Category: social computing


You couldn’t figure out the “World’s Theory” for yourself? It’s just common sense. Anybody knows, ya gotta keep your worlds apart.

- George explaining to Jerry the “World’s Theory” on Seinfeld – The Pool Guy

If you’re a Seinfeld fan like me (as in you’d rather re-watch Seinfeld over and over again as opposed to watching the crap sitcoms that are on TV right now. TV writers I’m looking right at you – maybe you should go on strike FOREVER), you’re probably familiar with the “World’s Theory.” When Jerry suggests that Elaine take Susan (George’s fiancé) to an exhibit at the Met, George goes nuts stating that his worlds were colliding. For George, Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer represented the world in which “independent George” thrives. By bringing Susan into that world, George claimed that not only did “worlds collide,” they were “killing independent George.”

The worlds collide bit wouldn’t be as funny if there wasn’t any truth to it. We all have different sides of our lives and personalities that we share in different contexts. There are different sides of me that my family, co-workers, and friends see in those different social situations. And that’s the beauty of real-life social interaction – we’ve evolved enough (well, most of us anyway) to know when to bring up something at work or how to act in front of our parents as apposed to our friends.

When I joined Facebook back in early 2005, it was just taking off at American colleges and universities. To get in, you had to be in school (with a .edu email) and at one of the RIGHT schools. At the time, I was in my first year of grad school at Michigan so I qualified. For a certain set of my grad school friends (read – the nerdier ones), Facebook became yet another way to talk about that experience of going to a small grad program. I had little poke fights with people – even though we really didn’t know what the poke feature was all about (and to this day, we still don’t know why its there). Our walls became semi-private places to share inside jokes about whatever off-the-wall information theory we were exposed to that week. If I was still up at midnight on a Monday night finishing up the week’s 502/503 homework, so were many of my friends. And I’d know that because I’d have immediate responses to my wall posts. We’d come in to our 9 am 503 section sleepy-eyed but knowing that we could have had a little more rest had we laid off the Facebook pokes and wall posts. For me, Facebook has always been about encapsulating part of my grad school experience and a way to keep in touch with a certain set of my grad school friends. Unlike my blog, my Facebook profile was only visible to my friends and anybody who went to school at Michigan. Facebook felt like a private online playground – I could be as goofy as I am with my friends in real-life because nobody else was watching.

Fast-forward to summer 2006 when Facebook opened up its doors to anyone. No school or work network? No problem. Umm, but we did have a problem. My worlds were colliding*! People I worked with at Microsoft started adding me as a “friend.” “Well, yes we’ve attended the same meeting a few weeks ago but does that make us friends?” Or, “You expect me to approve your friend request after what you said at THAT meeting?” Acquaintances aren’t friends and neither are most co-workers. Whether online or in real-life, the context of work makes it really weird to hang-out with people you work with. And not only was I being asked to essentially hang out online with people I worked with, I was being asked to expose them to my grad school world. Most of my grad school contacts were strong ties and most of my co-workers are weak ties. And its not like you can reject a coworker’s friend request – that’s a great signal to send at work – “Yes, I may work with you but I don’t like you.”

Some of you may point out that I can always limit my profile to acquaintances and co-workers but that’s just more work. I really don’t want to manage a limited profile and try to make judgments about whom of my co-workers are “safe” enough to see my full profile and whom are not. When it comes to work and Facebook, I’ve essentially come to terms with my worlds colliding. I don’t seek out coworkers but I don’t reject their friend requests, either.

To make matters worse, several of my grad school professors started adding me as friends around this time as well. Let’s just say Classroom Noor and Hanging-out-in-Ann-Arbor Noor weren’t the same. On the one hand, I was flattered when some of my profs still remembered me (that’s saying a lot at a research university) but I was still scrambling thinking, “Oh shit! I hope none of my wall posts say anything bad about that class!” But just like with co-workers, I figured, “Oh what the hell, sure we’re friends. I’ll try to forget about that A- you gave me and that awful group you put me in.”

Fast-forward to this summer when one of my cousins found me on Facebook. That single friend request started a barrage of friend requests from a number of my cousins, many of whom have somehow learned about Facebook. Most of my extended family lives in the Middle East. I’m lucky if I see them once a decade (seriously). I’m not that close to any of my cousins (as the Olsons would say, distance matters!). My worlds were colliding yet again! Not only were my cousins being exposed to my grad school world – they came into it with a different cultural context. In light of the differences between my two cultures (American and Arab), I wondered how they’d interpret my profile, photos, and wall posts. In real-life, I know enough about my two cultures to know what to say and how to act in each distinct context. My Facebook profile doesn’t.

I wish I had a good solution for the worlds collide problem but I don’t. To me, it seems yet another way that social software fails to express the nuances of real-life social interaction. Our daily social interactions are full of millions of IF/ELSE statements that are processed in seconds and without us even recognizing it. It is the sort of complex logic that would take years to code and we still wouldn’t get it right. On the plus side, my worlds colliding on Facebook hasn’t been all bad. In fact, Facebook has humanized some of my co-workers. In recent months, it has also helped me keep in better touch with my family overseas. In the past, my mom was the gatekeeper for that sort of news. Now, I’m all like, “Oh yeah, I knew they had a baby, I just saw the photos online the other day.”

But the final straw occurred yesterday when my aunt’s sister (my aunt through marriage) added me as a friend on Facebook. OH MY GAWD – THE GROWNUPS ARE HERE! WORLDS COLLIDE!

* My former co-worker Anu gets all the credit for appropriately applying the world’s theory to Facebook.

** Apologies for the time stamp of this post. I can’t sleep and when I can’t sleep, I write.

six years

I’ve somehow missed it yet again – my six year blogiversary!  I started officially blogging on October 1st, 2001.  I’m amazed that I’m still blogging and have somehow managed to turn it into a professional interest.  A lot of things have changed in my life since October 2001 – I don’t live in IL, I’m in my late 20s, I’m not in college, and I work in a different field.  Lately, my blogging has been fairly sporadic and other social media formats have taken more of my time (flickr, Facebook, Twitter).  As cool as the explosion of social media has been in the past few years, I still miss how exclusive blogging used to be.  I miss reading blogs that were authentic – not commerical enterprises.  I miss the social connections that I was able to make at that time, simply because there weren’t that many other people participating in this medium.  There’s something about this format [large text box + one:many + my own space that isn't part of something else] that I still find engaging and so much more effective at communicating my ideas and documenting my life.

halfway point

As of today’s photo, I’m officially at the halfway point of Project 365. I have taken 183 photos and have 182 more to go. Even though there are days when I’m not feeling creative and I’m at a loss for photo ideas, I’m really glad I joined the project. It’s been really fun to look through the past 183 days’ photos, especially since this past year has been all about change for me. Aside from documenting the mundane details of my life, the project has been a really fun way to connect with other people (most of whom I don’t know in real life).

If I ever have kids, this is the sort of thing I’d love to share with them (“there was a time when I was young and had way too much time on my hands . . . “). Then again, I do show my nieces my flickr photos — they usually request photos of OJ & Mulder (since OJ permanently hides under the bed when they’re around, seeing OJ on flickr is usually the closest they ever get to him).

I celebrated my birthday a few weeks ago.  This year was a bit different from the other 26 birthdays I’ve celebrated in my life – a larger percentage of my social network (and my strongest ties) are distributed across the country (and around the world).  Even when I was going to school at SI, my family wasn’t near me but a lot of my friends were also in Ann Arbor.  This year, I found it rather interesting the vast variety of ways that my friends and family decided to wish me happy birthday:

  • phone calls
  • comments on Facebook and MySpace
  • emails and e-greeting cards
  • in-person
  • IM (including Andy and Erika “singing” the birthday song via Office Communicator
  • paper cards (via snail mail!)

In most cases, each communication method correlated with the strength of my relationship with the sender.  Communication methods that required the greatest effort (phone, in-person, card) usually signified my strongest ties.  At the same time, not all email or IM birthday greetings were of the same depth.  Some of my close friends sent me lengthier emails, wishing me a happy birthday and updating me on what’s been happening in their lives.  Email threads of this type and more involved IM conversations also correlated with strong ties.  Birthday comments on Facebook and MySpace were usually left by my weak ties (again, there were exceptions), likely because they were reminded of my birthday when they logged in.  I’m guessing my strongest ties either know my birthday or have it marked on a calendar.

ICWSM: danah boyd on MySpace

I just heard danah boyd give a great talk about MySpace.  A few random notes:

  • Friendster lost its momentum by essentially battling with their users – deleting fake profiles, taking out features, etc
  • MySpace is successful for a number of reason: indy bands are there, they welcome teens, all their friends are there, personalization of profiles, conversations through profile comments, you can only find out about parties/what’s happening on the weekend through MySpace

I took about two pages of notes so this little blog post doesn’t really give the talk any justice. :)

thoughts on microblogging

During the past few months, I’ve been observing some changes in the blogging behaviors of many of my friends. I’ve been referring to their behavior as microblogging. I thought I was onto something new but a quick Live search reveals that the term has been floating around for awhile (just when I thought I had invented a new term!). I couldn’t find anything that actually defined it, though, so I figured I’d give my notion of what it means, what I’ve been observing, and why it’s important.

What is it?

Microblogging is just what it sounds – it’s regularly publishing small pieces of content on the web. The best example of microblogging is Twitter (from the same guys that brought you old school pre-Google-acquisition Blogger and Odeo). Twitter is a nifty new service that allows you to create a microblog of small pieces of text that you can update from your mobile, IM, or via the Twitter site (for an example, here’s my Twitter).

However, I don’t believe that Twitter is the first (or only) form of microblogging. I’ve been observing this trend of micro-microcontent (many people think regular blogging is microcontent) in various forms – del.icio.us (when posting a small note along with a bookmark), flickr (when posting a bit of text along with a photo), Facebook status, and even adding a review on Yelp could be considered microblogging.

So the common denominator between these examples is short content and minimal commitment.

My observations

Recently, I’ve observed that many of my friends have shifted their posting from their regular blogs to these various forms of microblogs. For instance, some of my friends haven’t updated their blogs in weeks (and some haven’t even updated them in months) but these same friends regularly post to their del.icio.us and flickr accounts. What I find even more interesting are my friends who would never think of starting a blog but have now become regular contributors to their del.icio.us and/or flickr accounts.

Microblogs are more appealing for a number of reasons. First, they offer a low level of commitment from both the blogger and reader. The blogger posts much shorter content, which is easier to update. The reader doesn’t have to commit to reading a lengthy post that they may or may not like. Moreover, because the posts are so short, the reader is more likely to read them and possibly leave a comment in return. The comments fuel the microblogging fire. A comment reinforces the blogger, illustrating that not only is the blogger’s content being read, it is of enough interest to generate new micro-microcontent.

In addition, I don’t think microblogs carry the same pressure to regularly update content that we usually associate with regular blogging. Merely by their design and format, traditional blogs tend to emphasize the dates/times of updates and the frequency of posts. One of the first things that you tend to notice on a blog is when it was lasted updated. Some blogs even roll the content on the home page, so if a blogger hasn’t updated her blog she ends up with an embarrassingly empty home page. The same isn’t true for a flickr, del.icio.us, or Yelp account. You immediately see the last updated entries, whether they occurred today, last week, or three months ago. Moreover, the date of these entries isn’t as prominent in the design.

So what?

In a world where the term blog is overused and over-hyped and blogs are misused, it’s interesting and refreshing to observe these changes in the blog format. You certainly can’t create a community around your cause/product/grad program with an ill-conceived blog, and you’re certainly not going to do it if the format changes. I also feel that this deviation in blogging validates blogging and signals its maturity as a format.

Now what?

All of these observations are anecdotal in nature and merely based on the behavior of a very small and non-diverse sample. The real questions at this point are whether any of these thoughts are true when examined with a larger and more representative sample. Is this really a phenomenon? And what sort of people are doing this? Are those new to social software jumping in to microblogging and skipping past traditional blogging or is microblogging a path along the blogging continuum (read other blogs > start your own blog > start microblogging)?

project 365

theatre
orange

A few weeks ago, I joined Eszter’s Project 365, where the idea is to take a photo a day for a year. I’ve been meaning to get started with the project for a few weeks but I’ve had plenty of false starts – a two or three day photo-taking streak gets interrupted by a day of laziness or lack of inspiration (“nothing happened today, maybe I’ll take a photo of my keyboard?”).

I’m not sure what that says about my readiness to commit to anything.

With my family being in town for Thanksgiving, I took a lot of photos last week so I kind of cheated and recycled a few of them to kick start my project 365 set. I’m not sure if I’ll blog the photos here every day since they will be in my Flickr stream but perhaps I’ll post updates every week (a “this week in photos post” seems like a blog commitment I can keep). If anything, I’m hoping the project will help break the boring routine my days tend to resemble (internet-gym-work-internet-dvr).

would you read another Noor blog?

I’ve been thinking about starting a new blog to contain my thoughts about social software, HCI, and user experience. Some of the content will be my latest ideas about the field, reviews of the latest services I’ve been playing with, and some of my del.icio.us links (but with expanded commentary). So my question to you is – would you read another Noor blog that wasn’t about my daily rambles? If comment count is any indication, I don’t think anyone is interested in that type of content.

No offense to any of my friends who keep multiple blogs but I tend to find the practice of keeping more than one blog kind of self-important. Not only should you keep up with my blog but you should keep up with all of my blogs! Mwwahhahaaaa! :)

And there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to become one of THOSE people (with multiple blogs).

will you be my friend? :(

One of my least favorite things about social software is the unnatural task of requesting friends. I just signed up for Netflix last week and I only have one friend. :(

I haven’t figured out a good way to discover friends on Netflix so I figured I’d ask here – do you use Netflix? If so, do you want to be my friend on Netflix? If we become friends on Netflix, we can see what we’ve rented, how we rated movies, and recommend movies to each other. Of course, being my Netflix friend doesn’t mean that you’ll be obligated to be my friend in real life or any other social software application. To find me on Netflix, search for my gmail address (noor [dot] alihasan).

Vox

I managed to get an invite to the uber exclusive Vox. You might think I’m talking about a trendy hot spot but Vox is a new blogging service created by SixApart, the same company that brought you MovableType, TypePad, and acquired LiveJournal. I’ve only spent a few minutes playing with it but I like it so far. There are a lot of things to like about Vox – the themes are beautiful, seamless integration with Flickr (very smart move, why force users to re-upload photos when they’re already using a social photo sharing service?), post-level privacy controls, and a sweet UI.

Best of all, it shares the same name as an old Sarah McLachlan song – the same song that has the “desert of my dreams” lyric.

I have two invites to spare. Ping me in the comments if you’d like to check it out.

Update – invites gone, you snooze, you lose! ;)

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