April 16, 2008
Attention through Status Message Update (SMU)
Through the Psychology of Facebook and Data Mining and Electronic Business classes at Stanford, I propose the term:
Status Message Update (SMU).
SMU is a unit and mechanism of asynchronous light weight communication distributed to an audience. SMU can be a currency and service, similar to SMS.
Communicating "status" is essential to our most valuable source of capital- attention. We are experiencing a temporary attention micro-economy right at this moment if you are reading this. However, attention does not come in precise, indistinguishable units. SMU is a metric emerging from social media that can potentially help us better understand attention.
How to persuade attention through the Facebook SMU?
Getting attention is more than a momentary thing because you build on a SMU stock. For example, if I post a SMU to "BUY THIS VACUUM CLEANER!" every five minutes, my network of friends would change their privacy settings and think some combination of the following:
a. I'm wasting a 100k at Stanford
b. I have OCD
c. Some advertiser is paying something worth more than my soul
However, if your SMU is new, real, original, or provocative then you might start acquiring subscriptions exponentially through Facebook's various viral channels. Thus, obtaining attention through SMU is obtaining a kind of enduring wealth, a form of wealth that puts you in the VIP seat to get anything the attention economy offers.
"Contrary to what you are sometimes urged to believe, money cannot reliably buy attention."
-Michael H. Goldhaber
Stay tuned for the next addition of Kairos through Status Message Update (SMU). Please feel free to contact me and shred this post to pieces!
Thank you for your attention,
Enrique Allen
Mark reviews services like ping.fm, hellotxt, MoodBlast, and Socialthing that hopefully facilitate valuable SMU for you.
Facebook, if I get your attention, I would greatly appreciate analyzing your status data and comparing it with Super Status lol!
Posted by Enrique at 04:09 AM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2008
Social Platform Sustainable Game Mechanics
Following a post by Max Levchin, CEO of Slide, platform teams must sustain a developer friendly ecosystem by manipulating elements that compose a mass multiplayer game of persuasion.
Platform developer goals:
1. Earn money
2. Acquire fame
3. Procure intellectual stimulation
Platform Owner Goals:
1. Attract and keep top developer talent
2. Encourage development of net-positive products
3. Maximize constructive competition among developers
4. Minimize objectively net-negative developers & products
--Enrique Allen
Posted by Enrique at 02:07 AM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2008
Video - Stanford Facebook class insights
The day before our Facebook class gave final presentations, some of us shared work at BayCHI. This event was probably better than the final. It's shorter and more direct.
You can watch the video below (with many thanks to BayCHI).
http://www.archive.org/details/baychi20071211v
You'll see how Facebook is a persuasive technology, what the students did to reach millions of users in a few weeks, and how this relates to the larger projects in our lab, including Peace Technology.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2007
Quick update on Stanford Facebook course
The Facebook course I've been teaching with Dave McClure has been in session for two weeks. We are setting up a blog exclusively about the course. In anticipation, we've been holding back our posts. But there's so much to talk about, I want to summarize a few things:
More than expected, the media has covered the course. The reporters usually spin our course to intrigue their readers, even if the story is not totally accurate. (For example, many say that we're hosting an expo in December for investors. Not true. And we keep telling reporters the investor angle is not true, but they keep writing this into their stories. More on media in future posts.)
The students have been superb: smart, flexible, dynamic . . . This is the best part: working with students.
The course has gotten richer as we've expanded our Tuesday 3-hour labs to bring in experts from Slide, Rock You, and more. We're also able to give students more hands-on technical help than we expected.
We've settled on short name for the course: "Persuasive apps & metrics." Coming up with a short name that captured the course well wasn't simple. But we're mostly happy with the result.
Biggest surprise: How many people and companies have offered to help us (thank you!). Of course, each person has a motive, often the ability to later recruit talent. Not all offers are useful to us, but we've welcomed talent and services that improve the course.
That's the quick update. More soon.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2007
Musings on Facebook from an 8th-grader
Brian Kong is 13 and in 8th grade at a school in Palo Alto. He's been participating in our lab for the past month and helping us understand the psychology of Facebook across different age groups. Here is a summary he's written of his findings, and some of his ideas for how to improve Facebook.
- Dan AG
As a 13 year old, I'm pretty sure I'm not part of Facebook's target population. However, more and more, I think that I'm beginning to understand why some of my friends started using Facebook, and what persuades more to join. Most of my friends use Facebook for one primary one reason: to tell about their lives and look at the ones that their friends or classmates live. Facebook is picking up success right now among my peers, because during the long summer break when my friends couldn't hang out or verbally update each other on what we did, we needed to find a newer, quicker outlet to keep in touch. This summer for me, the new outlet was Facebook. The word spread through emails and the urge to be part of this new "trend" caused many of us to join. After joining, we realized that it was a great site, and we stuck to it. The applications are also key to Facebook's success in capturing my attention. They provide a little more fun, such as super poke or zombie. So far, my friends are all zombies, and repeatedly try to bite me, as they probably do to other unbitten friends as well.
Facebook is great, but there are a few ways that it could be improved—maybe through new apps that others build. I would think that they should have some form of live video messaging so that the chatters could see other through a web cam. And then, maybe on the side of the video chat window, there would be a small summary of the other person's recent adventures, allowing people easy access to personalized conversation topics. They can even have an area on the screen that links or displays what chatters are currently discussing, such as a picture, an URL, a word document, a video, etc. This would be even cooler than a face to face conversation, and help increase communication and collaboration.
A few new features might also help Facebook expand. There should be some feature where based on your interests, a matchmaking game is set up. It brings you together with another random person with the same hobbies, and makes this little game to help you understand each other better and work as a team. This would also cause more friendships to be made over Facebook, increasing the time that a person would want to spend on Facebook. Of course, this idea is just one out of many, but features like this are generally what would make Facebook more popular and used over longer periods of time.
--- Brian Kong
Posted by Dan at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2007
"Support the Monks' Protests" - Persuasive Technology for Peace on Facebook
I just stumbled across the 337,000-person strong "Support the Monks' Protests in Burma" Facebook group. From the Persuasive Technology Lab perspective, this Facebook group is a timely confluence of our lab's academic interests:
(1) We are teaching a class on building engaging and persuasive Facebook applications
(2) We are studying the psychology of Facebook
(3) We are beginning to dive deep into a project related to "Peace Technology," and we aim to provide insight into how to build persuasive and effective technologies that can help bring about peace on a local level and on a global scale.
The Support the Monks Facebook Group currently has 337,000 members and 6,000 wall posts from members and appears to be extremely successful in raising awareness on Facebook using Groups and Events. According to the group, this Saturday is the "International Day of Action for a Free Burma." From the Facebook group: "We are marching in solidarity with the monks and ordinary people of Burma who are risking their lives for freedom and democracy."
According to an article in Wired, Group leaders anticipate tens of thousands of people taking to the streets around the world Saturday in Facebook-fueled marches, mass protests against Myanmar's recent crackdown on monks' pro-democracy demonstrations. The marches, organized by volunteers using Facebook, show the increasing power and reach of Facebook, and a user's unique ability to leverage his/her individual social graph to spread a message.
Events are scheduled in major cities worldwide, including at Stanford University, this Friday at noon. Scheduled to speak are Mark Gonnerman, a Stanford professor of Religious Studies and founding director of the Aurora Forum, and Nick Harmony, a Board Member of the Burmese American Democratic Alliance.
A question to our readers: What other interesting examples have you found of community organizations using Facebook to promote peace, and what methods have been most effective?
Posted by Dan at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2007
105 students join Stanford Facebook Course
Yesterday we taught the first Facebook class at Stanford, with over 100 student crammed into a temporary room that still wasn't big enough.
My co-teacher Dave McClure, my trusty TA Dan Ackerman-Greenberg, and new Team Coach Yee Lee helped teach the 3-hour class. We had a lot of fun.
We've set up more info on the course here: http://captology.stanford.edu/facebook.html
You'll see that our course isn't about the code part of FB apps. We're focusing on the psychology and metrics of Facebook, and how understanding these two pieces can help developers create superior applications on Facebook--or on whatever platform opens up next (and apparently more are coming soon).
What's new here is how Facebook Platform has brought the creator and user close together through Facebook product features like Reviews and Discussion Boards, as well as built-in metrics of uptake and engagement. Anyone can see exactly how people are responding to a Facebook app, both individually and collectively.
The feedback loop between creator and user is so small now that we've crossed a threshold--an important one. I believe we're entering a new era for designing interactive products. And that's why this course matters.
That said, we all agree our new course is risky. It could turn out to be a disaster, not just for a few students but for over 100 students, some of whom came back to school from academic leave to enroll in the course.
So I gotta hand it to Stanford University. This is an institution that welcomes innovation, like this new course. I hope our students appreciate this fact. I sure do.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 02:10 PM | Comments (1)
September 16, 2007
New Stanford Course on Facebook Apps (well, sort of)
So I can finally announce that I'm teaching a new course on Facebook this fall with Dave McClure and Dan Ackerman-Greenberg.
Students will focus on creating Facebook apps and using metric tools (like Google Analytics) to optimize the apps. We'll grade students in part on how deeply their apps engage users.
I proposed the new course because I believe we've entered a new era of interaction design. The distance between creator and user has become extremely small, thanks to Facebook Platform. This is the shape of things to come, and I want to understand it early.
Persuasion plays a key role in all of this. Facebook is the most persuasive technology of 2007. Studying the psychology of Facebook and the new apps available there should be both fun and enlightening.
I've posted a bit more on another page.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)