You Two Know Each Other? (An essay on social navigation within social networking applications)

Social networking applications on the Web serve two purposes: creating and viewing a certain kind of content, and interacting socially with the people who use or provide the content. But could they really be useful to someone like myself - an apprehensive, cloistered young man with little real-life social contacts and plenty of hesitations about meeting strangers? How useful and effective are these applications at expanding one's social network?

In this post, I shall reflect upon my brief introductory interactions with three such applications, Flickr, Delicious, and Twitter, and, with regards to informing the design and construction of a social networking application of my own, analyse what mechanisms such web applications most need to be able to provide in order to best facilitate social navigation and exploration.

Background & Focus

For each of these social networking applications, their complete functionality can be split into two categories –Personal Functionality (that is, the basic, prima facie purpose of the application which benefits the users individually) and Social Functionality (that is, that functionality which facilitates social interaction and discovery based on how other people use the Personal Functionality.) Personal Functionality typically revolves around perusal or submission of a certain type of content, be it images, hyperlinks, videos, or simple textual messages. Social Functionality typically includes such features as metadata – the ability to assign data to submitted content which is used to organise or connect like or unlike content – profiles – personal descriptions of the users which other users can access - feedback – the ability of users to respond to other users’ content, be it in the form of text comments or the posting of derivative content – subscription – the ability to track another user’s content and follow it as it updates - and/or messaging – the ability to directly contact a particular user of the application, in much the same manner as an email, or a ‘private message’ in a web forum.

I shall now introduce these applications in terms of these two levels of functionality, and of what particular Social Functionality features they provide.

In the case of Flickr, its Personal Functionality is image and photo hosting - providing free web space for the user’s photos, artwork and graphics, which can be accessed from anywhere on the web. In this respect, it is similar to the non-social image-hosting website ImageShack. Flickr’s Social Functionality is quite wide – it includes metadata in the form of tags, feedback in the form of comments, subscription in the form of ‘Favourites’, profiles, and messaging.

Delicious is primarily an online bookmarking service, whereby its users create personal lists of web bookmarks. Its Social Functionality includes metadata (in both the descriptions of bookmarks and the tags one can assign to them), messaging (in the form of sending a bookmark to another user) and subscription to the bookmark lists of other users (referred to as one’s ‘Network’).

Twitter presents itself as an omnipresent diary that you can add to (in 140-character ‘micro-blog’ posts) at any point during your daily life, and that any other web user can peruse and follow. While this primary functionality in and of itself has social applications (such as using it to contact friends or fans, or broadcast one self’s social availability at the moment) I shall also focus upon the Social Functionality that is complementary to the primary functionality. The most prominent of these is subscription (following many other users’ accounts simultaneously) and feedback (writing a post in direct response to another user’s, and said response automatically linking back to the precursor post) but also includes messaging (in the form of private entries between two users), and a rudimentary form of metadata (in the form of ‘hashcode’ tags embedded in the message itself.)

So, having introduced these applications, I shall now review and reflect upon how well these social applications encouraged or assisted me in learning more about other people. While I only experienced four weeks of inconsistent interaction with the applications, I feel that my findings and experiences are sufficient to reach a meaningful conclusion. I will address these three questions:

• How well do these applications communicate their intended socially beneficial usage to the user?

• How effective were these social applications at helping me meet and learn about people?

And, in conclusion:

• What does a social application most need in order to best facilitate social exploration?

Let’s proceed to the first of these questions.

How well do these applications communicate their intended means of social interaction to the user?

With the functionality of social networking applications split between providing the primary service and facilitating social interaction within its users, it is entirely plausible for a user such as myself, unfamiliar with the applications, to grasp and utilise the primary service to my satisfaction without noticing or comprehending the Social Functionality resting above it. How, then, do the applications and their interfaces assist the new user in embracing the social aspects of the software?

Flickr’s interface is, from my experience, quite encouraging. When setting up an account on Flickr, I was presented with a checklist of tasks to fulfil. The first and third of these – “Personalise your profile” and “Find your friends on Flickr”- are entirely related to Flickr’s Social Functionality, and making my account visible to others. Furthermore, a user’s ‘welcome page’ sufficiently emphasis on its two primary social functions: contacts (subscription to other users’ accounts), and groups (a function that lets one subscribe and provide feedback to a common subset of users).

Given how communication-based Twitter’s Personal Functionality is, its Social Functionality – in particular, its subscription features - is very prominently displayed within it. The user is always aware of how many other users are subscribed to their account, how many users they are subscribed to, and what the most recent posts of those to whom the user is subscribed have been.

Somewhat less successful was my initial experience with Delicious. As mentioned above, the Personal Functionality of Delicious involves creating bookmarks. It took many days of using it for me to gradually realise that Delicious’s conception of a bookmark differs from my own preconception. Having used them in web browsers for most of my online life, I had developed the conception of a bookmark as a web location saved simply because you want to return to it and won’t be able to remember it otherwise. Thus, I refrained from including websites that I would visit on a daily basis, or that I had memorised the URL for.

Delicious’s conception, however, is that of a bookmark being a ‘vote’ for a website – a declaration to the world that you feel that this website is special or worthwhile. It is through these ‘votes’ and selections that the popularity of a particular website can be measured, and the interests of a particular user are, through the user’s bookmark selections, revealed to other Delicious users. (Consider, for instance, how many times its users have bookmarked Google.com as a Delicious bookmark – over 34,000, and over 39 times just on the day of April 2, 2009.¹ Clearly, the intention for making such a bookmark is not as a memory aide.)

This is not, in and of itself, incompatible with my aforementioned preconception, but by restricting my bookmark choices to those which I did not visit regularly or were particularly well-known enough that I would effortlessly remember, my Delicious account’s outward presentation of myself was skewed in favour of sites that I have only a momentary or transitory interest in, and one of Delicious’s Social Functionality features – showing how popular one’s website interests are with the rest of the user base – was underutilised with regards to my actual interests. Some may interpret this as an error in Delicious’s choice of metaphor for its content (it is, if one refers to the guidelines of Kim Madsen, not building upon a user’s pre-existing metaphor, but modifying it²) and that its term ‘bookmark’ should perhaps have been substituted for the term ‘favourite’ used by Microsoft Internet Explorer – which has similar but subtly different connotations. Personally speaking, I feel that this discrepancy of assumption is narrow enough that a mere change of emphasis on the part of Delicious’s interface (emphasising bookmarks as signifiers of personal taste) can bridge it.

How effective were these social applications at helping me meet and learn about people?

Given that I was eventually able to understand how each application facilitated social interaction, how effective were the applications, in the weeks in which I used them, in fostering social exploration?

The most interesting and telling results came from my Twitter use. Being, as previously described, a shy, cloistered fellow with few real-life contacts, I was hesitant to search for any arbitrary Twitter account without some form of external validation for that choice. That being said, I was able to discover the Twitter feeds of a few very minor Internet celebrities that I personally respect. From there, I found myself naturally led to the Twitter accounts of those people’s friends, who were validated in my eyes not because of their being passively listed in that person’s Following list, but because the person was actively conversing with that friend. I found several different Twitter accounts, many of which I decided to follow since then.

This, then, reveals what I consider to be the most significant factor in a social application’s encouragement of social navigation – its ability to allow users to navigate relationships between other users, as those relationships manifest in the form of interactions. Steward Butterfield once defined social software as software which lets people interact with each other using the mechanisms of Identity, Presence, Relationships, Conversations and Groups³. From my experiences, I have come to the conclusion that while each of these mechanisms allows a limited degree of social interaction, it is through a combination of Relationships and Conversations that users can most easily engage in social navigation. Without conversations, subscriptions between users aren’t indicative of active, socially significant relationships.

My experiences with the remaining two applications serve to demonstrate how without both of these mechanisms, social interaction is rendered comparatively ineffective.

Flickr possesses, across all of its functionality, Identity, Groups, Conversations and Relationships. However, outside of comment threads for each individual image, its conversations happen exclusively within groups and private messages, and don’t necessarily highlight the actual relationships between users at all. You might wonder why conversations within Flickr groups are less socially effective than conversations within relationships. In my experience, I found Flickr groups to be somewhat impersonal collective entities of individuals, who are linked by a common interest or theme but not necessarily a significant relationship to one another. They are, ultimately, better at grouping similar content rather than similar people.

And finally, Delicious is slightly more receptive to the mechanism of Relationships – displaying for each user a more informative ‘Network’ list of subscriptions and mutual subscriptions – but has very little potential for communication between users, beyond exchanging bookmarks. It is thus more likely (and perhaps expected) that a Delicious user will find other users outside of the application rather than within it.

So, what does a social application most need in order to best facilitate social exploration?

What I found from this study of social applications is that social networks are defined by the connections between individuals, and the strength, immediacy and reciprocality of those connections. This, then, means that the most important aspect of a social application's functionality, with regards to social interaction, is its ability to let users converse with each other and form tangible relationships with each other, with each of those abilities serving to strengthen the other. While an application can rise to prominence and popularity on the strength of its content hosting functionality alone, whether or not it will also foster a social sphere depends on its ability to support relationships and conversations.

But, to finish on a personal note, while even the most effective of these applications indeed managed to bring me closer to other people, it is my opinion that they still can’t quite rival genuine, unfiltered human interaction – message boards and web forums.

1. ‘Everyone’s bookmarks for “Google” on Delicious’ ,http://delicious.com/url/6ab016b2dad7ba49a992ba0213a91cf8 Accessed 3 April 2009.

2. Madson, K. 1994, “A guide to metaphorical design”, Communications of the ACM,
Volume 37 , Issue 12. pp57-62.

3. Butterfield, S. sylloge, http://www.sylloge.com/personal/2003_03_01_s.html#91273866 Accessed 3 April 2009.