Life s Better Together A Look at Social Networking and

Life’s Better Together: A Look at Social Networking and Creating a Successful Internet Based Social Networking Service Matthew Haugen College of St. Scholastica Duluth, MN 55811 mhaugen@css.edu Abstract Many companies are trying to cash in on the lucrative new market of Social Networking, but only a few have achieved national name recognition and significant market share. MySpace and Facebook are the biggest examples of success, but what is it that makes them so successful? On the surface, there are many competitors who offer the same features as the giants, but have fallen by the Internet wayside. This paper digs into social networking and finds the elements of success that MySpace and Facebook have leveraged to help them succeed. Explored topics range from the expected, like the need to regularly introduce new features and have a simple interface to less obvious elements like the effect of profile customizability on site popularity, the unique privacy problems social networking introduces, and how customer criticism must be handled differently in the online world. A Brief Introduction to Social Networking People are social creatures. We want to be part of a group and be liked. It brings a sense of belonging in life, and shows that you have the social skills necessary to live and work with fellow humans. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace have exploded in popularity in recent years. Now, instead of being able to number your friends in the double digits, you can have hundreds of “friends” thanks to the magic that is the Internet. Social networking is a phenomenon that is not going away, and will likely only grow bigger as time goes on. The ability to easily communicate thoughts, pictures, and movies with a worldwide audience is just too convenient to pass up. What really is social networking though? Social networking services like MySpace have replaced the street corners and diners of old. It’s where the youth (and the not so young) can go to meet new people, or maybe just keep up with old buddies that moved away. The common theme of social networking is the creation of a personal profile which you then share with others. Your profile may be open to the entire world for viewing, or you may choose to limit it to your close set of “friends”. Your circle of “friends” is composed of other users of the social networking service who have taken interest in you and have chosen to associate with, or “befriend”, you. I always list friend in quotes, because the online definition of a friend can significantly differ from a friend that you meet in the flesh each day. Even casual acquaintances can be your friend in the online world, since social networking services rarely rate the level of relationship you have with a person. Generally, you are someone’s friend or you are not. It’s an interesting dynamic, since it may allow you to chat and otherwise interact with someone you would never dream of approaching physically in daily life. Where social networking sites differ is in what they let you share with the world. Well rounded sites like Facebook and MySpace let you share everything from interests and birthdays to photos and movies. These are all stored on your personal profile which is set up much like the home page of a website. Many social networking services target niche markets and focus on only one way to share information. For instance, online site Flickr focuses on pictures, and the easy distribution and categorization of personal photos. Through the relatively short history of online social networking services, there have been many companies that have tried and failed to generate large followings of users. For instance, networking site Friendster was considered an up and coming service, but due to its inability to adapt in the rapidly changing market, it has been since relegated to receiving the table scraps of MySpace. MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr on the other hand, have rapidly ballooned into businesses that are worth millions of dollars. What is it about these sites that makes them so successful, and allows them to adapt to changes in the market? The goal of this research project was to discover what it takes to make a successful social networking site, and then test that knowledge by putting it into action. The remainder of this literary review describes the “elements of success” that were identified through 1 researching the current social networking services. The information was gathered from magazines, journals, and firsthand experience using the services. The elements are wide and varied, but all play an important part in ensuring a social networking service is successful. Following the research is a brief introduction to the social networking site I created to test the elements of success I discovered. What Makes a Social Networking Site Successful? The criteria that make a social networking site successful fluctuate based on current technology as well as the whims of the user, but certain basic truths always seem to hold true. The success of sites like MySpace, which gives nearly complete control over to its users, proves that successful sites give as much power to the people as possible. Even if this may affect the professional look of the site, people would rather have a feeling of ownership over the content that they create. To this end, an easy and logical interface is very important, as many social networking users may not be overly computer savvy. The younger demographics that use social networking sites also tend to be very fickle, so the regular introduction of new features ensures that users always have something new to look forward to. If by chance a new feature intrudes on privacy or otherwise does not work as advertised, prompt response to criticism is key, since there is always a direct competitor wanting to steal users away. Regarding privacy, the arrival of sexual predators on sites like MySpace and the current trend of employers visiting potential employees’ Facebook pages to gather information highlights the need for broad and effective security measures to ensure profiles are only visible to those people a user wants. Combined together, these elements create a successful social networking service. Here’s a more in depth look at each element. Give Control to the User…Even if it Hurts One of the benefits of participating in a social networking service is that it gives you a chance to express yourself and show the world who you really are. Successful social networking services encourage this by giving users the ability to express themselves in as many ways as possible. The best example of this is MySpace, currently the number one online social networking service with over 100 million accounts [11]. Its competitors don’t even come close in terms of membership. For comparison, popular college networking site Facebook can only claim a population of 10 million. How did MySpace get so popular? One reason is that it gives such a high level of control over a person’s profile to the user. MySpace users can change the background wallpaper of their profile, change their page’s font and text colors, and embed games and videos. They even give the opportunity to embed straight HTML code into the page. It’s more like creating your own personal website than adding information to a profile. People appreciate this control because it truly gives them ownership over how they present themselves to the world. Photographers can post their pictures to the world, 2 complemented with an artsy background, or the rambunctious teen can use bright and flashy colors and banners to create an eye poppy display [11]. It’s all up to the users. The only danger with this idea of loose control is that user profiles can look incredibly…well, bad. Many MySpace pages are the product of poor design choices. Tiled picture backgrounds clash with garish text colors. The page is filled with rows upon rows of images, all of which are different sizes. It harkens back to the ugly web sites of the late 90’s. Sites like Facebook and Flickr combat this trend by implementing a Content Management System (CMS) to ensure that profiles have a consistent and clean look to them. Users enter information they want displayed on their profile, but the CMS actually formats how it is displayed on the websiteg through a template system. Users can easily create professional looking profiles that are very readable, but it also takes a significant amount of control away from them at the same time. User control isn’t just limited to the aesthetics of a site, but can also include how the data on the site is managed. Flickr implements a unique system to catalog user’s photos. Rather than just force photos into albums, Flickr allows a user’s “friends” to place tags on photos. For instance, a photo of a cute puppy might garner tags like “doggy” and “cute”. These tags then become metadata about the photo and will become search keywords. With the tag system, user data begins to describe user data, and allows users to form their own categorization of photos, rather than being forced to use predetermined categories (like Animal > Dog, for example). This idea follows the theory that a larger crowd can often come up with a better solution to a problem (more appropriate search words) than a select few (who would have created the predetermined categories). [5] Regularly Introduce New Features In order to keep users from growing bored, a social networking site should always be working on new features. The beauty of web based social networking services is that the Internet is the application platform. There are no applications that need to be installed, patched, and updated periodically. Version numbers have no meaning. The platform can be constantly updated, and the results are immediately visible to the entire user population. This makes updates and new features so much easier to implement. Facebook is a great example of a social networking service that is constantly evolving. When Asynchronous Java and XML (AJAX) really began taking off, it was only a matter of time before Facebook’s search bars had AJAX functionality that would help fill in the names of other schools and networks as the users typed. When photo sharing began to grow, Facebook implemented an easy way to upload photos and tag other users to them so that pictures took on a very communal form of expression. The point is, Facebook released useful updates regularly that intrigued people, helped retain users, and most importantly helped make the social network stronger. MySpace is another great example of an organization in flux, as it works to develop its own music label (after all MySpace was originally created to help promote bands) and the ability to transcend text communication with built in Voice over IP (VoIP) support. 3 Though the success of these add-ons remains to be seen, it is proof that additions don’t just need to be made in the core competency of the social networking service. A MySpace music label will help strengthen the brand of MySpace and will help some users, but really not directly affect the population as a whole. It taps in to a potentially profitable niche market, leading into the next element of success… Tap Into Niche Markets With giants like MySpace and Facebook taking up the majority of market share of social networks, newcomers need to differentiate themselves by finding a niche market which they can then serve very well. Facebook was originally designed to bring colleges together, and thus it is designed to function ideally within a college environment. People are grouped by colleges, and acceptance into the Facebook college network usually involves showing proof of a college e-mail account. Flickr takes the niche market of scrapbooking, and makes it very easy to post photos online. The list goes on and on, with sites like eVite helping plan events [2] and sites like Hi5 catering to an international market that MySpace wishes it could reach. [7]. Focusing on niche markets is important because trying to compete with well rounded sites like MySpace is near suicide. One must ask, what will this new site do that MySpace doesn’t already do? The answer is likely: nothing. With MySpace’s constant growth and development, users have no reason to switch to an “all-in-one” competitor site because they already have an established “friend” base, and all their core functionality is already taken care of. If however, they wished they had a better way to manage a large amount of pictures, MySpace is ill-equipped to handle this. That’s where sites like Flickr come in. It’s even better if sites collaborate to help one another. The future of social networking may be Flickr widgets that you can embed in Facebook or MySpace profiles, allowing users to easily present photo albums within their profile. It’s a concept that could bring the varied strengths of different services together. Make Sure the Interface is Easy to Understand Good social networking sites make actions intuitive. Facebook is a great example of this. Taking a cue from the Windows operating system, all the categories and functionality in Facebook are listed with a “My” prefix. “My Friends” takes you to all your “friends”. “My Privacy” lets you set your privacy settings for your account. It’s all very logical and makes sense, because it matches user experiences and keywords from other websites. Once in these areas, any information can be gathered or set with a couple mouse clicks. This is key for people who are not totally comfortable working with computers. Even the current generation of college and high school students are not completely comfortable diving into complex computer applications. They need things to be arranged logically for them, and the system should do most of the work. For instance, when loading a profile picture on to Facebook, it really doesn’t matter what dimensions the image is. Facebook will resize the picture to a dimension that fits on your profile page. 4 Not only that, it retains the same aspect ratio. The picture isn’t stretched or crunched. It’s a seamless and effective system, and highlights how the system should do the work, not the user. The user should feel like they’re expressing themselves, not fighting the computer to make sure information shows up correctly. Respond to Criticism Quickly As with any product, it is inevitable that a social networking service will eventually make a major mistake. The danger with making an error in the social networking universe is that the dynamic between host and user is different from say a newspaper and its customers. In the print world, if a reader doesn’t like a particular newspaper article, they can write to the Editor, and the paper may or may not print the complaint letter. In the social networking world, where the entire system is designed for expression by the users with little or no administrator control, the very social networking service can be used to trash brand image. Case in point, the Facebook Mini Feed fiasco of 2006. Facebook has a unique development strategy of not previewing any new features before releasing them to the public. There are no betas, features just suddenly appear in the production environment. In summer of 2006, Facebook released a new feature called the Mini Feed/News Feed. The feature gathered all recently changed data about your “friends” (if they added other “friends”, if their relationship status changed, if they added photos to their profile, etc) and then displayed it like a news ticker. This also meant that every change you made to your profile was instantly aggregated and displayed to your “friends” too. The public uproar was instantaneous. Facebook groups instantly sprang up, denouncing the invasion of privacy that the Mini Feed represented. Thousands of users joined these groups and Facebook was flooded with angry e-mails. The event even made the front page of major national newspapers [12]. Though this negative response took Facebook aback, they demonstrated a quality that all successful social networking sites emulate. They rapidly (VERY rapidly), fixed the situation. Within two days the Facebook staff acknowledged the problem of the Mini Feed, and while they refused to eliminate the feature, they began immediately implementing privacy features to limit what information the aggregator gathered from your profile and displayed to “friends”. Within less than a week, the new privacy settings were live and operational. The anger rapidly died down, and all is well on Facebook again [9]. Facebook’s error was its lack of testing, which would have likely highlighted the need for privacy features for the Mini Feed. Other companies have already learned this lesson. Competitor site Friendster uses focus groups to test new features before global implementation, Wikipedia lets user vote on major changes before they are applied to an article, and entertainment company Blizzard uses beta servers to test new content in its popular World of Warcraft game before allowing it to affect the general player population. Beta testing and focus groups are key to ensuring that a feature will truly benefit a service’s users. 5 In the event of a disaster like the Mini Feed, a rapid response helped save the brand image of Facebook. Car companies can take months to recall a vehicle, but online users are much more fickle. They have competitors they could potentially switch to. Facebook did exactly the right thing by listening to users and fixing the problem they had created. It’s proof that the power of the crowd can influence major decisions if they are given a medium to express themselves. The Facebook fiasco proved that the power of the people isn’t just a concept. Large groups on the Internet influence decisions on a daily basis, from the rabid fan group that influenced the feature film “Snakes on a Plane” to the many online petitions that garner thousands or even millions of digital signatures. Privacy is Important There is always a danger when posting personal information in a public area. It’s unfortunate, but a reality, that there are people in the world who prey on others and take advantage of them. Whether it’s identity theft or sexual predators, there are threats to people and families that are aided by the public nature of the Internet. The risk is especially great on social networking sites, which are designed to display personal information to the world. The Internet’s largest social networking service, MySpace, has also suffered the most attention when it comes to privacy. National magazines like U.S. News and World Report have published entire cover stories detailing the safety and privacy concerns of MySpace. Without the actual physical connection in communication, sexual predators have been able to create false profiles which they can then use to solicit teens that have not yet learned the life lessons of wariness. It is easy for a predator to start innocent text conversations with a teen and slowly work up a base of trust. Though the request for a physical meeting is a red flag for most online users, there are plenty of documented cases of MySpace teens meeting in the real world with “friends” who turned out to be anything but. Twisting the concept a bit, the teens themselves are also to blame. Many, usually girls, choose to post risqué or alluring photos of themselves. This creates a distorted perception of who they are as a person, and may attract predators to their profiles. This is why many organizations recommend parents check up on their childrens’ profiles to ensure they are not disclosing harmful personal information or unwanted pictures [1]. Though a social networking service cannot police all its users to hunt down predators, preventive measures can be put in place. For instance, nearly all social networking services give a user the choice of making their profile public or private. The difference being that a private profile can usually only be seen by a user’s “friends”. Facebook has a tiered level of privacy. Profiles can be public or private, but even if they are public, they are only public to students of that particular institution. Students from another college must become “friends” with someone from another college before they can view a profile, even if the profile is public. As mentioned above, Facebook also has significant privacy control in the area of information propagation via the Mini Feed/News Feed. It’s a very effective system, and one that many students take advantage of. Making Facebook 6 profiles private has been especially important within the last year, as employers have begun using Facebook to research potential employees in order to discover potentially unwanted habits. Since MySpace has no breakdown in terms of institutions, it has begun to create barriers based on age. Even if a teen’s profile is public, a MySpace user who lists their age as over 21 cannot view a teen’s profile. This privacy feature is a welcome addition, but there is nothing in place to prevent a predator from simply listing their profile age as 17. Users can also report suspicious profiles or behavior to administrators, which allows users to exercise some self-governance. Finally, MySpace has also began pulling information from a database of sexual predators to detect and delete profiles of predators. There is no all-encompassing solution to privacy in a social networking service. The only certainty is that privacy features are a must, though the level of control they offer depends on how open a service is. Though privacy is very important, the point of a social networking site is also to foster a sense of community. People cannot meet and interact if their profiles are locked up and invisible to others. The happy medium must be found where users can interact with others, while also isolating themselves in such a way that they don’t feel their personal information is in jeopardy of falling into the wrong hands. Where Do We Go From Here? The only problem with straight research from articles is that, when it’s all said and done, the findings are still nothing more than educated guesses. In order to prove findings true or false, an experiment must be attempted. That was the second half of this project. In order to prove or disprove the points that were outlined above, I created a social networking service to test at my college. Following the criteria above, I chose to implement a service that dealt with the untapped niche market of events. A college is always full of events, but they are not always advertised effectively and easily visible to everyone. Public events like intramurals for instance are likely adverted in the fitness center of a college, but may have less advertising coverage in other buildings. E-mail is also often used to try and reach entire student bodies, but the huge amount of e-mail students receive on a daily basis prompts many to simply delete messages without reading them. The point of my site, which I named Colligo (Latin for “to gather together”), was to create an environment where people and organizations could easily post information about events. These events could range from poker gatherings to baseball games to department meetings. The system was designed to be flexible enough to handle private or public events not only for individuals, but also groups as well. The events theme was chosen because there are currently no major sites that cater to public events planning in a college environment. Events planning is built into sites like Facebook, but the functionality limits the events to private gatherings which you must invite people to. In another vein, eVite helps you plan the details of the event, whether it be a football game party or a birthday party, but still limits the event to a private 7 gathering [2]. One of the points of college is to get out and meet new people and try new things. To that end, Colligo was designed from the ground up to encourage public events that everyone is welcome to. The finished and future versions of this paper will describe the victories and trials in the implementation of Colligo in a real college environment. Bibliography [1] Andrews, M. (2006, 9 18). Decoding MySpace. U.S. News & World Report , pp. 46-60. [2] eVite. (n.d.). eVite. Retrieved 9 25, 2006, from eVite: http://www.evite.com [3] Facebook. 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