This is an interesting slides from data to design.
Fell Swoop: Data To Design
View more presentations from Fell Swoop LLC.
Here is an interesting article, where the initial thoughts were users artificially made up information in their profiles, etc. This article proves otherwise.
Reference: Bower, B. (2010). Facebook users are the real thing. Science News, 177(7), 10. Retrieved from Business Source Corporate database.
Facebook users are the real thing
Young adults don’t deceive others on social networks
“On the Internet,” one dog tells another in a classic New Yorker cartoon, “nobody knows you’re a dog.”
The Internet is notorious for its digital dens of deception. But on Face-book, what you see tends to be what you get — at least in one study of tailless, two-legged young adults.
College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, researchers conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.
“Online social networks are so popular and so likely to reveal people’s actual personalities because they allow for social interactions that feel real in many ways,” says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
Back’s team administered personality inventories to 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social networking site. The subjects–who ranged in age from 17 to 22 — took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves. The inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.
Then undergraduate research assistants — nine in the United States and 10 in Germany — rated volunteers’ personalities after looking at their online profiles. Those ratings matched volunteers’ actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.
Past research shows that Facebook is so true to life that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, Back claims.
Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, calls the new findings “compelling” but incomplete. College students on Facebook and other online social networks often augment what they regard as their best qualities, Manago says. In her view, these characteristics aren’t plumbed by broad personality measures like the ones used in Back’s study. And students’ actual personality descriptions may have enhanced their real characteristics, inflating the correlation between observers’ ratings and students’ real personalities, she notes.
“Online profiles showcase an enhanced reflection of who the user really is,” Manago proposes. In a 2008 study she and her colleagues found that 23 college students sometimes used the online social networking site MySpace to enhance their images, say by Photoshopping acne out of a picture or posting a video of themselves driving a sports car at high speeds.
Apr 142010
Reference: Sowa, T. (2010, March 28). Nearly half of U.S. businesses have become anti-social: Increasing popularity of social networking Web sites drives policies. Spokesman-Review, The (Spokane, WA), Retrieved from McClatchy-Tribune Collection database.
Nearly half of U.S. businesses have become anti-social: Increasing popularity of social networking Web sites drives policies
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Tom Sowa
Mar. 28–Larry Soehren says his company, Kiemle & Hagood, recently faced the choice whether to block employee access to popular social networking sites such as Facebook.
According to one survey, slightly more than half of U.S. businesses now block office access to Facebook, which this month was anointed the most popular Web site in North America. It just surpassed Google for most visits per week, according to site analysis company Hitwise.
Companies block Facebook, MySpace and in some cases, YouTube, because they can affect productivity. Nucleus Research concluded earlier this year that U.S. companies would see a productivity gain of 1.5 percent if Facebook were blocked on work computers. In addition, many computer-network administrators block access to those sites because workers can introduce viruses via links or spam messages sent to them.
Soehren, chief operating officer for Kiemle & Hagood, said he and his colleagues understand that the typical workday, for many, includes checking Facebook, Twitter or YouTube several times.
But Kiemle & Hagood decided that providing office access to Facebook and Twitter made sense — if only to reward, or at least not irritate, the company’s most tech-savvy workers, he said.
“The tech-smart people we have are also the ones who have Blackberrys and are dealing with work e-mails in the evening when out of the office,” he said. “If we clamp down on them and block Facebook at the office,” they might be less likely to do company work in the evening hours.
The debate about Facebook is raging in offices wherever Facebook is available, which currently is in more than 50 countries, with 400 million registered users.
Soehren is on the side of managers who embrace the use of popular social networking sites. Some salespeople regularly use Facebook to make sales and build contacts with potential customers, he said.
Just as YouTube once was blocked by some companies, only to become a platform for online training sessions, he predicts Facebook likewise will increasingly become a business tool.
Websense, a San Diego company that provides Web security and filtering services, has found many companies that once blocked social sites have moved to allowing sites like Facebook inside their networks.
“Their productivity concerns are decreasing as more companies realize the business benefits of Facebook and other Web 2.0 properties,” said Websense spokesman Matt Mors.
Spokane County Information Systems Director Bill Fiedler said Facebook and a few other sites have been blocked for all but a few county departments since 2002. No change is anticipated, he said.
Twitter, a popular networking site that allows people to send short text messages, is not blocked, but Spokane County’s information systems team monitors it to track excessive use, Fiedler said.
The reason has less to do with policy and more to do with technology, though — the network filter used by the county lumps Facebook into the category of dating sites, but doesn’t regard Twitter as a dangerous site, Fiedler said.
Spokane Teachers Credit Union also blocks Facebook for most workers but allows Twitter access.
STCU workers doing communications or marketing jobs can use Facebook, provided they use the site to connect with customers or other business professionals.
Laura Wood, STCU”s director of human resources, said the mood inside the credit union is moving toward changing the current restrictions. “We have recently had more discussion about allowing more access,” she said. Some marketing team members are urging the credit union to set up its own Facebook page, she said.
Robert Half Technology, the consulting firm that found more than half of U.S. firms block Facebook, also noted that one in five U.S. companies allow Facebook for strictly business use. It said about one in six allow occasional or minimal social networking at work.
Soehren and other business leaders suggest the numbers will soon start shifting to much wider access.
One business group that will make that transition more slowly is the medical sector. Karina Jennings, vice president of regional communications for Providence Health & Services, said the organization is looking seriously at removing blocks, but will do so carefully.
Providence is regulated stringently to ensure that patient information and hospital data are not compromised or misused.
Any shift by Providence to allow employee access to social-networking sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn first would have to assure that those safeguards are addressed, she said.
Providence operates hospitals and medical facilities in Washington and Montana, include Spokane’s Sacred Heart Medical Center. In Washington the operation involves about 20,000 employees.
Only a few pockets within the Providence team have access, for now, to social media, Jennings said. But she and other managers have identified several reasons for opening up access.
One Providence foundation is using Facebook for fundraising, for example. And some Providence hospitals have Facebook pages as well, to connect with their communities.
One business consultant and management professor, Sheizaf Rafaeli, contends that companies need to consider productivity but also keep in mind the bigger, long-range role of social media in the workplace.
Rafaeli is a teacher and researcher at the Center for the Study of the Information Society at the University of Haifa, in Israel.
Over time, nearly every business with a direct relationship with customers will begin to use social networking tools, he said in an interview.
“Today’s workplace has more communication already built into it. Tomorrow’s workplace will have even more,” he said. Company managers will have to build some workplace norms for that new system.
“But prohibition will not work, only backfire,” he said.
Apr 142010
The purpose of this page is to track related events on Facebook and social networking and applicable research.
So I thought this article was interesting:
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Youth, Privacy and Reputation (Literature Review)
Published April 12, 2010
Authored by Alice E. Marwick, Diego Murgia Diaz, John Palfrey, Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative
From the Introduction
The scope of this literature review is to map out what is currently understood about the intersections of youth, reputation, and privacy online, focusing on youth attitudes and practices. We summarize both key empirical studies from quantitative and qualitative perspectives and the legal issues involved in regulating privacy and reputation. This project includes studies of children, teenagers, and younger college students. For the purposes of this document, we use “teenagers” or “adolescents” to refer to young people ages 13-19; children are considered to be 0-12 years old. However, due to a lack of large-scale empirical research on this topic, and the prevalence of empirical studies on college students, we selectively included studies that discussed age or included age as a variable. Due to language issues, the majority of this literature covers the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada.
More information is found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Youth_Privacy_Reputation_Lit_Review
Here is some interesting facts about Twitter captured on paper.
