Social Networks and Gossip Distribution

February 12th, 2008 seph250 Posted in Internet |

The term “social network” is pretty abstract with today’s social networks providing diverse ranges of functionality including entertainment, personal messaging, media sharing, self-expression, networking and gossip distribution. By “gossip”, I don’t mean negative or slanderous talk about others. More generally, I am referring to any casual information about other people in our social circles lives. Examples include someone going on a trip, getting a new job, breaking up with their girlfriend, or even getting a new hobby. Gossip distribution, which most people love to do, is a unique type of communication. While most forms of communication direct us to do something, or deliver information critical to our lives, the purpose of gossip distribution is to create a general awareness of what is going on in our community and understand each other better. I’d like to evaluate the historical methods of gossip distribution and try to understand how social networks have become a tool we rely on for this function

Industry S-Curves

Historically, the technologies and methods used to deliver gossip include:

1. Physical Meetings
2. Telephone
3. Email
4. Social Networks

In Figure 1, I outline the performance of the different technologies over time. The x-axis represents time and the y-axis is a performance metric titled “Ease of Information Distribution”. We mathematically define this metric as (number of relevant friends reached)*(quality of information) / (time spent distributing the information). Clearly I am not considering the scale of time or magnitude of performance improvements, but I think the general concept of these technologies disrupting another as our primary tool is reasonable. I am also ignoring entire categories of technology used for gossip distribution for the purpose of simplification.

Physical Meeting Points

Going back 1000’s of years, communal points provided the first method of gossip distribution. Ease of information distribution was low because delivery required physically meeting and the maximum number of people that could be reached at once was limited. Potential performance increases were possible with new technologies such as the megaphone and amphitheater however these were not well suited for the distribution of certain types of personal gossip information and could not always be utilized.

Telephone

With the advent of the telephone, the ease of distributing gossip dramatically increased. Physical travel was no longer necessary. As three-way calling, mobile phones and speaker phone technology became available, the ease of gossip distribution further improved.

Email

With email came a new method of distributing gossip. Users were now able to create mailing lists and send messages to a very large number of targeted friends simultaneously. As network externalities improved and more and more people became comfortable with this communication medium, performance further improved. Improved email software and email available on mobile phones also increased the performance. Users of email found that composing a message to deliver gossip information was more work than just talking on the phone, but being able to send it out to several targeted friends simultaneously made it ultimately less work.

Social Networking

Finally, social network sites emerged proving to be the ultimate (thus far) tool for gossip distribution. Early versions of social networks were bulletin boards, forums, AOL communities, and Geocities websites. However, it was not until later versions of social networks such as Friendster and Myspace that social networks began to outperform email as a gossip delivery tool. The design of these social networks allowed a user to browse their friend’s profiles and learn gossip (updates) about the person by viewing their photos, reading their “status” and reading their blog postings. Another key feature was the “comments” section in which users posted messages to each other that were visible to all other friends.

Hence, the “Social Graph” emerged: relationships began to be represented online with greater clarity.  Distribution of rich gossip information became automatic.

The person providing the information was simply required to post the information and anyone interested could (with a little digging) view it. Finally, this technology was further disrupted when Facebook developed the feature called “news feed”. With the news feed, users are no longer required to actively browse their friend’s pages to get updates – instead they are automatically filtered and delivered right to the person’s main page.

Past and Future Disruptions

Thus far, many disruptions have occurred in the gossip distribution industry. At a high level, we see in-person meetings disrupted by telephone disrupted by email disrupted by social networks. At a lower level we see that there is disruption occurring within categories such as the Friendster – Myspace – Facebook evolution. Even with Facebook’s news feed, we see significant room for improvement and thus opportunity for disruption. Social networks will likely evolve to distribute more and more gossip information with minimal incremental effort by the distributing person through increased integration with other online information sources. As more information becomes available, technology will need to improve such that it is more selectively distributed to interested persons so as to avoid a flood of information. Perhaps disruptive improvements can be made in the method of delivering this information. Improved distribution through mobile devices and other electronic media will allow users to share and access gossip information easily and on demand. Many companies are currently well posed to disrupt Facebook with some of these improvements.

Natural Technological Limits

One potential natural technological limit to these technologies may be rooted in our humanness. In many cases we continue to prefer to distribute gossip through in person discussions. Social networks and other online systems provide a breadth of information with very little effort, but have so far failed to yield the same depth of gossip distribution that is possible with in-person interaction. Perhaps technology, even with video or virtual reality will be unable to replicate face to face dialogue… or perhaps it will.