Social self-regulation

There have been some interesting issues around social media/social network self-regulation over the last few days. 

In the UK right now there is pressure on Twitter to lift their self-regulatory performance. As far as I can see, Twitter gets rid of users that post harmful or illegal content. Maybe not as fast as they could though.

I think it was Facebook (FB) that recently got rid of some 5,000 sex offenders from their site.

However, in an interesting twist, FB has gone social in developing a new set of self-regulatory controls. FB has proposed a set of principles and rights & responsibilities on their site and invited users to comment on them. I’ve copied the draft Rights and Responsibilities statement on safety to illustrate what is being proposed. There is clearly a significant burden of responsibility proposed on users.

3. Safety

We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your help in order to do that, which includes the following commitments:

3.1 You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications to users (such as spam).
3.2 You will not collect users’ information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.
3.3 You will not upload viruses or other malicious code.
3.4 You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.
3.5 You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
3.6 You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.
3.7 You will not promote alcohol-related or other mature content without appropriate age-based restrictions.
3.8 You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.
3.9 You will not facilitate or encourage any violations of this Statement.

The question is, will self-regulation be effective? Where should the onus lie – on the service provider or the user: social self-regulation?

New influencers, new digital divides and Facebook

I’ve posted before about the emergence of social media as a new form of influence. Social media includes blogging, social network sites, wikis, web forums etc – anything that’s interactive and online. A few recent developments reinforce this trend and is indicative of new forms of digital divide.

Technorati has been tracking the state of the blogosphere since 2004.

By July 2005 there were 14.2 million blogs globally with 80,000 new blogs per day. By April 2007 there were 70 million blogs. By August 2008 there were 133 million blogs with 120,000 new ones launched each day. The number of blogs almost doubled between April 2007 and August 2008.

In May 2008 eMarkerter reported there were 94 million blog readers in the US in 2007 (about 50% of internet users). In August 2008 ComScore put the figure a little lower at 77.7 million or about 41%.

In Australia, the only figures I have available are those produced by Nielsen which indicated that 48% of internet users (7.1m) had read a blog and 16% (2.36m) had created one (source . I do not have other sources to check on the reasonableness of these figures – that is the only data I have. But the data in terms of blog readership by internet users are consistent with US data.

The figures do not take account of newer forms of blogging such as Twitter, FriendFeed (microblogging) and video blogging.

Is blogging mainstream?
Technorati claims that blogging is now mainstream. That seems to be so in the case of US newspaper industry – 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs.

ReadWriteWeb (RWW) concluded that reading blogs is becoming mainstream, but not writing them. The demographics are interesting (and may shatter a few myths) – 74% of US bloggers are college grads; 51% reported a household income >$75,000 US.

But here is an interesting point – only 1.5 million blogs around the world are updated as often as once a week. That indicates to me that blog readership is in the direction of a small number of bloggers (relative to total number of bloggers). I may be wrong and it would not be the first time. But it’s consistent with my research on social media participation – as little as 1% account for 90% of the activity. If my hunch stacks up, those 1.5 million bloggers are influential – the new influencers. Of course some of them are from mainstream media, but from my experience a good many of them are not.

It takes effort and skill to regularly update a good blog. Social networking and microblogging are less demanding in terms of written literacy skills. It’s easy to update your message status on Facebook or MySpace, upload a photo or whatever. I would say that regularly updating an influential blog will never be mainstream.

RWW say that blogging “may become centralized, professionalized and increasingly scarce”. Maybe, but the number bloggers continues to grow rapidly, even during a time when social networking sites and microblogging took off. So we shall see. Blogging, no matter how often they are updated, continues to grow significantly. In any case, the top bloggers have become influential in my view. I may be bias though – I spend more time reading blogs each day than reading newspapers.

btw, Facebook released stats on its growth by country in the first half of 2008. Australian Facebook user growth for 2008 (to 29 July) was 43% to a total of 3.4 million users or 18% of the population on Facebook alone). Outside of the US, Australia is the 4th highest in terms of user numbers after the UK, Canada and Turkey.

Digital divides
About one half of internet users read blogs, one half do not. Add that to the number of Australians that  use the internet largely for emailing and banking etc (not user content), it adds up to a lot of people not engaging in social media. My take on this is that internet use is segmenting – there are ‘digital divides’ within those classed more generically as internet users. Analysis of internet use segmentation is likely be of interest to policy makers, businesses, educators, health service providers and other service providers – just as much as who has an internet connection and who does not.

Social networks and network effects

Today’s Next supplement of The Age describes examples of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs leveraging Facebook to rapidly accelerate user take-up of their applications.  Lee Lorenzen, CEO of Shop.Com spent nine years to get 500,000 registered users, but then “Facebook application iLike, from developer Rockyou, added 600,000 users in eight hours”.  It works by a Facebook user adding the application after having been invited to do so by a friend.

Call it what you will – viral marketing, the Participative Web, the open & innovative dynamic of the internet - Lorenzen’s experience is an excellent example of web-based innovation and scale advantage, and leveraging the network effects of social networks.

Through opening up their platform to third-party applications developers, Facebook benefits from a virtuous circle-like retention and growth of their user-base.

Another pointer from the article was to the Facebook Developers Garage phenomenon.

And just one other message from this informative article – an observation from Dr Marcus Weichselbaum, CEO o f applications developer TheBroth, that “People within Facebook have everything they need within Facebook. They do not want to go to an outside website” – a view that resonates with my earlier point about the potential for social networks sites to be a hub for entertainment, news, information, connecting with friends – and shopping!

What’s old and what’s new in social network services

When thinking about social network services (SNS), what do most people have in mind? MySpace, Facebook and Bebo may well come quickly to mind. What is it that SNS do? What probably comes to mind are activities like sharing a personal profile, posting photos, videos, and music, writing about shared interests, organising social activities (like parties!). Some may reflect back on several years of blogging, where knowledge is shared and created through online collaboration. I’ve heard about 15 year-olds in Melbourne, Australia swapping their social network address first, mobile phone number second.

The growth in SNS has been rapid and global.  According to ComScore ’hundreds of millions of people around the world are visiting social network sites each month and many are doing so on a daily basis”.

That’s a very potted history of SNS use. So what’s emerging? Quite a lot actually. Here some examples:

• Loomia lets readers of online media (who are also Facebook users) see a list of recommended news articles referred by their Facebook ‘friends’.
• eFans is a social network for sports fans (combining a sports portal and social network).
• MySpace and the BBC have annouced a partnership  to enable MySpace users to share some of the BBC’s programs by embedded them into their personalised profile pages. Imagine the potenial for viral distribution through network effects…and if a ‘big hit’ occurred…what that would do hasten the shift from mainstream to online TV.
• MySpace as well as Facebook have opened up their sites to third-party developers…adding fuel to the pace of innovation.
• Bebo has partnered with UK and USA broadcasters to provide professional media companies and individual users the opportunitiy to create and upload their own content, and monetise content through serving and selling their own advertising.
• Professionals have started using LinkedIn as their sole contacts repository.

Common threads here are the SNS’s are shaping up to be integrated hubs for individuals and their extended networks to connect, communicate and to access and share tailored news, information and entertainment.  Advertising is moving online to SNS as well as search.  Mainstream media is moving online via SNS - not migrating so much as complementing traditional broadcast services.

What may well lie on the horizon? I would suggest embedded voice, video as well as text, IM and chat; communication between virtual and real identities.

Seems to me that social network services are shaping up to be drivers of innovation and substitute/preferred services for social and entertainment needs – and business knows it!