Defriend yourself!

The term of this week seems to be ‘defriending’. It’s not even in Wikipedia –yet– so it must be fresh. Website Marketing Facts writes about it, a sure sign that it is to be a trend for 2009. Basically, it means you clean up your social network so that only people who you’re actually in a friendly or closer relationship with remain. The basic premises behind this idea is that the value of your social network is higher, if the online equivalent reflects your offline one –or something like that.

It was fast-food chain Burger King who took defriending to a new level. With the Facebook app Whopper Sacrifice you earned a free Whopper for every 10 friendships you ended on Facebook. After a week, Facebook ended the viral as 233.000 friendships were sacrificed.

Facebook sacrificed the Whopper Sacrifice viral

I think the whole assumption that your social network should have only “real friends” is wrong. At least, in my case. My social network is made up of people I’d like easy access to, and who do, like and know things I find interesting, and with whom I’d like to share some of the things I do and find interesting. I haven’t personally met all these people, nor have had contact with them. That doesn’t make their ideas any less valuable to me tho.

The Dunbar Number

So why is the scope and extent of my social graph important for why I use Twitter? For that, I need to introduce you to the Dunbar Number. Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes:

… there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.

The number he calculated was 150. If you carry this number to the social graph, you could argue that the human brain is only able to cope with 150 or so stable relationships, thus anyone with a higher number of friends in any of their networks, has unstable relationships, and are therefore worth less then those with stable relationships. Thus, one should defriend and stabilize his graph. (for more info on this subject, read Christopher Allen’s great blog post The Dunbar Number as a limit to group size)

Source of inspiration

Like I said in my introduction, my online social network is my main access to a lot of inspiration. I have real life and long time friends there, family, co-workers, people I have worked with in real life, people I have collaborated with online, people I haven’t met and would like to meet some day, people I’ll probably never meet but whose ideas, skills and works I admire. I haven’t got stable relationships with 150 of them –probably far less. But they reflect on who I am, and how I like to be perceived, and what I do and don’t do, and what ideals I have and don’t have. They reflect on me.

Now, lets get to the topic of this post, why I use Twitter. Twitter is especially in the picture when the defriending topic sails along, as it is both easy to add people to your network (you just click ‘follow’ and you’re done) and for other people to add themselves to your network (all they have to do is follow you). But for me, Twitter isn’t just a representation of my social graph and an easy way to know what my friends are doing all day, but something else entirely. It is a source of inspiration.

The modern day Hearth

This is something Stephen Fry pointed out in his talk at the Apple Store in London on Apple and Twitter and so forth. He basically said that the human race has a long history of exchanging ideas and transferring knowledge. He was talking about audiobooks, but the same applies to Twitter in my opinion –he is Twitter’s self proclaimed vice-president, as only Barack Obama has more followers then him.

Anyways, he basically says that with the invention of he printing press by Guttenberg, knowledge exchange moved from a social, interpersonal experience into a distanced, individual experience. Before the mass distribution of printed knowledge and experience, there were storytellers who, in different forms –songs, tales, plays, opera’s, etc.- immerse the listeners into the story, thus conferring it’s meaning and sharing its experiences and lessons. The most basic form of this oral distribution is the hearth. Around the hearth the storyteller is in direct contact with his or her audience, and shares not only his words, but also the non-verbal meaning, suspense, experience and even drama. Thus, making it a rich experience, probably anchoring the experience in the audiences minds far better then most books ever could.

This struck me as true, and I immediately followed this logic to my use of Twitter. To me, Twitter is the modern day hearth or village pump. It’s a place where I choose to go to and share my experiences, my daily finds, my emotional states, my inspirations with anyone who is interested –for whatever reason. And I look for other people’s experiences, knowledge, daily finds, etcetera as well.

And the beauty of Twitter –for me– is that it’s not long distance. Yes, it is a-synchronous, but I can reply to tweets, send them a direct message, and start conversations. In other words, the barrier to get in touch with the storyteller is very low. I can easily get in touch and enrich their experience with my own, and even build a relationship.

This is why Twitter for me is such a source of information, experience and inspiration. It lets me see things from a different perspective and surprise me with insights –both good and bad. It is the Social Graph and Social Network stripped of all web-technology-imposed barriers. I interact with other people, not with web applications or websites that aggregate the personal aspect to a manageable social blob. To me, Twitter is the modern day hearth.

Let me explain. When just about any blogger comments on the development of the internet and the world wide web, long discussions about web 2.0, web 3.0 and all kinds of concepts usually follow. And when that blogger considers to rename the world wide web into something as obscure as the Giant Global Graph, this normally is greeted with laughter at that person’s expense. Enter the latest weblog post of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. –Huh? Who? Exactly.

When the ‘inventor’ of modern day’s most succesful technology writes a post about the next step of the web –following its original design, but fuelled by the evolution that it has made over the past few years (the www is only 18 years old!), we’d better start paying attention. All this Web twopointsomething crap aside, he explains how he sees the evolution of the internet, the world wide web, and the next layer: the giant global graph.

Basically, the first abstraction layer is what is referred to as the Net. The major benefit of the Net is that it doesn’t matter how your computer is connected and how the cables go from one ‘puter to the other. The Net was/is designed to connect you to any other computer.
The second abstraction layer built on top of that is what is commonly referred to as the Web. The benefit this brought to the masses was that it doesn’t matter where the documents are located physically, but you can access it’s contents anywhere and anytime.

Most people think or assume that this is what the Web 1.0 was all about. Berners-Lee and his people over at the Cern labs wanting to make their research archive freely available to all Cern and associated researchers. As in documents, files, web pages. But –as Sir Tim has explained many times already, they are wrong.

He now explains the ripeness for the third abstraction layer which he refers to as the Giant Global Graph. This graph thing is a mathematical term apparently and he does make some objections to using it –but apparently it’s a common enough term in scientific circles, and as you just saw, that is where his roots are. The Graph signifies the ‘cloud’ of personal data and data relationships that is available on the web today. The term in this context is most often seen with the SocialGraph, which is the sum of all personal friendship relations you have created on all the social network sites out there. Actually, Brad Fitzpartick and David Recordon have a much better definition:

A social graph consists of who an individual is connected to based on the type of connections, such as work, friendship, interests, and location. It differs from a social network, which consists of who an individual is connected to based on the existence/strength of (one type of) connection, such as work. A social graph therefore conceives of connections in a typological way, whereas a social network does so in a binary/spectral way. I.e. a social graph asks what type of connection exists between individuals, whereas a social network simply asks whether the connection exists or how strong it is. Accordingly, a social graph is a more complex/higher-level model of a social system than a social network.

The Social Graph follows the same ideology and pattern as the Sementic Web –the name Berners-Lee gave his continued work on building the web into it’s full 1.0 potential. Basically it means that you –as a user, not as a developer– choose what relationships you have with other people, and that your identity is connected to your other online alter ego’s, and that this includes your network of friends.

For example: you join a social network site by logging in with your OpenID for the first time, and you get a message saying that because you used your OpenID, and because you have made your network relationships part of the public sphere, those friends you have in your network and who are also a member of that social network site are listed for convenient adding to your friends list on that site. And why is this convenient?

Well, it follows the rather simple and thus powerful idea that friends are people too, and that they are not limited to one network site like Last.FM. I mean, my friends are on Hyves (a popular Dutch Facebook-alike site), LinkedIn (because I made them), Facebook (those with international contacts), Last.FM, Flickr, just to name a few. They’re the same people, why should I have to tell each site that I know them?

The benefits of this are obvious, and the potential for new and improved webapplications are boundless for now. But most importantly, this brings the simple yet fundamental point of who owns my data (me!) closer. When implemented correctly, I –the user– will be the one who decides what part of my network I want to share my music tastes with, and what part my resumé. And if this concept goes on, I can share content other then identity and relationships as well, like my photo’s, or my ideas, or my scribbles, or whatever. Data –more importantly, my data, will be portable.

Lets call this the Web 4.0 (3.0 already having been claimed by the mobile content industry). Naah, lets just call it what it really is: the evolution of the Web 1.0. To finally come closer to what it was originally designed to do.