Comments for Online Fandom

Comment on Coming in April 2010 by Almotasim

Almotasim — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:41:09 +0000

These polity books covers are real killers. Any chance to let us know the chapters on the content page?

Comment on Algorithm Fetishism or What Facebook Gets Wrong by Flipperoff

Flipperoff — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:03:38 +0000

Excellent article! They should have at least named their “smart” filter something different so average users have some clue as to what is going on instead of wondering why the news feed is out of order and missing things. There is something deceptive here that must be part of a bigger marketing scheme because the change is simply STUPID!

Comment on Coming in April 2010 by Alain Thys

Alain Thys — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:59:03 +0000

Nice cover ! Looking forward to read it.

Comment on Algorithm Fetishism or What Facebook Gets Wrong by Nancy Baym

Nancy Baym — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 02:57:08 +0000

Bobby: No, twitter is not included, although I would bet that people engage in regular direct interaction (@ replies and DMs) with a very small percentage of those whom they follow or who follow them. A brief excerpt from a chapter I have forthcoming in the Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies:

“On the whole, there is very little direct communication amongst friendship pairs in SNSs. In their analysis of 362 million fully-anonymized message headers on Facebook, Golder et al.(2007) found that only 15.1% of friends ever exchanged messages. In their analysis of over 200,000 MySpace messages, Gilbert et al.(2008) found that 43.5% of friends never commented on one anothers’ profiles, and only 4% exchanged ten or more comments. Baron’s (2008) research found that 60% of Facebook users wrote on others’ walls either never or less than once a week.”

Baron, N. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. New York: Oxford.

Gilbert, E., Karahalios, K. & Sandvig, C. (2008) The Network in the Garden: An Empirical Analysis of Social Media in Rural Life, CHI 2008, April 5–10, 2008, Florence, Italy.

Golder, S. A., Wilkinson, D., & Huberman, B. A. (2007, June). Rhythms of social interaction: Messaging within a massive online network. In C. Steinfield, B. Pentland, M. Ackerman, & N. Contractor (Eds.), Proceedings of Third International Conference on Communities and Technologies (pp. 41-66). London: Springer.

Most friend pairs on Last.fm in my research did not use the site for one-on-one communication either.

Comment on Algorithm Fetishism or What Facebook Gets Wrong by Bobby Rozzell

Bobby Rozzell — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:37:36 +0000

I’m curious about the statement “there is very little one-on-one communication that takes place through Facebook (or any other social network site)” What is the data you mention you have and do you include Twitter as one of the social network sites you refer to?

Comment on Algorithm Fetishism or What Facebook Gets Wrong by Nancy Baym

Nancy Baym — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:41:14 +0000

Matt — I agree that people will always complain, but that doesn’t mean that they are always wrong, even if they usually adapt. In the case of Last.fm, I know several people who have quit using most of the service, or at least elements of it since their big “upgrade” made sociability so hard to maintain.

And yes, suggestions are about prodding inactive users, but aside from how exploitative this feels, I am not sure they fully understand how the active users will respond. Their analytics will tell, but I know many of us are really appalled and that to others it smells more like desperation than Mashable’s spin of “brilliant idea!”

All sites like this face the struggle of balancing the heavy users with the less or inactive ones, and what pulls in the inactives may well alienate the actives.

Comment on Algorithm Fetishism or What Facebook Gets Wrong by Elizabeth Kricfalusi

Elizabeth Kricfalusi — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:07:27 +0000

Couldn’t agree more. The funniest thing is this quote in Facebook’s Help file re. the new News Feed:

“Highlights and the News Feed were combined into a single stream so that you could have more control over what you view on your home page and stay connected with your friends.”

So “no control” is more than what, exactly?

BTW, a lot of people have noticed that some friends have disappeared from their Live Feed since it launched. One of the reasons is because Facebook created a “maximum number of people to display” option and set the default to 250. You can change it but it’s not very clear how, so I posted the steps here for anyone who is having this problem:

http://www.techforluddites.com/2009/10/bug-alert-friends-are-missing-from-the-new-facebook-live-feed.html