March 27th, 2009, 19 Comments »
At South by Southwest Interactive last week, marketer Peter Shankman said “if you say you’re a social media expert, I’m going to check how many Twitter followers you have.” This is about as useful a metric as saying “if you say you’re a professional hockey player, I’m going to count how many hockey sticks you have.” It tells only a tiny fraction of the whole story.
Shankman’s comment got me wondering: how would Twitter be different if the service didn’t publish statistics about who you’re following and who’s following you? Because these numbers are public, we’re experiencing a kind of follower arms race, where heedless reciprocal following has become the norm and popularity and leader-board sites are de rigeur (I’m still working on getting my douchebag index into the nineties). One’s list of followers has become, for better or for worse, the new unweeded blogroll–messy, too long and polluted with hastily-exchanged links. This shouldn’t be a surprise: from box office revenue to Technorati ranking, if we can count it publicly, we will.
Several people have begun wondering about how our burgeoning networks will scale, and how its users will deal with the growing amount of signal.
If our Twitter numbers were private, wouldn’t we be more selective about who we followed? Wouldn’t we focus on forming a conversational network based on the quality of people we followed, instead of the number of people who followed us? Wouldn’t we emphasize meaningful discussion over the “top seller” mentality that seems to pervade the tool?
Grade Eight Gym Class
It took me years to start obsessing about the web stats for this site. I eventually learned to follow my friend Dave Olson’s advice to “fuck stats, make art”. Now I’m facing a similar grindstone with Twitter. The bloggy, social media world has always been a bit too much like high school. I thought we’d begun to grow out of that immaturity, but the tyranny of Twitter stats puts us right back in the sweaty locker room after grade eight gym class.
I was talking to my friend John Keyes about how I could reduce my compulsion to watch my Twitter stats. He was sympathetic, and whipped up a Greasemonkey script that simply hides the follower numbers from the tool’s web interface. It’s only as effective a mind hack as, say, setting your watch five minutes fast. However, it’s a little reminder to chill out and use Twitter the way I want to, instead of how the popularity-obsessed web demands that I do.
UPDATE: British writer and comedian Dave Gorman has a great post that touches on a similar topic:
But yesterday I had two people contact me to tell me that I was rude for not following them. How not-following someone can be rude is quite beyond me. So I asked. And their point was that they were following me and that it was therefore only polite for me to follow them back because unless I did that I wasn’t being interactive.
Which seems to me to be a false definition of what interactivity really is. In what way would clicking a button to say I was following someone be actually interacting with them? At the moment I follow between 200 and 300 people. When I log on I normally find there are between 10 and 20 posts for me to look at from the last 5 minutes of activity. But I’m followed by over 20,000 people. If I followed all of them, there would be a hundred times as many recent posts to review. There would be no way of me actually reading - or even meaningfully scanning - 1000 to 2000 posts every 5 minutes.
I especially like his conclusion:
The difference between following someone and replying to them is the difference between stopping to chat with someone in the street or giving them a badge declaring that you know them. One is actual interaction. The other is just something you can show your friends.
19 Comments »
January 27th, 2009, 9 Comments »
In the next couple of months, I’m giving three talks to different groups associated with post-secondary education. In preparing these speeches, I was doing research into Facebook’s market penetration among BC’s teens.
As you may know, Facebook’s advertising program lets you thin-slice your target audience in all sorts of interesting ways–gender, age, location even specific interests or workplaces. I created a query that indicated that I could reach 344,860 British Columbians between the age of 15 to 19. I take this to mean that there are 344,860 profiles matching that criteria on Facebook.
Curious to see what percentage of all BC teens this was, I checked the BC government’s stats for the current population of teens aged 15 to 19 in the province. They reported 287,444. I took screenshots of the two sources:
That means that there are 1.2 profiles on Facebook for every BC teen. Is that possible? Probably. After all, I recently read that 99% of the 2012 class at Amherst College had a Facebook profile. I suppose that if 20% of teens created two profiles, they’d generate these results.
And I remember reading some of danah boyd’s (lower case capitalization hers) research that indicates that teens discard unwanted profiles frequently, and often create several on a given social network.
In any case, isn’t this kind of false advertising from Facebook? The most teens an advertiser could possibly reach in BC is all of them: 287,444 in 2008, a few more in 2009.
9 Comments »
November 18th, 2008, 13 Comments »
A while back I subscribed to the RSS feed for Statistics Canada. As you might imagine, the agency produces statistics and reports on a wide and occasionally bizarre array of stuff–fertilizer shipments, iron piping and so forth. As you know, these reports are regular fodder for journalists (and, uh, bloggers) hunting for low-hanging trend stories.
Today Statistics Canada released data on divorces across the country in 2005 (the newest year available, presumably). Using their handy data manipulation tool, I generated this chart:
So which province has the highest divorce rate? As you can see, it’s Alberta. I’m ignoring the northern territories, because the sample size is pretty small (Nunavut suffered all of 10 divorces in 2005).
Is Alberta a Red State?
What gives? Why are there 27% more divorces per capita in Alberta than in Saskatchewan? Is this like the US, where so-called conservative red states have a considerably higher incidence of divorce than blue states?
Here’s one thesis: people marry younger in Alberta, and the younger you marry, the likelier you are to get divorced. That’s disproved, though, because Saskatchewan has the lowest marriage age (27 for women, 29.3 for men) in the country as well as a low divorce rate. That’s the red state theory–earlier marriages combined with lower socio-economic standing and less education. Stereotypes aside, I don’t think those factors apply to Alberta.
Here’s another idea that sounds plausible: compared to other provinces, Alberta has a low immigration rate. New Canadians, particularly those from Asia, are less likely to divorce.
Why do you think Alberta has the country’s highest rate of divorce?
Incidentally, while looking through some Statistics Canada research, I found this chart. The rate of divorce is apparently highest for those married about 4.5 years. After that there’s a long decline (to quote Neil Young). Once you hit 40 years of marriage, your odds of divorce are roughly two in 1000.
13 Comments »
September 5th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Reuters Second Life News Center recently reported that, for the first time, there had been 50,000 concurrent users inside the game. That’s a notable milestone, but it’s not really what interested me.
Lower down in the article, Reuters references these fascinating graphs by Tateru Nino (she of the mop-like hair, sexy glasses and transparent chest). They display a bunch of usage statistics for Second Life. They only go back six months, I loves me a chart, don’t you?
The most interesting charts are the first two. The one on the left shows the dramatic increase in registrations over the past, with the total more than doubling to about 9.3 million. However, the chart on the right shows the number of ‘active residents’ (I think that’s users who have logged in in the last month). It’s pretty much flat. Assuming these charts are accurate, those new users are remarkably, uh, unsticky.
3 Comments »
June 29th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Here’s a mini link round-up concerning gender-related stories:
- Via the new Digg + wiki site Thoof (how’s that pronounced? ‘thuf?’), I discovered the blog (and associated site) Expecting Executive. The company provides services for the pregnant businesswoman. That’s a clever and growing niche. There’s an idiosyncrasy in their blog URL–it’s http://blogspot.expectingexecutive.com/. You might need to look twice at that URL to spot the weirdness.
- A bunch of illuminating statistics about about sundry cultural and educational divides between boys and girls. The numbers on suicide and correctional facilities are particularly surprising.
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- The Musuo people live in the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, close to the border with Tibet. They are a matrilineal society, and have a highly unusual tradition of marriage. Here, also, are some beautiful photos on Flickr.
1 Comment »
