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Facebook, Google+, and the Crafting of the Global Social Network

Jul 1, ’11 8:32 AM

I was one of the “lucky,” who has a friend (and ex-coworker) that works for Google, and so I got an early invite to Google Plus, their attempt to take on Facebook head-on (i.e., after Facebook has achieved dominance, as opposed to the early Orkut days).

Google+ is oddly Facebook-like. This makes sense, given that FB is well-used by people of all ages in many countries. The design and interface are battle-tested (if also trivially and endlessly changable). But there’s a key difference, and one that started me thinking about the real business that Facebook is in.

That difference is, of course, the prominence of “Circles” in Google+, and the near-absence of features in Facebook for segmenting and targeting your communications. Sure, one can create friend groups in Facebook, and then make status updates for just a friend group, but I’ll bet a lot of you either didn’t know that, or had never used it. Heck, I’ve never used it despite my expressed desire on Facebook for just such a feature. It’s nearly invisible on Facebook.

It’s central and prominent on Google+. Google wants us to *limit* and control, for ourselves, to whom we target our words and images. Twitter almost insists upon the opposite, that we speak boldly into the ether, and whomever is listening will hear, whether we know the person or not.

I’d bet that at Facebook, any feature which restricts the *volume* or *velocity* of messages that flow within the Facebook global social network are verboten, or anathema. But at the same time, Facebook positions itself as providing control and “privacy,” despite numerous well-publicized privacy issues.

Twitter largely self-organizes as a social network. Facebook, on the other hand, is *crafting* the global social network. It encourages us to accept the illusion of privacy in order to get us to friend more people, post more status, and expose our opinions and information than we would be willing to otherwise. We should not, as a result, study the Facebook social network as if it were a reflection of our real-life social networks, because the two networks are different both in topology and in weighting.

What Google+ is trying to do, and how that intent will translate into reality once it’s fully up and running, I have no idea. It is, perhaps, not entirely clear to Google themselves, since they seem to start with goals and ideas, and let data and experiment drive them toward an ultimate plan and implementation. In fact, I’ll bet the social network scientists and researchers at Google have studied the Facebook social network and its dynamics better than anybody else except Facebook’s social network scientists, and know a good deal about what makes it tick and what makes it sick.

But it’s safe to say that they’ve made a couple of bets. One is that Google is willing to accept a slightly lower velocity and average quantity of messages in the system. This is inevitable because people will restrict more highly to whom they send various status and messages if the means for doing so is prominent and core to the system’s operation. The degree to which this effect will be prominent is open to question, but the underlying inequality in rates is pretty much built in. They would make this bet if the increased loyalty they get from customers yields a better upside.

Second, they’re betting that running a more organic and self-structured social network will yield better growth than a manipulated and engineered social network. Here, I’d bet that Google analyzed growth rates from various kinds of node-addition processes, and found that Facebook is oversaturating its degree distribution and eventually will lose the desirable “near-scale-free” network properties (for propagation), and will tend toward a distribution with too many degree correlations to propagate information efficiently. That’s a complete conjecture on my part, but it’s backed by some solid science on the nature of information transfer on various network topologies.

So Google+ is starting out in a seemingly interesting direction: offering more well-integrated control over how and to whom we communicate, but with a familiar feel and design. The real question now is, will enough people come and play, so that we can figure out how well it works, what Google is *really* doing, and whether that’s good or bad for individuals.

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A belated Towel Day perspective

May 29, ’11 5:13 AM

This year, on Towel Day, I was busy, putting together a fundraising dinner for the UW Anthropology Department and the UW Student Farm.  So I didn’t really write anything, as I have in years past.  But not for lack of something to say.  I’m not sure what it is, exactly, about “Towel Day,” the semi-bogus holiday celebrated by fans of Douglas Adams each year, but it seems to bring out the “long view” in me, visions of civilizations rising and falling.  You’d think such thoughts would be triggered by someone more profound…by a rereading of Edward Gibbon or at least Barbara Tuchman, or even Carl Sagan reflecting on the immensity in which our parochial concerns are lost.

Nope.  Douglas Adams does it every time.  It’s the Golgafrinchans, at the end of Restaurant At the End of the Universe.

Because, of course, they’re us.  They’re our bumbling, over-specialized, incapable of making a living for themselves, useless skills aplenty, useful skills thin on the ground, selves.

And, as an archaeologist and social scientist, the Golgafrinchans always remind me of how fragile our civilization is.  I am a social scientist, and I read a good bit of contemporary social science, of course, but in my work I analyze phenomena at a much longer time scale.  I study societies and social groups as they come and go, are born by fission from some other group of people, flourish, perhaps give rise to social “offspring,” and eventually go extinct.  And what is more emblematic of social extinction than Adams’s portrayal of the Golgafrinchan Ark “B”, carrying the non-essential members of society off to form a new world….

The Golgafrinchans occupy a place in my personal “wax museum of humanity” right next to Danny Hillis’s Long Now Foundation, and their 10,000 year clock.  Although the 24 hour news cycle and the buzz of tweets and instant information would have you believe otherwise, it is over much longer time scales that we can evaluate the success, and equitability, and sustainability of the various ways we humans have, of being human.  Our battles might be fought in days or years or lifetimes, but it is only our descendants that can truly “keep score” and decide how well we did.

The Long Now clock is designed to transcend us as a civilization, and as one of the ways we can communicate some of what we’ve learned with our far-future descendants.  It is designed not to require folks to be close enough to us in time and culture that they can read our writings, or comprehend our ideas, but to draw upon principles that are presumably deeper — not necessarily built into the laws of physics, mind you — but comprehensible to beings who are descended from our kind of minds, our kind of bodies.

Combine the perspective of an anthropologist studying the slow coming and going of societies, and the perspective of a software and systems engineer, and I think you get a sub-genre of futurism and speculation:  what it takes to “recover” the good bits of a civilization, after a collapse or other disaster.  Or simply the slow erosion of deep time.

I think of this problem in algorithmic terms.  If you wanted to maximize the chances of being able to recreate us, down the road after we’ve lost our knowledge, lost this particular set of scientific/democratic values, what is the “minimal instruction set”?

In short, what is the “boot loader” for an open, democratic society  combining expressive freedom and respect for scientific discovery?

This is the closest I can come up with, and I do not claim that it’s a deterministic algorithm.  In other words, starting here, you are not guaranteed to replicate the aspects of our civilization we value.  It’s clearly stochastic, and there’s clearly a lot of noise.  Which means only that I’m giving an “initial condition” and transition probabilities for processes which are in the “basin of attraction” of the product we’re looking for, and that if you follow such rules, “more often than not,” you’d end up with something we’d recognize as an open society.  Assuming you either replicate the experiment a lot (i.e., send LOTS of Golgafrinchans to LOTS of uninhabited worlds), or wait for the experiment to repeat itself over and over (i.e., deep time).

But here’s the algorithm (and I don’t claim full originality here):

  1. Pay attention and observe patterns in the world around you, keeping an open mind.
  2. Bang the rocks together, so to speak, and make things.  Especially new things.
  3. Understand how competition and cooperation work, and why each is necessary.
  4. Study those who are different, with an open mind.
  5. Pass on what you learn, without too much prejudice.

Put this algorithm on an endless loop, and you have something approximating the progressive parts of the last several thousand years of Western Civilization.   Ignore a couple of key clauses, and you have a much wider array of outcomes.  Not all good, and some downright scary.   Do it just like this, and you might, if you’re lucky, end up with an open, tolerant, prosperous, enlightened democracy.

That’s it.  That’s what it takes.  The Golgafrinchans managed it, apparently…and so did we.  But it was a narrow victory, and the question is whether we can manage to keep it up…..

Happy Towel Day!

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Recent Research

Mar 30, ’08 11:16 PM

I just returned today from the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, B.C.  I presented a paper (in poster form) about some recent work bridging the gap between formal models of cultural transmission (i.e., social learning and imitation between individuals) on social network graphs, and measures of cultural behavior that are observable in discrete traits (e.g., archaeological artifact classes).  A corrected PDF version of the poster is available here

Download madsen-lipo-bentley-saa2008-poster.pdf

and will be published soon along with our entire poster session as an issue of the online Journal of Evolutionary and Historical Sciences.  I’ll talk more about this soon, but this week is incredibly busy and I wanted to get at least one link up for the paper before I forget.

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Sunday Night Windstorm, and What I’m Doing and Studying

Jan 20, ’08 8:14 PM

I just came in from standing on the deck, under clear skies, a partial moon, and the most amazing windstorm. The moon made visible the big waves crashing on the rocks below me, and the whitecaps out in the channel. It’s been blowing hard all day, without cease, and I’m happy to be inside with a wood stove and food on the stove. A brief respite at home before another stretch at the office. I haven’t quite figured out the optimal amount of time to spend down in Seattle, but I’m pretty sure it’s shorter than I’ve been spending as things heat up at work. Seeing friends and doing things in Seattle is great, but I miss the island. The slow process of meeting people and “becoming a local” has all but stopped as I commute back and forth.

I haven’t written much here since late December, but only because life has reached a fever pitch again, and the brief times I have free away from a full schedule need to be devoted to research and my dissertation, not idle contemplation for my website. But we’re in the thick swamp of an election season, unseasonably early of course, and I haven’t written anything about the candidates, the primaries, the debates, as I did for much of 2004. I can’t promise to get back to regular posting before Super Tuesday, but I hope to soon thereafter. Or as soon as I can get my two projects more firmly underway (one paper, one poster) for the SAA (Society for American Archaeology) meetings in late March in Vancouver. Both are co-authored with Alex Bentley and Carl Lipo, and we’re working on the statistical consequences of expressing formal models of cultural transmission within realistic social networks.

For those unfamiliar with cultural transmission, this is the observation that humans are not born with a hard-coded set of cultural behaviors (in the sense of genetically transmitted) but learn, over the course of child development and throughout life, ways of behaving and believing and thinking through interaction with others in our social groups. In a formal sense, cultural transmission is modeled mathematically through analogues of haploid population genetics models (Wright-Fisher and Moran processes), replicator dynamics and allied models from evolutionary game theory, and the contact and voter models in the study of “interacting particle systems” or spatial stochastic processes by probability theorists and statistical physicists. An open question, whose likely answer is “yes,” is that these methods of modeling cultural learning and transmission are formally equivalent, given appropriate variations of population structure and the focus on deterministic versus stochastic models. But more of that in future posts, hopefully.

Basically, I’m working with some collaborators studying models of social learning and communication, for predictive ensemble or spatial statistical “signatures” in cultural data which are mapped spatially and dated temporally. A “signature” would be a unique pattern of statistical properties which tells us how a given population was structured (in terms of social networks) given the results of how cultural information flowed within the population, and came to be reflected in material objects or artifacts. An example would be a model in which we learn about, and adopt, preferences for songs and music from our social network of friends, but in an unbiased fashion — we occasionally adopt the preferences of a colleague or associate. What statistical properties does this local process of imitation have, when projected into a “global” perspective — statistical patterns within a population, spatial patterns in kinds of data we can map and chart?

Of course, we all know that the model I just described is pretty simplistic. Nobody “just copies” their friends, let alone doing so without any filters, biases, and on a strict “coin flip” or probabilistic basis. But it turns out it sure can look that way when you aggregate the results of many people imitating, choosing, learning, and adopting ideas. So this kind of model is a good “null hypothesis” for a simplistic kind of cultural communication — anything more realistic will have to depart from this simple random model in striking, hopefully unique ways.

Being able to find unique, predictive patterns from more complex models of cultural learning and communication is possible, but not guaranteed — it is easily possible (maybe even likely) that several different kinds of social situations could lead to the same overall patterns at a local, regional, or even global level. We call this problem “equifinality” — the data we have are insufficient to distinguish between several possible processes, so given our models and data, each process is “equally likely” to have caused the observed pattern.

This type of research is what I’ve been engaged in for a long time — at least since 1995, with conference papers, publications, and Carl Lipo’s dissertation research covering some of the results. Now I’m extending our previous work and learning a lot of math, probability, and population genetics in the process. It’s fascinating stuff, but in addition to the job at GridNetworks the work keeps me pretty busy.

This is all by way of explanation for my longish absences from writing something here. I hope to remedy that, as I said, but there’s some serious work between now and then.

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Carl Sagan and the “High-Water Mark”

Dec 20, ’07 7:19 PM

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world….There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

Today is the eleventh anniversary of Carl Sagan’s passing, and like last year many people are writing today to commemorate Sagan and contribute to the second annual Carl Sagan Blog-a-Thon. This is the first of several from me, and one that I’ve been thinking about for awhile.

Not too long ago a friend asked why I still was enamored of the old Cosmos episodes, and periodically went back to watch them. I had to think about it a great deal, because ultimately my friend was right: they’re outdated, and even in their depiction of history are occasionally inaccurate. I keep coming back to an answer, however, which makes me think about Hunter S. Thompson and the quote above.

At least for me, Carl Sagan and his work with Cosmos and planetary exploration represent the “high-water mark” for American scientific culture. Cosmos is redolent with the sense of knowing that we lived in a time when science and democracy and rationalism were winning out over superstition and fear. As Thompson says, not in any military sense, but simply that a particular sensibility would ultimately prevail.

It has not. Not long after Sagan completed the Cosmos series, the Moral Majority (and its descendants, the modern Religious Right) became a major force in American politics, and so-called “postmodernism” became a major force in American scholarship. Today, less than 30 years later, the prestige of science and rationalism are at their lowest in my lifetime. Watching Cosmos, and reading Sagan’s writings are the equivalent, in my view, of seeing the “high water mark” — the place where the wave of mid-20th century secular rationalism finally broke and rolled back.

This isn’t entirely a bad thing. A bit of skepticism is always a good thing. Feyerabend and Arthur Fine bring to the philosophy of science a needed skepticism about the uniqueness of “scientific method” and most of us now view science as a socially conditioned process. But still one whose essential feature is self-correction across the efforts of many. We may have no solid ground to claim that anything we learn is really true, in any ultimate sense, but Popperian falsification still seems to work: we can know when we’re wrong.

But the skepticism of the postmodern critique of “scientism” has crept into policy-making and politics. The shameless manipulation of science and expert testimony under recent (and especially the current) Administration is shocking, and it’s not clear how to reverse this trend. A whole generation of Americans is growing up without much significant training in math and science, which are increasingly viewed as specialities which it’s OK for most people to skip because they’re “not interested in that sort of thing.”

The elevation of personal choice as the sole arbiter of value is a difficult topic in a capitalist democracy (see Michael Sandel on this topic, among other political philosophers), but one thing is clear: we face choices as a country that virtually require us to understand the issues. And it is far from clear that the electorate does understand the evidence on global warming, or peak oil, or biodiversity, or genetic research, to name just a few topics.

So to some extent, I continue to remember Sagan and watch Cosmos as a reminder of what we need to regain, of what we’ve lost in the past 30 years.

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Java on Leopard: Is it “Horribly Broken?”

Oct 31, ’07 9:03 PM

Early reports concerning Java 5 on Leopard aren’t encouraging. John Gruber and Adrian Sutton hit back with blog entries, variously arguing either that the breakage isn’t important given shipping compromises, or that it isn’t really broken and that whiners should shut up.

My personal experience is that it’s broken in some significant ways. I’m not that concerned, given the scientific and mathematical programming I do, with Cocoa pipelines and graphics, but overall my fairly simple numerical simulations using RepastJ 3.1 run several orders of magnitude slower in Leopard than Tiger, given Log4J text logging in debug mode.

You can argue, as Sutton probably would, that nothing fundamental is wrong and that I shouldn’t judge “brokenness” by the performance of text I/O, but hey, let’s face it, if you can’t write ASCII text to a bloody text file before protons decay and the sun burns out, then Java 5 is horribly broken in Leopard.

Which sucks, because although Gruber doesn’t see any “significant” software being written in Java for the Mac, there sure are a lot of us using IntelliJ IDEA doing Java development on Intel Macs, and the compile and test cycle just got a lot worse. A *lot* worse.

Leopard was late, and compromises needed to be made, and sure Apple took a lot of flak for announcing the delay, but this OS needed more time in the oven.

UPDATE: This turns out to be the Quartz rendering pipeline switch, and is “fixed” by passing the following to the JVM as command line arguments:

-Dapple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz=true

My guess is that Apple might release a separate download to restore the Quartz pipeline as the default, but in the meantime this seems work. I would like to thank Pratik from Apple, who saw my post a couple of minutes ago and pointed me in the right direction.

Maybe Gruber and Sutton are right, it’s possible we all need to chill out a bit. This here upgrade might turn out to be alright, though I did follow Siracusa’s lead and turn off the pseudo-3D dock using the “no-glass” attribute — I have a zillion program icons and they’re incredibly hard to distinguish at very small sizes in pseudo-3D. Siracusa is also right, it’s almost impossible to read the very-similar grey “stacks” folder icons when my dock is so small….

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