The Rise of the Networked Individual

Its been a long time since I updated this blog!

I happened to attend a talk by Lee Rainie [twitter] in the University of Minnesota on “The Rise of the Networked Individual”. Lee Rainie is one of the master minds behind The Pew Internet & American Life Project and he is a self claimed expert on social media and has done a lot of research on this field.

Here are a few highlights from his speech on April 22, 2010 at UMN.

1. The Golden Age of Amateur Experts both a blessing and a curse.

Participating in social media and creating content is cheap and also easy. Hence there are tons of amateur professionals who publish their thoughts, pictures, videos and other content in the internet and hence the noise becomes higher. This makes it difficult for a consumer of content to identify the best content.
Opportunities: intelligent Feed filters to suppress noise and bring out the best content. Eg. techmeme, techlens

2. Blogs vs social media

Rainie highlights that facebook and other social networks have emerged as one of the most used technologies on the internet, with facebook being a major player in social media and people spend more time with FB than with google search. Microblogging has taken to new heights and the number of people using blogs are coming down.
Applications : A team in facebook has created an application which will create a blog with your FB profile and status updates.

3. The strength of weak ties is bigger than the strength of strong ties

Having read a paper on “Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media” by Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios, which highlights the importance of strong ties, this came in as a surprise. The interesting argument was that all strong ties [friends, family, coworkers] were almost at the same level and had the same contacts as you. However the weal ties played an important role in a job search, because they have a different network. Also, Rainie pointed out that the digital friends are either 0 or 1 [friend or not a friend], where as in real world, there are priorities and ranks.
Applications: Create ranking algorithms in friend circles in social media

4. Dashboard

Integrating social media is the call of the day and there is a lot of potential in integration of social networking sites in to a single portal. This also explains the cost of switching to a new network.
Opportunities : With rich APIs, creating a new portal sounds very plausible.

5. Location Aware Systems

Forusquare was one of the most successful companies in 2009 and yahoo, Microsoft [and facebook ?] are all eyes on it with a billion dollar evaluation. Location aware systems have successfully emerged in bringing a positive mindset with recommendations and networking over weighing the privacy concerns.
Opportunities: Replicate foursquare and make it better!

6. Privacy Concerns :

Americans are extremely concerned with privacy but the technology of social media and location aware systems clearly over-weigh the cons. Rainie highlights that the number of users who leave their data on the cloud is on a exponential high and people are less concerned with privacy these days.

Twitter stream of the speech : #rainie [April 22, 2010]

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