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Social Networks for Current Awareness

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 7 months ago

 

Social networks for Current Awareness.

Sue Cook 

3 August 2007

 

 

How many people have joined an online social network?

What benefits have you gained professionally?

 

There have been a few other people with replies on this.

They have said that we need to be where the clients are or that we need to be aware of developing technologies.

 

I think that participating in one or more online social networks is of value in itself as a source of professional information.

 

First of all a recap to set the scene:

 

Fifteen years ago, before the web, what were our sources of information?

 

We had books, journals- and all the other traditional hardcopy resources accessible though catalogues and indexes

 

I remember wanting to be a special librarian at library school, and reading lots on that subject. There was one article that I still remember (although I couldn’t tell you the citation).

It said that in any organisation one joined as a librarian there would already be the “gurus”- people who others naturally went to as information sources. It was recommended that the gurus were to be cultivated as sources but also as people to whom you could direct information so it could be disseminated to the rest of the organization.

 

So- I would add “the gurus” into our pool of traditional information sources.

 

Then came the World Wide Web. Our sources went online in ever increasing numbers. Initially we had to browse for them. We also had online forums to which we and our gurus could contribute.

 

Then we could search.

 

And our possible sources grew to include wikis

 

and blogs.

 

RSS and readers came along to make information seeking a bit easier and turn my arrows around. Instead of having to go and seek information we could ask the information to come to us. Websites became push.

 

That brings us to today.

 

David Sacks recently stated that information seeking has moved from browse to search to share. What did he mean by that?

 

Sharing is taking place in the social networks and social networking platforms are developing into the new information portals. Sharing is another form of push information flow. The pointers to information come to information seekers via their online friends. I want to examine this in more detail and use Twitter as an example of a social network to demonstrate this in action.

 

Let me divert for a moment to talk about the elements of a social network so we all know what I mean by that.

 

Gene Smith in his article “Social building blocks” included the following elements of a social network. They are

         a way of identifying people in the system

         a way of knowing who is online, or available

         a way of describing relationships

         a way of talking to other people through the system

         a way of forming groups

         a way of knowing the reputation of other people in the system

         a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants

 

I would add that an ideal network also has:

         A way of controlling the level of privacy that you are comfortable with including choices to block unwelcome friend requests.

         Multiple ways of accessing the conversation and sharing the resources.

 

This is a diagram of three social websites and how they use the building blocks described by Smith. The dark green hexagon is the element which Smith considers is the focus of the system; the light green hexagons are the supporting elements.

 

But I disagree with Gene Smith’s assessment of Twitter. He has indicated that Twitter is primarily about presence, and secondarily focussed on conversations, identity and relationships. But what do people do while having conversations? They share information.

 

But what is Twitter?

 

According to Wikipedia

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro bogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, the Twitter website, or other third party applications.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends”

 

So let’s have a closer look at Twitter and how it works as an information portal.

 

This is what the Twitter home page looks like. As you can see the direction of the posts is to answer “What are you doing?”

 

We are looking at the public timeline. All posts from people who do not have their profile marked as private appear here.

 

This is the public profile page of a randomly picked stranger.

 

There are two tabs. We can see her posts

 

And her posts mixed with her non private friends.

 

And here is mine.

 

Looking at these pages in this way will not give you any sense of the value of twitter. People have been very dismissive.but Others are totally addicted.

Clive Thompson in WIRED MAGAZINE recently said:

“So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it's experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can't explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends “

 

This is my home page which will give you an idea of what you see after you join. There is a place to post a message, those messages from people that I follow and some profile details on the side. Messages are archived which means you don’t miss anything if you are not online for a while.

 

The key thing about posts is that although they are only 140 characters long they can contain URL’s.  This is done through a technology called tinyurl. Any long URL can be turned into a much shorter one.

 

This means that posts actually can contain a lot of information. By linking to other sites the question of “What are you doing” can actually be answered by

“Reading…

“listening to …

“Writing….

“Watching….” With links to whatever they deem valuable enough to share.

 

One good example of linking like this is this person who happens to be one of the people that I follow.

This is where Twitter turns into an information portal. Pointers to information that you didn’t even know to look for come to you via trusted sources.

 

Twitter recently changed the terms that it was using to define relationships. It changed from “friends” and “followers” to “following” and “followers’. This fits my argument today.

 

These are the people that I follow on Twitter. They don’t necessarily all follow me. I have chosen to follow most of them because of the value they were already adding to my current awareness needs via their blogs

 

They are my ‘gurus’.

 

They tend to fall into three groups. There is a group of local people who are associated with the Web Development community, there is a group of Australian Librarians and there is a group of International librarians.

 

 

If they chose to share with me and others the information they are using then it already has value. It has already been filtered and you do not have to go looking for it, it just arrives. There are differences between information sharing via Twitter and that shared via blogs. Twitter posts are of course shorter than a blog post and can be more immediate (and less considered). People will point to something grabbing their attention now and not necessarily something worth a long post.

 

As I have said, one sort of information flow in Twitter is via people posting with links to sources. But there is a much more direct sort.

 

Posts don’t have to be about “What are you doing?” They can be anything you like. Posts can ask a question. Pose a question to a large enough crowd simultaneously and someone may know the answer.

 

This is a screenshot of a recent twitter conversation. I don’t expect you to be able to read this. This person recently bought an Apple computer for the first time after using a PC for a long time. She was having trouble using it the first weekend but found lots of help via twitter.

 

And answers don’t necessarily come from your first degree contacts. People can and do repost to their other followers.

 

The numbers of people that can be reached this way are large.

 

This is an extreme example but it’s cool so I wanted to share it. This is a representation of one particular person’s sphere of influence on Twitter. He is Robert Scoble who is a well know tech blogger. He is represented by the dot in the middle. Each dot in the first layer is his 4956 followers then their followers and so on. In April Scoble reported that he found out about the Mexico City earthquake via Twitter several minutes before the USGS reported it and an hour before CNN reported it.

 

Twitter can be a more immediate conduit of information than email or forums.

 

So besides being of value as personal information sources what are the implications of Twitter for us as librarians?

 

One of the themes of Library 2.0 is getting the information to the user in whatever format that they want it.

 

As I said in my initial description of Twitter “Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through other applications.”

Those “other applications” include:

         Firefox extensions and plugins

         Desktop applications for every platform

         Homepage widgets

         Blog widgets

         Google desktop gadget

         Mobile (phone) web

         Twittergram for posting voice

         Apps for reading twitter to voice

         A Facebook application

         Second life applications

And so on.

 

If a library can get its information into Twitter their users can then decide what platform that they want to receive that information.

 

Here are some of examples of libraries doing just that.

 

They are a university library,

 

a public library

 

and a special library.

 

To wrap up – how does this work?

 

  1. Find yourself a social network where the people whose opinions you value are.
  2. Join
  3. Friend or follow those people
  4. Be willing to contribute to the conversations.
  5. Experience the information flows.

 

 

 

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