Tag Archives: Social network

Flickr was a game but users drove it into a photo sharing site.

The typical example of a socio-technical system heavily influenced by its user (prosumer!) is Flickr. Maybe not too many people know that in the beginning Flickr was a Web-based game, called Game Neverending (GNE). Best summary of early Flickr history I found is in this interview.

The original interface of GNE (see below) was heavily based on Instant Messagging. You could drag game objects into an IM conversation and it would send to all the other members of the chat an image of the object.
THAT was the key feature! The creators of GNE thought “what if instead of game objects, you could drag and drop other digital objects into these conversations, like Word documents, or PDFs? Or maybe photos?”
So the first version of Flickr was just a stripped-down Game Neverending interface, with photos instead of game objects.

I think this is the perfect example of user-driven design. “I created a web game site –> users use it for sharing objects –> then I create a site for sharing photos.”

A screenshot of Game Neverending (from GNE Museum)
GNE flickr screenshot

And there was also a Social network explorer!

social network explorer

social network explorer

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Insights into relationships on Facebook

Interesting blog post by Cameron Marlow, research scientist at Facebook over at overstated.net: Maintained Relationships on Facebook.

They start from a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks?

They looked at the communications of a random sample of users over the course of 30 days and defined networks in 4 different ways:

  • All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends. In research papers this number ranges between 300 and 3000. In facebook on average every users has 120 friends.
  • Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties. In research papers, this numbers ranges from 3 as individuals with whom I can discuss important matters (for Americans) to 10 or 20 as ongoing contacts at a university.
  • One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated.
  • Maintained Relationships: the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice. This is a sort of over-the-shoulder relationship, I’m “following” (this is the relationship type) the target user without she necessarily knowing it. This is a new type of relationship (not really available says 50 years ago), similar to reading the flow of thoughts of someone via a blog or just looking at the pictures uploaded on Flickr.

An interesting observation: “as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network”.

And another one: The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.

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