Launching Google+ in June, 2011 was a bold move for Google. Among the less obvious reasons: Circles, a central Google+ component, competes with components of other contact management systems Google maintains (Gmail Contacts and Google Contacts).

My product manager self was wondering what’s the plan for the three Google contact management systems. It’s a tough one. Mandatory upgrades, voluntary migration and re-integration, all pose technical, product and corporate challenges. Migrating millions of Gmail users is a project from hell. It might hurt Gmail users and dilute the value of Google+.

My bet is that because the social wave is here to stay, redesigning older email platforms around innovative social interaction concepts is inevitable. On Dec. 2009, I wrote “Hopefully, Google’s strategy considers meshing Wave and Gmail“. Google Wave’s team leader, Lars Rasmussen, has since joined Facebook, but others led Google into the so-called Emerald Sea. Now, on December 2011, Google takes another step in the social direction by making Circles appear as a sort of “smart labels” in Gmail (see Google blog).

Using social circles as email filters is more than an enhancement – it’s a path to correcting a traditional weakness of email in general. The weakness being that originally and inherently, email is a one-to-one thing, detached from social groups.

This statement often meets with puzzlement. But surely, engineers say, you can email a group of people? This is true, but hardly relevant. Precisely because we can email several people at once, we read more emails than we write. Email is primarily a reading activity, so it’s more important to read those emails we need. We decide which emails to read first based on social context. We need to read those emails we have made an obligation to read. This is why we need to read them in the order of obligation. This is the stuff that actual social relations are made of.

Try this: I, a consultant, need to daily view email messages from my clients. The main Gmail tool that helps me do that is search. I can type and search for each of my clients’ email addresses, one by one – not too practical for a daily task. Another option is to use an advanced “filter”. I can group my clients into a “Clients” label, then view the label. Not a biggie – if you’re comfortable with regular expressions; and if you’re willing to modify an OR [...] OR [...] OR [...] statement each time you win a client, or lose one.

(I actually do all that, on a regular basis. For me, it’s worth the trouble. But I wouldn’t bet on my system to be embraced by consumers and beat Facebook.)

This is where the new Gmail integration breathes new meaning into both Circles and Gmail. Using Circles as dynamic labels, one can make sure one sees first things first. Arranging your Circles by the relation of contacts to your life segments, you naturally create Circles for projects or life areas. You’ll never again miss an important email, and it’ll work much more predictably that the so-Google “Important” filter.

Using Circles as Gmail labels is still far from perfect, but it illustrates the idea that email messages* are primarily made of social interactions. The social relations producing them and emanating from them are their most important aspects.

(*The same goes for calendar events and todo tasks, and that’s material for another post. )

When attributing family relations first became possible on Dec 5, 2010 (see post), it was limited to 16 direct blood relations. We now have 32 relation types, or 33 if you count the double inclusion of a “partner” (bug or feature?).

The newly added relations are those that are created by marriage, but are not “relaciones de sangre” – e.g.  husband, wife, and various in-laws.

Why is Facebook expanding the available types? This might give a clue.

The Case of the Man with Two Mothers

A mother I know was recently surprised to discover her son’s Facebook profile had two mothers listed. One was herself, the other – the mother of her son’s wife. It appears that her daughter-in-law’s mother wanted to express inclusion towards the profile owner, but didn’t have an appropriate option. The closest to son-in-law was son – and what son-in-law in his right mind would refuse a request from one’s mother-in-law?

That a woman in her 50′s, who is not a Facebook power user, would insist on naming in-law relations, illustrates the variety and urgency of needs Facebook has on its plate since it brought the “Family” cat out of the bag.

The Case of the Distant Relative

But relations can be more distant than son-in-law. How distant is distant? I was recently invited to a girl’s Bar Mitzva (the female form is actually Bat Mitzva, celebrated at 12, often cutified by the almost-nearly-teens to Bat Mitzvush). My connection to the Bat Mitzva girl: she is daughter of sister of husband of daughter of my sister.

That’s a five-step, non-blood relation. Pretty distant, you say? Well, it might be distant for you, but perhaps one treasures five-degrees-apart relations more if one’s family, like mine, was cut in half by a holocaust.

The kid’s mother now wants to designate our relation in Facebook – but she can’t.  Too distant to indicate as family as per the current version.

To me, this isn’t a trivial technicality. Although her family lives abroad, in Europe, the Bat Mitzva event took place in Israel at significant effort and cost. It was worth it, because there’s a “roots”  sense to celebrating a Jewish rite of passage in Israel, among family. So, you can see why seeing a distant uncle from Israel, who went to your Bar Mitzva, on your mom’s wall, can mean a thing or two. it can help you recall your own roots that are partly in the Old Country. This is how many call their homelands, and the emotional charge is nothing like “my Mom lives in Idaho”.

Coming from the Middle East, I wonder whether my brethen (in the extended sense)  are happy with the Facebook family relationship types. Are 32 types enough to describe a family? a tribe? a hamula – a clan that “often extends beyond lineage“? an ahl? What about other world kinship systems and “all our relations“?

And what would Dunbar do?

PS – My latest Facebook friend calls me in RL “uncle” – but it’s the wider, African tribe sense. In fact, he’s but the son of brother of an ex-girlfriend, to whose wedding I went last week. And this December, I’m looking forward to a visit from a friend, the first wife of the deceased (second) partner of my ex-wife. We live on different continents, yet we’re both members of a closed Facebook group we call The Tribe, a reflection of a real-world group spanning three continents and including 30 people who date back many years. But don’t get me wrong – we’re just friends.

“Social networking ‘utopia’ isn’t coming” is the title of a post by Chris Taylor, Mashable San Francisco bureau chief, written especially for CNN.

Taylor doubts the visibly glowing future represented in Facebook’s global spread map, and suggests that regardless of the light fantastic rushing across network lines, there are hardwired limitations to social networks:

Turns out we’re hardwired to get along best in tight groups of no more than 150, and have been since we were living on the African savannah. Armies take advantage of this hardwiring, as do the smartest corporations, not to mention wedding planners.

The Dunbar number is certainly going places. It’s just 6 months since Dunbar’s NYC op-ed. Exactly a year ago, in May 2010, I wrote about the significance of the Dunbar number for social networks in The Product Guy blog:

Is Facebook stretching the cognitive boundaries of friend management?

Perhaps the current decline in social mood has opened us to thoughts about smaller, more closed gardens. Perhaps, after MySpace is sold for about 5% of its 2005 valuation, we’ll let go of utopias based on the wisdom of crowds, and as Taylor notes, concentrate on the wisdom of our smaller, chosen tribes, our stronger connections:

Instead of being lumped with the village we happened to be born in, as happened for most of history, we each get to construct a virtual village that suits us — cobbled together from family, old friends, our best co-workers and mentors, and that like-minded spirit you met on vacation one time.

Maybe. One lesson I would like to take from the demise of the “crowd wisdom” utopia is that the point is in following, supporting, not replacing, what we happened to be born into for the most of our neurological history. Great work could be done – when we learn more about our social nature and accept our limitations.

Now, P2P might be a great architecture for social networks. Software development likes form to fit content, and most real-life human activity was always structured in P2P architecture. If a social network is ‘a map of the relationships between individuals,’ a collection of P2P nodes makes sense for Facebook will make its current architecture seem like a huge workaround. Looking forward, P2P architecture could be better equipped to handle the complex issues the future holds for social networks.

P2P is usually touted as for its scalability. Some (see http://www.peerson.net) point to the better handling of privacy issues. However, here I am referring to the way it lends itself to social data architecture. If you see the point in programming Angry Birds in some object-oriented language, then you may see the benefits in designing a social network in P2P. Indeed, this is just an opinion, a futuristic musing more than a professional consensus. Many programmers  don’t value a stylistic flow between goal and representation all that much. But if Facebook were built on a P2P infrastructure -

• We would have Object-Oriented Social Programming
• Types of relationships (plug ins) would be developed by third party developers
• Payments could be done in a completely new model, replacing credit rating with social trust
• Better integration with alternative currency
• Friend connections would be much more granular and interesting, and would correspond better to 6 degrees concepts, Dunbar numbers and circles theory
• User data would not be controlled by a central owner
• Privacy arrangements could be made to be more transparent to users
• (Anything to add to this list? email me)

I doubt Microsoft and Skype strategists perceive  the future issues of Facebook; if they did, there were several other, easier things they could do to counter Facebook’s advance. In any case, the larger the acquisition, the less of a rational justification it has anyway.

Too bad; SkyNet could have been a great trade mark for Facebook 2.0.

Customized is OUT, News Feed is IN

The March launch of LinkedIn.com/Today is a reminder that LinkedIn is a force tyo be reckoned with, even though it has no Hollywood movie made about it or a hot pre-IPO market.

LinkedIn has correctly identified the rising interest in social news, and the accompanying look, or feed design (see social news aggregators such as PostPost, Zite, Flipboard, Early Edition, Flud, Pulse). The LinkedIn social news product – LinkedIn Today – leverages LinkedIn’s strength in the professional community. But how social is LinkedIn’s social news?

When LinkedIn’s blog defines LinkedIn Today as “Customized News”, allowing me to “discover the top headlines”, I cringe. ”Customized” is a pre-social concept that is losing momentum (see Google Insights). Facebook only talks about “customizing” your privacy preferences. But Customization used to mean something else – like selecting items from a list of curated MSM sources, or from a very short “industry” list (an architecture once used in Yellow Pages listings). It’s a bit outdated in the context of news feeds – we have grown to expect much finer filtering.

We have also grown to be less forgiving to omissions. LinkedIn’s Today’s industry list is even shorter than its own usual list, and with no option of expanding and exploring it. I couldn’t find Legal Services – a one-time strategic industry for LinkedIn – and wonder what else is missing in the view LinkedIn is presenting to me.

Now, LinkeIn Today selects articles according to three “social views”, which I guess is better than just one. One of those considerations is what my connections and “industry peers” read; but when LinkedIn Today serves me with articles like Measuring the ROI of your social media efforts – USATODAY.com, those are coming from the parts of my industry I’m not proud of and don’t wish to follow too closely. I might appreciate the headlines – only the headlines, please – of articles read by such peers.

In other words, customizing content by industry might end up delivering less than the granulation (or long tail) that users of social services have come to expect. If the “industry” category is too broad, it might easily lead to a reading list that’s been SEO’d down to the lowest common denominator. You know, “top headlines” do not always need to be “discovered”.

Using social methodology means using contexts for better relevancy. It’s a difficult issue that the major players are struggling with (and that this blog tries to track). LinkedIn Labs’ InMaps, released six weeks ago, could be an interesting shot at that issue. In InMaps, users are invited to map their groups; the app decides on the groupings (or contexts), users decide on naming. Then they share with other users, and perhaps a common naming scheme can emerge by algorithm or negotiation. Is LinkedIn already using InMaps data to create a social graph guiding the feed selections of LinkedIn Today? Will LinkedIn – Tomorrow?

Wikipedia: “In 1797, a British publisher issued The Young Man’s Valentine Writer, which contained scores of suggested sentimental verses for the young lover unable to compose his own. Printers had already begun producing a limited number of cards with verses and sketches, called ‘mechanical valentines,’ and a reduction in postal rates in the next century ushered in the less personal but easier practice of mailing Valentines. That, in turn, made it possible for the first time to exchange cards anonymously, which is taken as the reason for the sudden appearance of racy verse in an era otherwise prudishly Victorian.”

While some might see mechanically produced, racy verse as a sign of liberation from Victorian shackles, social dynamics present a different picture. Mass duplication and postal anonymity defeat the purpose in most mating rituals: displaying one’s capabilities and commitment. In modern society, this can sometimes be displayed by the size of the gift. But if you play that card, don’t be surprised if your love runs off with an impoverished poet.

As for the original ban on marriage Roman emperor Claudius is credited with, you might want to read this. The original ban probably refers to a ban on marriages between Roman soldiers, sometimes as young as 16, and province residents – known in modern day as undocumented immigrants.

Two weeks after Time selected Mark Zuckerberg as Man of the Year, NYT published a classy claim to relevancy: a Saturday guest op-ed by SPW’s hero, Prof. Robin Dunbar, titled “You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends“.

A day later, CNN published a story on original Nature Neuroscience research (Amygdala volume and social network size in humans).  Mashable ran the story a day later as Friend Count Linked to the Size of a Certain Body Part?, and then it came round to Time’s Healthland which titled it How to Win Friends: Have a Big Amygdala?.

But daring “body parts” references aside, none of the above websites published the image of the body part in question that was found in an appendix of the original research paper. It begs to be titled: This is Your Mind on Social Networks.

The Village People

I recall a media-shy Dunbar, with a whiff of scientific coldness and irrelevance. But a NYT op-ed is considered anointment in some circles. Like McLuhan’s “Global Village” once resonated with a TV generation, Dunbar’s “Electronic Village” may resonate with this social generation and its leaders:

Until relatively recently, almost everyone on earth lived in small, rural, densely interconnected communities, where our 150 friends all knew one another, and everyone’s 150 friends list was everyone else’s.

But the social and economic mobility of the past century has worn away at that interconnectedness. As we move around the country and across continents, we collect disparate pockets of friends, so that our list of 150 consists of a half-dozen subsets of people who barely know of one another’s existence, let alone interact.

Our ancestors knew the same people their entire lives; as we move around, though, we can lose touch with even our closest friends. Emotional closeness declines by around 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact, so that in five years someone can go from being an intimate acquaintance to the most distant outer layer of your 150 friends.

Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to keep up with friendships that would otherwise rapidly wither away. And they do something else that’s probably more important, if much less obvious: they allow us to reintegrate our networks so that, rather than having several disconnected subsets of friends, we can rebuild, albeit virtually, the kind of old rural communities where everyone knew everyone else. Welcome to the electronic village.

Click for a comparison of “Global Village” and “electronic Village” trends in Google searches.

Friends Lists now enjoy better visibility. Their new home is a nice plot of real estate in the left column of your profile. By default, it shows all your friends; but it can have subsections, each displaying faces of members who are on one of your lists. This is a bit like extending the “Friends Who Liked This Website” feature to Facebook’s own Profile pages.

Because a friend of mine owns a time machine, I received an alert about the Dec 5 Facebook release, and on Dec. 3 I was able to post this prophetic Tweet:

“Merging ancestry tree websites like Geni with Facebook would be considered normal in most world cultures“.

This could be Geni.com or Ancestry.com window of opportunity to seize the moment with a brilliant social strategy offering unique value to Facebook. While upgrading their users’ relaciones de sangre data, based on their users’ Facebook profiles, these services can also support Facebook’s efforts in collecting more blood relations data. Facebook needs family data now like nobody ever did. Like I said before, many of the use cases from hell that haunt Facebook have to do with the confusion between family and friends.

Integrating Groups and Friends Lists

The Relationships tab offers  users to “Create new list · Add an existing list or group“, leading to a pop-up where Lists and Groups are tabs in the same window. This is an acknowledgement that Friends Lists and (the new) Groups share functionality. It’s almost as if Friends Lists are a special case of a Group (see my Oct. 2010 product feature table here). The next logical step could be to enable “Share” of news feed items to Groups, not just to Friends Lists.

It’s interesting to note that while blood relations automatically populate a “Family” list on your profile, they are not available as status distribution limiters (the groups you create are). This, unfortunately, leaves unaddressed the user scenario from hell reported by Dana Boyd and quoted in my May post The Friend of My Friend Was My Mother.

On Oct. 6 Facebook introduced 3 types of groups, and all but dumped the Friends Lists project. But have Friends Lists really failed? I’m following both Google and Facebook managers:

Paul Adams (Google):

Google’s own Paul Adams [...]  shows (pic) that if asked to create lists of contacts only 3% of people create a “Friends” list, and 60% of people’s lists have unique names.
(Social Product Blog, may 2010)

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Oct. 2010:

“In reality, almost no-one wants to make lists… we’ve been at this for a few years and what we’ve found is that even when we’ve promoted this feature very heavily for a few years the most of what we’ve got is for 5% of people  to make a Lists and most of these people only make one list. You can design the best interaction in the world to make lists, no-one wants to make lists… “

Just to make sure we’re comparing apples to apples, let’s compare the slides used in Adams’ and in Zuckerberg’s presentations respectively.

Adams (the right side shows what he thought Facebook lacks):

Zuckerberg (notice Adams’ “Ambassadors” not yet present in Facebook’s model):

So when your competition – the seasoned crew of Google – scores 3%, isn’t 5% a pretty decent result? This 5% could be expanded further when 200m mobile Facebook users (freshly updated today from 150m) would get access to Friends Lists. Friends Lists management isn’t yet available to Facebook mobile users, a sector Growing Faster Than On Desktops (Techcrunch).

Understandably, Facebook wants more, faster, as the growth of a single bloated friends list can kill the service. But what would be a reasonable target? How about a nice Pareto 20% as a target for users creating lists? They will probably be creating 80% of the groups. Growing 5% to 20% isn’t an unreasonable challenge for a PM in the fast-moving, vision-rich social arena.

Another open question is whether the new group types could replace Friends Lists. For Facebook, maybe, but not for users. The following chart – showing the visibility of group member lists in different groups – says the three new types won’t be able to replace Friends Lists.

The big difference between Friends Lists and other group types is this: in Friends Lists, the list creator can change the lists on the fly and quietly. Groups are a community constructs – adding someone to the group is always followed by notifying him or her.

Friends List is the only list no-one but the group creator can view. Is it not realistic to expect this need to go away and be replaced by the wonders of social media.

Zuckerberg calls this issue “vital”.  I couldn’t agree more.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117795&org=NSF&from=news

This is Thomas Malone, Director of the Center elaborating on collective intelligence in the Davos economic forum this year. He mentions Google, Wikipedia and Linux as examples, but curiously enough, no Facebook. I guess Facebook needs to wait before it can be mentioned in Davos or Science in the context of intelligence.

Here‘s a video interview with Malone from earlier this year,  where he does discuss Facebook, and places the privacy controversy in a historical context of scale.