Chris Heuer posts about the new FriendFeed Rooms and says that they replace the old mailing lists. I tend to agree with him. As Chris points out:

We can have them

• public or private
• open or closed (members invite other members or not)
• we can message each other
• we can share links
• we can let people know what we like
• we can have a comment thread
• we get to have it on the Web instead of locked in our email inbox
• it has RSS feed so I can access it in my Google Reader

I love the new Friend Feed Rooms feature. Now people with similar interests can more easily share content and discuss it. Currently there seems to be no search capability for public rooms which I think should definitely be added, however, you can find some interesting rooms here. Some rooms I joined:

Social Media Club - administrator - Chris Heuer

Scripting News - administrator - Dave Winer

My dear friend Yaniv Golan, CTO of Yedda, had given a brilliant presentation regarding Incentives In Online Social Communities a few weeks ago at The Marker COM.vention and since it’s unfortunately in Hebrew, I wanted to translate it, include some of my own additions, and share it with you.

Online community participation

Let’s start with the obvious question….Why?

Why do users comment? Why do they write blogs? Why do they upload pics to Flickr? Why do they send links to friends?

What are the motives behind user participation in social communities? Understanding why users participate can lead us to understand further how to engage users and increase their participation in online communities. Let’s first learn a bit more about our users.

Membership life cycle for online communities

Amy Jo Kim was the first to propose the idea of a member’s life cycle in an online community (2000). The cycle suggests five phases of a user’s lifecycle within a community:

1) Peripheral (i.e. Lurker) - An outsider, unstructured participation

2) Inbound (i.e. Novice) - New user, invested in the community, on his way to full participation

3) Insider (i.e. Regular) - Committed participator, member of the community

4) Boundary (i.e. Leader) - A member brokering interactions and encouraging/sustaining participation

5) Outbound (i.e. Elder)  - On his way to leaving the community, perhaps to another community due to a particular change in the community or personal choice

Power Law of Participation

According to Ross Mayfield:

“The vast majority of users will not have a high level of engagement with a given group, and most tend to be free riders upon community value.  But patterns have emerged where low threshold participation amounts to collective intelligence and high engagement provides a different form of collaborative intelligence……

Digg is the archetype for low threshold participation.  Simply Favorite something you find of interest, a one click action.  You don’t even have to log in to contribute value, you have Permission to Participate. Del.icio.us taps both personal and social incentives for participation through the low threshold activity of tagging.  Remembering the URL is the hardest part, and you have to establish an identity in the system.  Commenting requires such identity for sake of spam these days and is an under-developed area.  Subscribing requires a commitment of sustained attention which greatly surpasses reading alone.  Sharing is the principal activity in these communities, but much of it occurs out of band (email still lives).  We Network not only to connect, but leverage the social network as a filter to fend off information overload.  Some of us Write, as in blog, and some of us even have conversations.  But these are all activities that can remain peripheral to community.  To Refactor, Collaborate, Moderate and Lead requires a different level of engagement — which makes up the core of a community…..Participation in communities plots along a power law with a solid core/periphery model — provided social software supports both low threshold participation and high engagement.”

All users activities in online communities whether low threshold or high engagement activities co-exist within a community to create a form of collective intelligence. Therefore it is key for virtual communities to allow both low threshold and high engagement participation so that users in all 5 phases of their lifecycles will be made to feel comfortable within the community.  

Participation Inequality

Social Platforms - the 1% rule

1) 90% of users are lurkers

2) 9% of users contribute sometimes

3) 1% of users actively participate and are responsible for almost all the action

On Wikipedia for example, participation inequality is even higher. More than 99% of Wikipedia’s users are lurkers. Only 0.2% are active participants. Wikipedia’s most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site’s edits. 

We see here that small groups of people often turn out to be the main value creators of social communities. Over time, their actions fuel widespread interaction that engages the lurkers and attracts new users. If continually nurtured, the community can become a self-sustaining generator of content and value.

So let’s go back now to our initial question:

Why do users participate in virtual communities?

According to Peter Kollock in The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace, there are three major reasons for why users contribute in online communities:

1) Anticipated Reciprocity - A user is motivated to contribute to the community in the expectation that he will receive useful help and information in return. Indeed we have seen such active users receiving more help than lurkers.

2) Increased recognition - individuals want recognition for their contributions. the desire for prestige is one of the key motivations for individuals’ contributions in an online community. Contributions will likely increase if they are visible to the whole community and are credited to the contributor. … the powerful effects of seemingly trivial markers of recognition (e.g. stars, ranking) are overwhelming.

3) Sense of efficacy - Individuals may contribute because the act results in a sense that they have had some effect on the community. Wikipedia is a good example of this.

Yet there are also other elements which can motivate users to become active in online communities:

1) Connections within the community - the more friends a user has within a given community, the more important it becomes for him to participate in. Therefore it’s important for online communities to allow users to form friendships easily and encourage a high level of interaction between users.

2) Emotional Safety - a sense of belonging and identifying with the community. Once users become regulars in a community, just like in any offline community, they stop feeling fearful and begin to feel a sense of safety in and identification with the community. The key here is to get these individuals to become regular users in your community and create a cozy and ”feel good” environment for them.

3) Common emotional connection - niche communities that are built around a particular emotional connection/cause between members tend to become more cohesive and experience lower percentages of participation inequality.

4) Altruism - Yossi Vardi coined the term “Dopamine Over IP” - each user transfers dopamine to another user….by contributing content, a user knows that he will cause pleasure to those who view it and those users that forward this content onwards, know the same.

For more reasons why people become active participants in social online communities and the key to Web 2.0’s success, please see my posts:

What’s Behind the Success of Web 2.0? A Psychological Interpretation

http://www.blonde2dot0.com/blog/2007/08/13/web-20-and-the-new-tribalism/

So now you ask…

What are the ways that online communities can overcome participation inequality and increase users’ participation?

1) Make it easy for users to contribute, make them feel confident with their contributions, and share their contributions with other members in the community -> Feeling of influence

2) Make participation a side effect. Let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system.

3) Reward users’ contributions and allow for markers of their contributions. Promote and feature top contributors -> Sense of recognition, sense of community, fulfill anticipated reciprocation

4) Allow users to rank each other within the community and comment on contributions -> sense of community, feeling of influence

3) Platform should be flexible enough to transform with the changing needs of its members -> feeling of influence

According to virtual community pioneer Jonathan Bishop, online community managers need to also change the beliefs of lurkers on their site in order to increase participation. Lurkers, believe that they do not need to post messages or that they are being helpful by not posting. Such beliefs prevent them from carrying out their desires to be social and participate in the community. Therefore it is up to the community managers to change this attitude by use of persuasive text or by other means.

A few more useful tips for community managers

1) Simplicity is key - participating in the community should be simple for the user. The simpler it is, the higher the participation rate will be.

2) Allow some actions to be performed by non-registered users.

3) Give people something good to talk about - as always, content is king. If your content is interesting and appealing enough, people will be eager to contribute.

4) Display the activity on your site. No one likes to go into an empty restaurant. Already on the homepage show users all the great stuff that’s happening within the community.

5) Offline events are a great way to make a community even more cohesive and virtually active.

So this morning I get on Facebook and guess what I find? Facebook Chat. Yes it was expected, but it was also a nice suprise.

Since I have I almost 900 friends on Facebook, you can imagine the number of IM’s I’ve been receiving. I find myself spending even MORE hours on Facebook today (if that’s even possible).

This feature will definitely add to the stickiness of the site and also make Facebook a more cohesive community I believe. With chat, its much easier to keep in touch with a larger number of contacts than through private messaging.

The feature is also advantageous for marketers who are looking for constant interaction with individuals in their communities. However marketers should be cautious not to turn chat into yet another spamming tool (like what happened with Super Wall) because this will definitely cause everyone to list themselves as “unavailable”.

I would also advise you to be careful of approaching bloggers in this manner. IM can be quite intrusive to one’s privacy and approaching bloggers through chat, is not a good idea. These approaches should be made by private messaging.

It’s a known fact that many of us already use FaceBook as our main email platform (even though there are many improvements to be made here as well). Now that we have Facebook Chat, seems like Gmail with its chat is becoming even more dispensible.

Anyways, I’d be happy to hear what you guys think about Facebook chat. Love it? Hate it?

Since MySpace recently launched its MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), I was looking for some statistics on the virality of MySpace apps.

According to Fred Wilson, Zynga, which has launched a couple of Apps on MDP, has done some interesting research and found the following:

1) Myspace apps are not taking off in the same speed that Facebook apps did (see below). This is probably because MySpace is currently not promoting these apps nor linking to them in any way. There is no newsfeed to promote the apps and apps are only visible on profiles. You cannot invite friends to an app and apps cannot message users in any way. For now, apps are being installed only by those users who are aware that there is such a thing as apps.myspace.com. As Wilson writes, this may be a deliberate move on MySpace’s behalf: “This may well be an attempt by MySpace to avoid the “app spam” that became a problem with the Facebook platform and has been largely eliminated with the new rules that Facebook has implemented.”

2) There are major differences between the top twenty apps on MySpace as opposed to the top twenty on Facebook (see below).  It is not yet clear why these differences exist, however, I believe that it’s just too early to tell which apps will be most popular on Facebook as all this is still in development plus many of the apps on Facebook are not yet available on MySpace.

I also understand from a friend who’s working on a MySpace app that even though apps created for MySpace should supposedly work on all other OpenSocial networks, several changes are still required in order to upload the app on each of the platforms.

In spite of all this, I still believe that developing a MySpace app now has enormous potential and at some point soon, the virality of these apps will take off in full speed.  I do think that players who get in on the action early will enjoy dominant positions later on. In addition, in order to stay competitive, MySpace has allowed platform developers to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.

Asi Sharabi has written his second report on Facebook Applications Trends. You can see my post regarding his first report here. I find Asi’s reports to be extremely interesting and useful. Any person/company that’s currently offering or plans to offer an application on Facebook, should definitely read both reports to get an idea on “what’s hot and what’s not” as far as apps go. In the first report Asi focused on the 100 most popular apps according to number of installs. This report focuses on the apps that have the highest number of active users. Looking at these apps allows us to truly understand what makes a sustainable Facebook app. All data in the post is taken from adonomics , an amazing site which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding Facebook applications.

Asi writes:

“As some people have already noted there is a sense of ‘apps fatigue’ and this indeed reflected in the data. Still, according to recent report while there is for the first time a slow decrease in the apps fair, on average 51% Facebook users interacted with FB apps pages in January.”

Most of the prevalent, multi-million installs apps have fairly low percentage of active users. Evidently, it is one thing to create a ‘viral’ application and get loads of users to install it (which occasionally been achieved with some dirty tricks and is getting increasingly difficult), but it is a different thing altogether to create a sustainable application, i.e. application that’s not just a passing gimmick but one that offer lasting value that people keep using over time.”

I think that part of the reason why users are fatigued by Facebook apps is because there are very few apps that offer users real added value. Succeeding in getting people to install your app is great. But that’s only the first step. The real challenge lies in creating a sustainable application which people will actively use.

There are currently 20,861 applications on Facebook (140 apps are uploaded daily). Only about 170 apps have over 1 million users.  About 800 have 100K to 1 million users, around 2200 have 10K – 100K users, around 4300 have 1K – 10k users, which leaves us with about 13,000+ apps with less than 1K users.

Asi points out that he found a negative correlation between the number of installs and the number of active users. Looking at the top 50 apps in each group (number of installs), you’ll see that the more installs they have, the less percentage of active users they have:

From the group of top apps (over 1 million installs), there are very few with more than 10% active users.

Looking at the top 100 applications with over 1 million installs as well as the top 40 applications with 100K – 1Million, we can divide these apps into the following categories:

Identity Formation / Social Comparison 44%

These apps allow Facebook users to display more personal information about themselves affecting how others perceive them and receiving feedback from others about how they are perceived. This category can be divided into a few sub-categories:

Flirting Games

This is the largest category of popular Facebook apps. Examples include flirtable, are you interested, Likeness. Asi points out that these interactions trivialize a behaviour which in the offline social world would be perceived as overly blatant. This is probably the reason why these apps are so popular online. They allow us to interact with others in ways that are impossible in real life. For example, apps like friends for sale (13% active users) and owned (19%) allow users to buy, refund friends and actually put a price tag on their worth. These types of apps are the latest hot thing on Facebook.

Asi also indicates that Facebook is on its way to becoming the largest dating site in the world. He writes:

“I’ve spotted at least 5 different dating applications like spark (12%) , zoosk (8%) meet new people (9%) and Hotties for sale (34%). These, I predict will only grow in popularity.”

This should definitely serve as food for thought for dating sites that currently do not offer a Facebook app or for those entrepreneurs who are thinking of opening up a dating site.

Self presentations tools

These apps allow users to display to the world who they are. These tools can be divided into two sub-categories. The first sub-category:

Funny “virtual pub games”

Examples of these apps include: what’s your stripper name? which cartoon are you?what kind of drunk are you?. This is the second most popular category of facebook apps. These apps usually have a low percentage of active users because once you’ve figured out what you are, that’s it, you’re done, and the app offers you no further value. Yet as we see these apps are still very popular, thus we will probably continue to see more of them uploaded in the future.

The second sub category is

Hobbies/interests

These apps seem to be more sustainable than the previous because as people we nurture our hobbies on a continuous basis. Examples of such apps are: Films (5%), music (3%), Dogbook (3%).

Phatic interactions / games 39%

These apps allow users to interact with friends without the need to say anything meaningful. Pokes, hugs, kisses, zombies, are examples of these sorts of interactions. More recently longer-type phatic interactions apps have also become quite popular.

Games

Games apps usually have a higher percentage of active users. Poker for example has 8% active users, Chess 12%. Scraboulus has the highest number of active users (22%). Asi adds that since games have high durability, they make for very sustainable Facebook apps:

“The data shows that experiences designed for people and can adopted to facebook have more active users than made-to-facebook applications.”

Tools / extensions / social management 17%

These apps serve as tools allowing users to better manage their profiles and social lives.

Extensions: Apps which extend communications between users such as mobile (12% active users), IM (1%), super wall (9% active users) and fun wall (13%). The reason these apps are so successful is because users view them as a natural extension of Facebook.

Profile management apps such as: Top Friends (8% active users), Best friends (2%), Entourage (2%) enable users to “manage” their friends and an app like anti stalker allows users to see who checked out their profiles and whose online.

Final Thoughts:

As Asi writes, Facebook apps allow us to socially interact with friends in entertaining ways yet very few apps actually offer users any added value. As time goes on, users become more picky about the applications they install, and those apps that have the highest number of active users and not necessarily the highest number of installs will win in the long run.

“One can argue that that’s what people want, and that’s fair enough but I still hope that in the future we’ll see more applications that offer genuine, lasting utility – Marketers and developers - listen to David.

The opportunities with branded applications are yet to be realized. I’ve asked Facebook for some data as it’s impossible to dig among nearly 20K applications but unfortunately they couldn’t help. The easiest route is to engage people with ‘on brand’, humorous, culturally resonant ‘phatic interaction’ type of app (like the one Poke and Mother recently developed for KY Jelly UK - to launch this week). Think of it as simple interactive tools to extend your campaign that, if done well, can help raise awareness and build some emotional connections between people and the brand / product. Check out the recent Snickers widget “.

I completely agree. Widgets/applications are a great way to socially market your company and increase brand exposure. A successful campaign doesn’t necessarily involve having an app with the most installs but rather keeping your audience interested and active. Creating an app with added value to the user definitely increases its sustainability and the user’s dedication.

Check out Poke’s Orange Wednesdays application to be launched in few days. Every Wednesday users get 2 tickets for the price of 1 at cinemas across the UK, enabling users to easily invite friends to the movies. The app also gives information regarding movies playing, trailers, and directions to the theater. Now that’s what I call a useful app.

This week OpenSocial applications have gone live on MySpace and members can now install these apps and display them on their pages. Not only can these apps be used on MySpace but they support the OpenSocial 0.7 API which means that users will be able to use them on all member sites of OpenSocial such as: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. 

Developers can now upload their applications to MySpace. Currently there are 467 apps available on the MySpace platform and I am sure that this will change very soon as everyone jumps on the opportunity to offer their app to the millions of MySpace and OpenSocial members. If you’re a developer looking to upload your own app, check the MySpace Developer Platform for more info.

Nick O’Neill has recently interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (in a slightly different manner than Sarah Lacy). Here’s what Mark had to say:

1) He believes the reaction to his interview with Sarah Lacy was overblown.

2) Mark claims that the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook is more of a technical limitation than anything else and even though users have been complaining about this, it is not something they plan on changing any time soon. However Nick adds:

“I received a different response from one Facebook employee later that night who claimed that it would only be a few lines of code to change. I’m sure there is more to it than that but it definitely is not a high priority at Facebook currently.”

3) Mark claims that Facebook does not want to compete with other application developers. However, this still didn’t stop them from sending out a message to thousands (if not millions) of college students recently telling them to install the March Madness application. Over the last few years, CBS and Facebook had worked together in creating and promoting this application. The fact that Facebook is not allowing other developers the same promotional capability for their applications is angering many developers and justly so. When asked about this controversial issue, Mark mentioned that this year they had actually messaged less users than in previous years.

4) Mark mentioned that he is focusing on building the Company for scale and will in the future place more of his responsibilities on others.

5) Mark thinks that in the future, the social web will move away from social networks and many of the new applications will move outside of Facebook.

6) When asked whether he would take a proactive role in fighting anti-semitism on Facebook, Mark said that rather than fighting hate movements on Facebook, the Company intends to continue focusing on providing useful communication tools allowing users to connect and discover new worldly perspectives.

7) Mark emphasized that Facebook’s aim is to create the most accurate representation of our “social graph.” However, as Nick points out:

“There’s only one problem with Facebook’s attempt so far though: all our interactions don’t take place within Facebook. We send instant messages to our friends, send at replies on Twitter, have telephone conversations and exchange emails. All of these things help construct the summation of our interpersonal communication.”

Mark agrees that Facebook needs to improve its messaging system and says that the Company will be focusing on providing new tools to users in regards to messaging. In fact, three days ago Michael Arrington reported that Facebook was launching a new instant messaging service and it will be available to the public soon, perhaps in the next week. Michael writes:

“I’m now hearing that this won’t be Jabber-compliant, at least at first. That means access will be Facebook only unless they create an API and/or third parties figure out a way to hack into the service as they’ve done with Yahoo, MSN and AIM in the past.”

8 ) Mark believes that the viralness is done for many Facebook applications and that the Company needs to incentivize differently in the future. Instead of a good application being one that has a lot of users, there will be other incentives. No further elaboration was given but Mark did mention that the system for deciding which are “good applications” would be automated.

As all of you know, I love Facebook but frankly I was a bit disappointed by some of Mark’s answers. For example, the fact that Facebook does not allow all applications an even playing field is quite disturbing to me. In addition, the fact that users are complaining about Facebook limitations and not receiving a response is not right either. It does however seem that Facebook will be providing more communication tools in the future and enabling users to more easily find “good apps” amongst the thousands of apps currently being offered, which is definitely something to look forward to.

Technorati tags: interview, mark zuckerberg, nick o’neill, sarah lacy, facebook, applications, developers, march maddness, cbs, social web, social networks, anti-semitism, communication tools, social graph, twitter, messaging, instant messaging, michael Arrington

Here’s 60 Minutes’ interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder of Facebook:

I wanted to let you all know that I currently have an unlimited number of invitations to MeeMix. So if anyone would like to receive an invite, please just leave a comment below.

For those of you who don’t yet know MeeMix, it is a personalized internet radio community which aims at identifying individual taste and taste prediction in music using its own behavioral-based algorithm and additional methodologies.  MeeMix takes into account your behavior on the site (for example, which songs you added to your favorites) and uses it to predict what music you might like to listen to in the future. It is one of my favorite Web products and I highly recommend you all to try it out.

Barak Hachamov has written a fascinating post regarding our gradual metamorphosis into digital beings as more and more of our every day activities occur in our virtual worlds. Unfortunately since the post is in Hebrew, many of you will not be able to read it so I wanted to share its key ideas with you.

In the past, the internet used to be only an information source for us. However, in the last few years, and especially since the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet has become more than just an information source. It has become our way of interacting with our friends, expressing our thoughts and interests, and handling our day to day activities. Web 2.0 has turned the internet into something completely different than it used to be. No longer are we the passive viewers. Now we are the active users, creating content and building our virtual worlds with our virtual friends and virtual events. The cold, alienating experience of using the Web has turned into a personalized, customized experience for each of us. Information that we view is gradually becoming more and more targeted to our our immediate needs, our interests, etc. through the usage of personalized tools and the early beginnings of artificial intelligence capabilities.

Social networks such as Facebook allow us to interact virtually in ways that were not possible before. If someone were to describe to you ten years ago that in the recent future you’d be able to hug virtually, throw a sheep at someone virtually, even buy and sell your friends virtually, you’d say he was crazy. With all this interaction and the growing number of online friendships that we build, how does one give each of his friends the attention they deserve? How does one deal with this overwhelming amount of of personal, relevant information that requires his attention?

Just like the telephone, cellular phone, and internet are allowing us all today to do more and meet less, our gradual transformation into digital beings will soon allow us to do more and meet more. Our virtual reality creates more opportunities for us online as well as offline.  How many social events have you gone to thanks to Facebook? How many new people have you met with in real life due to Facebook? Those of us who have been internet freaks for a long time, secluded in our homes from the offline world,  have come out of our shells due to Facebook.

Barak writes that Facebook which we now use mostly to entertain ourselves with lots of silly applications and connect with our friends, is gradually turning into the first human attempt to launch a Human Digital Operating System. As each of us creates a profile, adds applications, schedules events online, etc. he creates the digital self. Whether we realize it or not, we are all participants in this human experiment. We are creating and enhancing the prototype of our own operating system.

Our operating system is working all the time without us even noticing and is digitally mapping our way of thinking, our habits, and our interests. Gradually activities and experiences that were only available to us offline are entering our digital world. One day we will all wake up and see that most of our daily activities happen online. On this day we will know that we have become digital beings. Think about how privileged we are to live in this era where we are able to view this evolution from DOS to HOS, from cold windows to warm, emotional, social platforms.

It is certain that Facebook will invest enormous efforts in improving navigation capabilities between the different applications and information sources it offers as well as the communication and semantic capabilities between them.  These capabilities will improve over time and develop into the first platform which will allow me to create the Digital Me.

Just like in Lego, we will build the digital us out of hundreds of “small applications” which consist of our way of life. As we build the digital us through what seem to be “innocent” actions and games, hidden sophisticated algorithms of artificial intelligence will gradually learn who we are, as well as possible semantics with other applications, and will allow these applications to communicate with each other, draw conclusions, and handle tasks for us automatically. 

The management of my life through my digital world in combination with the collective intelligence of Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence create exciting possibilities for the future. The combination of all these capabilites will allow us to  break through the information barriers and limitations we have today and allow us to better process the overwhelming amount of information we are exposed to. In the future we will be able to handle a few tasks at once without damaging the quality of our actions and without wasting precious time. We will then find it very hard to perform in a world without digital technology. Yet more than this, in the basis of our thoughts there will be virtual terms and underlying digital metaphors, and perhaps we will even feel in a technological format. To many of us this future world may seem quite scary, however ironically, as we become more digital, we will also become more social and emotional with a larger number of people. 

Thanks to Jeff Swearengin for the pic.