The Economist, Facebook and the Dunbar number

The Economist has an article this week entitled "Primates on Facebook" which talks about the size of the average network on Facebook (120 "friends") and the connection to the often quoted (mis-quoted perhaps?) Dunbar's number in which British Anthropologist Robert Dunbar claimed that the human brain (more specifically the size of the neocortex) could only keep track of 148 connections in its network.

The question raised by the article is whether mediation of these networks by a computer makes the "cost" to keep each relationship alive lower. I might be dating myself, but in my early teenage years, I still wrote real actual letters to my friends across the world. My group of "friends" therefore was lept fairly small due to the cost of staying in touch.

Email lists allowed me to employ one-way communication and share my life with a much broader group (some were avid readers, others considered it spam). Now with Facebook, I feel that I have two networks: My friends (those that would have been on the one way email blast) who now have a 2 way dialogue thanks to wall updates, pictures, and social apps, and my "other" contacts, people that I would never add to my email but whom I am OK having on the periphery of my social network (they can consume but it is unlikely to be two way).

So, yes the article is correct that "people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are 'broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,'" but I still disagree with the notion of a static number... and believe that social networks, twitter and the like do allow us to have less costly (and thus more frequent) interactions with a greater number of people.

A great book on some of the science behind social networks, made consumable for the common man, is Duncan Watts Six Degrees. Duncan had joined Yahoo! Research...I wonder whether he is still there.

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Top highlights from Mobile World Congress 2009

 

47,000 of us from 189 countries (down over 15% over last year) gathered in Barcelona last week for the 2009 version of the Mobile World Congress, formerly 3GSM. The tone, as many have stated, was muted relative to past years and there was certainly a different kind of buzz this year. Then again maybe it's just me being cynical after so many of these shows.

Looking back at the event I wanted to summarize my perception of the "Top 10" from Barcelona. in no specific order:

1. Nokia Ovi store 
   Yes, Nokia launched a store... no surprise there. Promise of personalization and cross selling makes it a bit more interesting than the other 1/2 dozen app stores launched in the last months
   
   
2. Skype – Nokia deal 
   Skype has been talking about mobile in a big way as of late, and made some noise at CES launching an Android app. The Nokia deal gives them the potential of large distribution but how Nokia and Skype's incentives align, and the role of the operator in all of this is still TBD.
   
   
3. Palm Pre GSM
   Despite expectations, Palm did not announce a GSM version of the device, but leaked videos did show a Pre running on a Vodafone SIM. 
   
   
4. Palm Pre supports HTML 5 (Google Maps demo)
   My personal (very biased) favorite was Vic Gundotra showing off Google Maps running directly off the Palm Pre browser on full AJAX with panning, two-pinch zooming and all of that... without a single line of on-device code. Again: The browser is the platfom.
   
   
5. Android for Vodafone (HTC Magic)
   A lot of expectations about the "G2" were finally realized when Vodafone and HTC announced the HTC Magic, the second device running Android. The key here is the marked difference between the G1 and the Magic as far as design and the ability to innovate quickly on the platform to incorporate new usage profiles (touch-pad keyboard rather than physical one). 
   
   
6. Nokia ad layoffs
   Not announced at MWC but it did hit the news last week and I found it particularly important...as Nokia spoke at MWC about the importance of services, it also sent a clear message that it was regrouping and refocusing on what it does well (shipping millions of phones) and stepping away from an over-crowded mobile display ads space.  
   
   
7. INQ1 wins GSMA handset award
   Impressive that a relatively unknown "ODM" would win the GSMA award for best handset but a testament to the success that a simple consumer value proposition ("skype phone") can have in driving sales and adoption.
   
   
8. Microsoft myphone 
   Badly leaked prior to the show, Ballmer did announce MyPhone and promised the integration of services along with OSs (see below)
   
   
9. Windows Mobile 6.5
   No comments on my former colleagues. 6.5 was announced and will be seen live "in the near future." Unfortunately, still the same old browser.
   
   
10. Sol Trujillo vs Google and Skype
    Sol seems to have something against services and hasn't been Google's biggest ally in the past. His quips and discussion with Josh Silverman from Skype was particularly sharp (and amusing?

Vic demo @ MWC 09: The browser is the platform

I will post more on my thoughts on the Mobile World Congress, but I did want to share this video of Vic Gundotra's demo of Google Maps on the Palm Pre...



Google has been talking for a long time of the browser as the platform... Wekbit + HTML 5 plus millions of iPhones, Android, Pres (and yes eventually Nokia's) make this statement a reality.

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Dear Nokia: Servers fail, get used to it

I will first state that I admire Nokia and that it is one of the few companies that has managed to reinvent itself so many times in the past 100 years: From lumber to rubber boots, radios and eventually mobile phones and mobile networks.

It is currently in the midst of its latest transformation evolving from a hardware manufacturer to a service provider via its new Ovi brand. In a late night conversation with a Nokia executive last January a Google colleague made a bold statement about how Nokia would quickly realize that being service provider is harder than just launching a website and how we would realize that being in the phone business is harder than just launching a phone.

The statement seems to be holding true, as Nokia learnt yesterday when its Ovi Contacts system crashed because of a broken cooler. Folks, its not like just getting rid of defective phones.. ... build redudancy and backup capabilities. People might forgive a dropped call here and there but they will not forgive you loosing their contacts database!

Maybe Nokia will want to co-locate their data center along with Google's supposed new data center in Finland.

In any case, I look forward to having a front row seat to Nokia's latest evolution.

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Google eye tracking study

At Google everything relies on data... so what better way to understand how users scan a page than to analyze it...

Pretty cool insight into how your eyes will track across a page. Most interesting parragraph:

"Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page."

Favorite job titles

There are some job titles that I have always thought particularly attractive including

Supreme Allied Commander
Generalissimo
Master of the Universe
"Duncan Mcleod of the Clan McLeod"
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Grand Poo Bah

Any others come to mind?

Prof. Clemons follow up from Davos

Following up to the link of the Davos Panel with Prof. Clemons from Wharton, he just posted his thoughts on TechCrunch.

Panel on mobile at Davos: Facebook mobile, LBS, video uploads

Some interesting folks, Chad Hurley of YouTube, Zuckerberg, Craig Mundie, Shananu Narayen of Adobe, Hamid Akhvan VP at T-Mobile and my former professor at Wharton Eric Clemons got together to discuss mobile at Davos.



Techcrunch's Arrington moderated the panel and followed up with a post.

During the discussion Zuck mentioned 25M users of the apps (does not include browsing to x.facebook.com or facebook.com) a month... and Allfacebook posted that it was close to 4M a day with 1.6M from iPhone alone.

The real thumb culture: Obama's "special" Blackberry

It's been dubbed the Obamaberry...Given his addiction to the machine we all know and love and that glitter of hope we get every time the little light goes red... as the leader of the Free World, Obama has convinced the secret service that he needs to keep his Blackberry.

And it seems that the new symbol of power in DC is not invitation to dinner and Camp David, but access to Obama's super secret new whitehouse email address (wouldn't it be obama@whitehouse.gov???)

And apparently, contrary to rumors, it is not a special WinCE device, the Sectera EDGE but rather an actual Blackberry.

Snowed under in London

Mobile in Japan

An interesting presentation by Christopher Billich on why the mobile web works in Japan...

My general take is that Japan is unique and gives us some lessons to emulate but what happens in Japan and stays in Japan...we cannot cut and paste to any other parts of the world!

Why People use the Mobile Web in Japan...and some Really Crazy Stuff

View more presentations from Christopher Billich. (tags: japan mobile)

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