying Influential Spreaders in Complex Networks,” by researchers at
Universities in the USA, Israel and Sweden, and the 2009 research paper
“Effects of Word-of-Mouth Versus Traditional Marketing: Findings from an Internet
Social Networking Site,” by Michael Trusov, Randolph Bucklin and Koen
Pauwels.

How hubs work

In his book Six Degrees (Norton, 2004), Duncan Watts explores high and low
thresholds for idea adoption, how hipsters influence within a network, the analogy
of seeds in nature, and his studies on lists of music.

Two research papers that influenced me on hubs and adoption are the 2008
research paper “The Role of Hubs in the Adoption Processes,” by Jacob
Goldenberg, Sangman Han, Donald Lehmann, and Jae Weon Hong, and the
2010 research paper “Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product
Diffusion,” by profesors at Wharton and the University of Southern California.

Multiple facets of identity

danah boyd has done some amazing research over the years, a lot of which
relates to identity. For example, see the 2006 research paper “Profiles as
Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster” by boyd and Heer.

Ben Gross has also conducted some great research, see the 2007 research
paper “Addressing Constraints: Multiple Usernames, Task Spillage and Notions
of Identity” by Ben Gross and Elizabeth Churchill, and the 2009 research paper
“Names of Our Lives”.

Another good paper to check out is the 2009 research paper “Trust and Nuanced
Profile Similarity in Online Social Networks” by Jennifer Golbeck.

Anonymous ratings

See the 2010 research paper “I rate you. You rate me. Should we do so
publicly?” by researchers at the University of Michigan.

Awareness of Privacy

The following three research papers are a great place to start:

See the 2009 research paper “Information Revelation and Internet Privacy
Concerns on Social Network Sites: A Case Study of Facebook” by Young and
Quan-Haase.

See the 2010 report “Reputation Management and Social Media” by the Pew
Research Center.

See the 2010 research paper “How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults
When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?” by researchers at
UC Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania.

People underestimating their audience

See the 2008 research paper “Characterizing Privacy in Online Social Networks”
by Krishnamurthy and Wills.

People misunderstanding privacy settings

Multiple research studies show how people misunderstand the privacy
implications of their activities. For examples:

See the 2010 research paper “How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults
When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?” by researchers at
UC Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania.

See the 2008 research paper “Strategies and Struggles with Privacy in an Online
Social Networking Community” by Strater and Lipford.

See the 2008 research paper “Expandable grids for visualizing and authoring
computer security policies” by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University,
University of North Carolina, and Gonzaga University.

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