Tag Archives: social networks

Social network analysis: “The Friendster Autopsy”

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A group of researchers has provided an autopsy of Friendster:

Friendster was once the hottest thing in social networking. Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but — burdened by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook — it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006. That said, it trudged along for a few more years, helped by a relatively strong following in southeast Asia. Then, around 2009, a site redesign crushed it…

What they found was that by 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.

“First the users in the outer cores start to leave, lowering the benefits of inner cores, cascading through the network towards the core users, and thus unraveling,” Garcia told us during an online chat…

The researchers describe heart of successful networks in terms of what that they call K-cores. These are subset of users who not only have a lot of friends, but they have “resilience and social influence,” Garcia says. As these K-cores disintegrated, the whole Friendster thing fell apart.

This sounds like a classic social network analysis: are there enough strong bonds in a large network to keep it together? As they note, it is not just about the number of users involved but rather the relationships and interactions between key groups that have an outsized influence on the entire network.

I suspect Facebook (and other social network people) has some idea about this idea already. What I would want to hear about is how then Facebook helps keep these “k-cores” or hubs or key nodes together. Are the algorithms for news feeds geared toward these people or groups? How are things tweaked to help these k-cores grow and continue to have an outsized influence?

More companies hiring through internal referrals, online applications carry a stigma

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This might help explain why the ranks of long-term unemployed have risen: more companies are finding new employees through referrals from current employees.

The trend, experts say, has been amplified since the end of the recession by a tight job market and by employee networks on LinkedIn and Facebook, which can help employers find candidates more quickly and bypass reams of applications from job search sites like Monster.com.

Some, like Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, have set ambitious internal goals to increase the proportion of hirings that come from internal referrals. As a result, employee recommendations now account for 45 percent of nonentry-level placements at the firm, up from 28 percent in 2010…

The company’s goal is 50 percent. Others, such as Deloitte and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, have begun offering prizes like iPads and large-screen TVs in addition to traditional cash incentives for employees who refer new hires.

This sounds like a sort of Granovetter social network job hunt run amok: companies are looking for ways to minimize bad hires but in doing so, they are relying more and more on their current employees which freezes out people outside these social networks. But, it also suggests a job hunting strategy beyond Internet sites: people looking for work should look to impress their contacts who are currently working. This could be helpful to a lot of job searchers as it would cut down on online applications, cover letters, and the “black hole” (as it is called in the article) where applicants get very little feedback.

Here is a little bit about the advantages of companies hiring referred employees:

Referral programs carry important benefits for big companies. Besides avoiding hefty payouts to recruiters, referred employees are 15 percent less likely to quit, according to Giorgio Topa, one of the authors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York study.

Social networks improve business efficiency…but might also leave certain people out in the cold.

Lack of black offensive playcallers in the NFL

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The NFL has only one black offensive coordinator:

“We are very, very conscious of this issue, and it’s something that needs to be addressed,” said John Wooten, the chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an organization charged with promoting equality of job opportunity in NFL coaching and front office staffs. “We have alluded to it and spoken to it directly, and we feel our only course of action is to push more people up the pipeline.”

Complicating matters for Wooten and the legions of aspiring minority offensive coordinators is that the pipeline is also disproportionately dry…

Right now, the NFL’s sole African-American offensive coordinator is the Buffalo Bills’ Curtis Modkins, who doubles as the team’s running backs coach. However, Bills coach Chan Gailey is the team’s de facto offensive coordinator and primary play-caller. Only two African-Americans, the Houston Texans’ Karl Dorrell and the Minnesota Vikings’ Craig Johnson, are quarterbacks coaches, the position-coach job which most frequently leads to offensive-coordinator opportunities.

“This is the biggest travesty that’s taking place in this league, and every black coach is well aware of it,” said one anonymous African-American assistant for an AFC team. “They don’t promote you from running backs coach or receivers coach to offensive coordinator. When guys do get coordinator titles, they have to be position coaches at the same time, and they don’t get paid as much as other coordinators, because they’re not the play-callers. And in a lot of cases, guys believe they’re really there for locker-room reasons, to ‘take care of’ the minority players.”

A classic example in the sociology of sport of how race plays out in sports is to look at the expectations for and portrayal of black and white quarterbacks: black quarterbacks are expected to be more mobile and use their natural ability while white quarterbacks tend to be viewed as tacticians. I wonder if the same thing is going on here. Defense is said to require more reaction ability and athletic skills while offense is about strategy and throwing off the defense. Offensive playcalling is more of a sacred art that requires an intelligent guru to make things happen. Also, it sounds like this is a social network problem: black playcallers need to be able to have access to lower offensive positions, be able to prove themselves there, and then have the opportunity to move up when jobs become available. Without this chain in place, it could be a very similar issue to what might be behind the unemployment gap between whites and blacks.

The article doesn’t say much about this but the NFL has put policies in place for helping to ensure minority candidates are interviewed for head coaching positions so will something similar happen here?

The differences by race in using social networks to find a job

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Unemployment rates are quite different for whites and blacks. Social networks may be the reason why:

But this stubborn fact remains: The African-American jobless rate is about twice that of whites, a disparity that has barely budged since the government began tracking the data in 1972. In last week’s jobs report, the black unemployment rate was 13.2 percent, while the white rate stood at 6.8 percent.

Discrimination has long been seen as the primary reason for this disparity, which is evident among workers from engineers to laborers. But fresh research has led scholars to conclude that African-Americans also suffer in the labor market from having weaker social networks than other groups.

Having friends and relatives who can introduce you to bosses or tell you about ripe opportunities has proved to be one of the most critical factors in getting work. Such connections can also help people hold on to their jobs, researchers say.

“It is surprising to many people how important job networks are to finding work,” said Deirdre Royster, a New York University sociologist. “The information they provide help people make a good first impression, get through screening and get hired.”

Considering sociologist Mark Granovetter’s oft-cited piece on how weak ties help people find jobs, perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising. Social capital can go a long way toward accessing opportunities in society. Also, Royster’s book Race and the Invisible Hand is an interesting look at how this played out in one Baltimore vocational high school as faculty members tended to give white students access to their social networks while not giving the same privileges to black students.

Report calls for more study of how “kids navigate social networks”

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A new report suggests we don’t know much about how kids use social networks and thus, we need more research:

A recent report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Kids Online: A new research agenda for understanding social networking forums, has identified that we don’t actually know enough about how pre-teens use online social networking. The researchers, Dr. Sarah Grime and Dr. Deborah Fields, have done a good job in helping us recognize that younger children are engaged in a range of different ways with online social networks, but that our knowledge and understanding of what that means and how it impacts on their lives is pretty much underdone. GeekDads, of course, will have thoughts about how and why our children are playing and engaging with technology and networks in the ways they do, but this doesn’t give the people who make the rules and set the policy agendas the big picture that they need.

Essentially, Kids Online is a research report that calls for more research into children’s use of social networks. But the report does demonstrate very clearly why this is required. And at the rate that technology is changing and advancing, we need to work cleverly if we are to have the type of data and analysis that we need as parents to guide our decision making around technology and our children. We are all out there trying our best to facilitate healthy, dynamic, educational and exciting experiences for our children when it comes to tech, but there are not enough people exploring what that looks like. As the report says:

“Research on Internet use in the home has consistently demonstrated that family dynamics play a crucial role in children’s and parents’ activities and experiences online. We need further research on the role of parental limits, rules, and restrictions on children’s social networking as well as how families, siblings, peers, and schools influence children’s online social networking.”

I would go further: we need more research of how people of all ages navigate social networks. This doesn’t mean just looking at what activities users participate in online, how often they update information, or how many or what kinds of friends they have. These pieces of information give an outline of social network site usage. However, we need more comprehensive views how exactly social interaction online works, develops, and interacts in feedback loops with the offline and online worlds.

Let me give an example. Suppose an eleven year old joins Facebook. What happens then? Sure, they gain friends and develop a profile but how does this change and develop over the first days, weeks, and months? How does the eleven year old describe the process of social interaction? How do their friends, online and offline, describe this interaction? Where do they learn how to act and not act on Facebook? Do the social networks online overlap completely with offline networks and if so or if not, how does this affect the offline network? How does the eleven year old start seeing all social interaction differently? Does it change their interaction patterns for years to come or can they somewhat compartmentalize the Facebook experience?

This sort of research would take a lot of time and would be difficult to do with large groups. To do it well, a researcher would have two options: an ethnographic approach or to gain access to the keys to someone’s Facebook account to be able to observe everything that happens. Of course, Facebook itself could provide this information…

The sociological tree of William Julius Wilson

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As part of a larger article looking at the legacy of William Julius Wilson’s book The Truly Disadvantaged and his study of neighborhood effects, there is an interesting graphic: Wilson’s “web of influence.” Here who is on the list (listed here in clockwise order from the top):

-Robert Sampson – Harvard

-Sandra Smith – UC Berkeley

-Sudhir Venkatesh – Columbia

-Stefanie DeLuca – Johns Hopkins

-Christopher Jencks – Harvard

-Lawrence Katz – Harvard

-Patrick Sharkey – NYU

-Douglas Massey – Princeton

-Loic Wacquant – UC Berkeley

-Mary Patillo – Northwestern

This reminded me of NFL coaching trees: see the Bill Walsh, Marty Schottenheimer, and Bill Parcells trees here (and there could be other trees based on Paul Brown, Bill Belichick, and others). Why don’t we do more of this within the field of sociology? We know there are influential thinkers and graduate school mentors who influence broader ranges of students and academics than others. Indeed, quickly looking at this list shows these people tend to be clustered in higher ranking departments which attract more capable researchers as well as graduate students.

A classic example of this in sociology is the Chicago School: decades of American sociology were heavily influenced by a group of sociologists at the University of Chicago in the early 1900s who trained a number of notable graduate students and helped shape the field (urban sociology in particular). Such social networks or trees or “bloodlines” don’t have to be deterministic; new scholars don’t just parrot what they heard before but there are key ideas and methodologies that these networks share while also analyzing new social realms.

There would be multiple ways to measure this. We could start with grad school training: who was trained at what institution and with which advisers and dissertation committee members. Another way to look at this would be to examine who is citing whom and who is utilizing theories and concepts developed by others. A third way could explore who is actually collaborating on works with each other. While all of this would take some time, I wonder if such trees would really help explain more of the underlying structure of sociology as a discipline in the United States.

Increasing racial segregation in the American workplace

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Two sociologists argue there is evidence that some American workplaces have become more racially segregated in recent decades:

The results of our research found in part that there has been a trend toward racial re-segregation among white men and black men since 2000 and increased segregation since 1970 between black women and white women in American workplaces — so much so that it has eliminated progress made in the late 1960s. This is not simply an academic question, but a fundamental problem with American society. While most of us morally embrace equal opportunity and race and gender equality, we find that America is still a long way from those commitments. Only by confronting our shortcomings as a society can we address them…Distressingly, 19 of the 58 industries we surveyed — nearly one-third of all industries — showed a trend toward racial re-segregation between white men and black men over the last dozen years. Transportation services, motion pictures, construction, securities and commodities brokerages are some of the sectors that reflect this trend. In addition, re-segregation since 1970 between black and white women in workplaces has eliminated progress made in the late 1960s.

Transportation services, railroads, publishing and many low-wage manufacturing industries show increased segregation between black and white women. Unfortunately, increased access to private sector managerial jobs for black men and black women came to a grinding halt more than 30 years ago as well. Meanwhile, black women’s employment segregation from white women has actually grown somewhat, as white women made continued gains into traditionally white male jobs…

Where has there been progress? In general, African Americans tend to do better in workplaces that use formal credentials to make hiring decisions. Minorities and white women have made the most progress in professional jobs. These occupations require specific educational credentials to be considered for employment. African Americans also progress in those relatively rare large, private-sector firms that monitor their managers diversity track record.

It sounds like jobs based on social networks tend to be more segregated while jobs based on credentials allow more opportunities for non-whites. This reminds me of the sociological study Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men From Blue-Collar Jobs. Royster found in studying vocational schools that although black and white students were getting similar educations, the instructors and school gave white students more access to the primarily white social networks in the vocational trades while black students were left more to fend for themselves.

 

I would be curious to know how job segregation lines up with residential segregation, one of the more persistent features of American life in the last century. In other words, are workplaces in more diverse areas less segregated?

Since having a good job is tied to income, building wealth, accessing social networks and social capital, and new opportunities, this is important information. Also, this is a reminder fighting segregation is not a linear process.

 

Facebook owes a debt to sociological research on social networks

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At a recent conference, two Facebook employees discussed how their product was based on sociological research on social networks:

Two of Facebook’s data scientists were in Cambridge today presenting on big data at EmTech, the conference by MIT Technology Review, and discussing the science behind the network. Eytan Bakshy and Andrew Fiore each have a PhD and have held research or lecture positions at top universities. Their job is to find value in Facebook’s massive collection of data.

And their presentation underscored, unsurprisingly, the academic roots of their work. Fiore, for instance, cited the seminal 1973 sociology paper on networks, The Strength of Weak Ties, to explain Facebook’s research showing that we’re more likely to share links from our close acquaintances, but given the volume of those weaker connections, in aggregate weak ties matter more. As Facebook attempts to extract value from its users, it’s standing on the shoulders of social science to do it. It may seem banal to point out, but its insights are dependent on a rich history of academic research…

These data scientists were referencing an article written by sociologist Mark Granovetter that has to be one of the most cited sociology articles of all time. I just looked up the 1973 piece in the database Sociological Abstracts and the site says the article has been cited 4,251 times. Granovetter helped kick off a exploding body of research on social networks and how they affect different areas of life.

Some of the other conclusions in this article are interesting as well. The writer suggests the pipeline between academia and Facebook should be open both ways as both the company and scholars would benefit from Facebook data:

Select academics do frequently get granted access to data at companies like Facebook to conduct and publish research (though typically not the datasets), and some researchers manage to glean public data by scraping the social network. But not all researchers are satisfied. After tweeting about the issue, I heard from Ben Zhao, an associate professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, who has done research on Facebook. “I think many of us in academia are disappointed with the lack of effort to engage from FB,” he told me over email.

The research mentioned above and presented at EmTech was published earlier this year, by Facebook, on Facebook. Which is great. But it points to the power that Facebook, Google, and others now have in the research environment. They have all the data, and they can afford to hire top tier researchers to work in-house. And yet it’s important that the insights now being generated about how people live and communicate be shared with and verified by the academic community.

This is the world of big data and who has access to the more proprietary data will be very important. More broadly, it should also lead to discussions about whether corporations should be able to sit on such potentially valuable data and primarily pursue profits or whether they should make it more available so we can learn more about humanity at large. I know which side many academics would be on…

A lot of web traffic comes through the “dark social,” not through social network sites

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Alexis Madrigal argues that while social network sites like Facebook get a lot of attention, a lot of web traffic is influenced by social processes that are much more difficult to see and measure:

Here’s a pocket history of the web, according to many people. In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers that helped you find what you wanted among all that information. Some time around 2003 or maybe 2004, the social web really kicked into gear, and thereafter the web’s users began to connect with each other more and more often. Hence Web 2.0, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not strawmanning here. This is the dominant history of the web as seen, for example, in this Wikipedia entry on the ‘Social Web.’…

There are circumstances, however, when there is no referrer data. You show up at our doorstep and we have no idea how you got here. The main situations in which this happens are email programs, instant messages, some mobile applications*, and whenever someone is moving from a secure site (“https://mail.google.com/blahblahblah“) to a non-secure site (http://www.theatlantic.com).
This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as “direct” or “typed/bookmarked” traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that’s not actually what’s happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you…
Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s impact on the site…
If what I’m saying is true, then the tradeoffs we make on social networks is not the one that we’re told we’re making. We’re not giving our personal data in exchange for the ability to share links with friends. Massive numbers of people — a larger set than exists on any social network — already do that outside the social networks. Rather, we’re exchanging our personal data in exchange for the ability to publish and archive a record of our sharing. That may be a transaction you want to make, but it might not be the one you’ve been told you made.

Two thoughts about this:

1. Here is how I might interpret this argument from a sociological point of view: Internet traffic is heavily dependent on social connections. Whether this is done on sites like Facebook, which are more publicly social, or through email, which is restricted from public view but is still quite social, the interactions people have influence where they go on the web. In this sense, the Internet is an important social domain that may have some of its own norms and rules as well as its own advantages and disadvantages but it is built around human connections.

2. This sounds like a fantastic business and/or research opportunity; what is going on in this “dark social” realm? Could there be ways at getting at these activities that would help us better understand and analyze the importance of social connections and interactions and could this information be monetized as well?

Cory Booker uses his social networks to funnel Wall Street money to Newark

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Newark mayor Cory Booker has found a way to bring needed money to his city: work his wealthy social networks.

“The room is packed; you had every major hedge-fund, private-equity person,” recalls Joseph Shenker, chairman of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.

Booker holds guests spellbound using the Hebrew phrase “tikkun olam,” or fixing the world, to describe Ackman’s generosity. It’s a notion Booker has adapted to his city 12 miles (19 kilometers) west of Wall Street, and the moneyed elite are buying in…

“One of the things Cory Booker has done is turned Newark into a national cause,” says Shenker, 55, a New Yorker who remembers watching TV footage of the 1967 riots that left 26 dead. “He has made it a serious issue for the United States.”

Booker, midway through his second four-year term, has raised more than $250 million in donations and pledges for a city where the previous three mayors were convicted of or pleaded guilty to felonies after leaving office.

Mining a network stretching back to Stanford University and Yale Law School, Booker is promoting New Jersey’s largest city as a lower-cost alternative to New York and overseeing nonprofits to fund everything from security cameras to midnight basketball tournaments. Benefactors view Booker as somebody they can work with after decades of corruption, says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

This reminds me of some of the public-private efforts also being undertaken by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. If major cities are facing budget issues, this is one way to get money: work with wealthy business people, offer them some results/benefits of investing, and then use the money as you wish.

I could imagine some potential issues with this:

1. Is this a sustainable long-term solution? What if another cause becomes more attractive? What if the city problems become too big to be dealt with using private money?

2. Do the donators have any sway or influence of how the money is used? If so, or, perhaps even more important, if there is even the perception of this, the public may not appreciate this.

3. Generally, does this suggest that it is primarily the powerful people in society, people like important elected officials and wealthy businesspeople, who really to get to decide what gets done? Who really controls a city: the people or those with money and clout?

4. What happens if this money doesn’t lead to much improvement? In business terms, what if there is not a high return on investment?