This post provides an annotated bibliography of some work on using social media (in particular Facebook) as a pre-registration/pre-university/induction tool. The references given can also be found at my Delicious site. Some examples of the use of Facebook for induction purposes are given at the end.
The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET. The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays. Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period. Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.
Until recently no one had taken it upon themselves to do concentrated, outsider examination of the News Feed - Top News versus Most Recent (both are filtered) - to see what's going on. Tom Weber staged a one-month experiment to unpack the algorithm, and came out with 10 of Facebook's secrets - and if you're crafty, a way to game the News Feed to ensure that you come up more often than others.
In Activity Streams, verbs are their own objects, and the variety of actions that can be represented is limited only by the standard itself. Providers can also use verbs outside the standard, taking the chance that they'll eventually be incorporated, or that a downstream client could parse them anyway. Here's a list of the verbs incorporated in the Activity Streams standard so far:
"Socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote." And that's why we don't want to run a University-wide Tornado server
A US study (http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx) has indicated that younger internet users are losing interest in blogging and switching to shorter and more mobile forms of communication. The number of 12 to 17-year-olds in the US who blog has halved to 14% since 2006, according to a survey for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
14.5% of all online time is spent on MSN Live Messenger - 14.5% of 27 billion total hours. The next biggest service is Facebook at at 5.2% with YouTube coming in third at 4.4% (Google's biggest slice of the online pie.) Facebook climbs 200% in usage since the same time last year.
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.
Student-driven revision/moan group for BS3035 on Facebook. Interesting to see evidence of concerted email campaign to elicit information about exam questions.
I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices... As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it's not broadly popular. My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan's friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become "public" (to all that matter) simply because there's social pressure to connect to "everyone"?
Screw Blackboard... do it on Facebook: an investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook’ paper by Neil Selwyn, London Knowledge Lab. Paper presented at the ‘Poke 1.0 - a Facebook social research symposium’, London Knowledge Lab, University of London, UK - Thursday 15th November 2007
Imagine if every twelve weeks Facebook: * shut down all the groups you belonged to, * deleted all your forum posts, * removed all the photos, videos, and other files you had shared, and * forgot who your friends were.
"What we care about is what makes information inadequate." David Weinberger's keynote about the value of the implicit @ Defrag Con. He's describing the route to web 3.0: http://tinyurl.com/yw4ffj
Microsoft has paid $240m (£117m) for a 1.6% stake in Facebook that values the site at $15bn (£7.3bn). Facebook spurned an offer from Google which was also keen to invest the site.
A few years ago I wrote to Microsoft’s leadership and asked them why they weren’t involved in the new Web 2.0 space. I got an answer back that was about 2,000 words long and included the words “business value” 13 times.
Millions in the UK are already registered with Facebook, or similar social networking tools such as MySpace, Bebo and Friendster, to conduct part of their private lives online, and it's growing at a huge rate.