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    • Connecting with Chris Vein: City Hall Technologist
      by Adam Conner on Monday, July 19, 2010 at 9:31am
      At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people—from experts and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook Blog in our "Connecting with..." series.

      Chris Vein, the CIO for the City and County of San Francisco, recently predicted that social media services may displace government-run websites for many citizen interactions. Chris has played a key role in bringing access to city services to San Francisco's Facebook Page and other sites. I talked with him to... learn more about the role social media can play in local government services and citizen engagement.


      A lot of people think of technology as an expensive investment. How are you trying to save money and use technology to provide better services?


      Vein
      It really is [about] the introduction of self-service and [that is] one of the things that we have done with Facebook. Citizens don't have time to come down to city hall, they don't have time to sit and see processes that waste their time; they become very impatient and that's how government gets a bad name.

      So it's really trying to figure out ways to make those services available any time, any place and make them cheaper to provide. And so when we do things like allow citizens to pay their parking tickets through a Facebook application, you are allowing citizens to be in more control of their interaction with the government rather than government in control of the interactions.


      Some city services could never be provided over the Internet, but what are some of the surprising ways you have been able to use technology?


      I think virtually everything can be made more efficient with technology. I think yes, it would be difficult to make garbage collection go away by automating it. However, what you can do is provide more information to citizens on when garbage day is coming and what the parking laws are on particular streets so that people don't get tickets when the garbage truck comes along.

      Now that's bad for ticket revenue. But on the other side from a citizen's perspective, we are combining a bunch of technologies in order to allow the citizens to be more in control of their lives and how they interact with the city...in ways that make life easier.


      So it's not just about the services themselves being provided online, it's also about the access to information of the services that helps them become more smooth or efficient.


      Exactly. That's also behind all of our efforts [to make] government transparent and hopefully accountable by talking to government agencies and finding out what data sets they have [and] putting them out there.... And it really is an opportunity for the average citizen to have access to the very core data elements that we use to make our decisions.

      So from a transparency and accountability standpoint, if we are moving in a direction or taking an interpretation of specific data in a way that public doesn't agree with, they can come up with their own interpretation and challenge this..using social media like the city's Facebook Page.


      What has surprised you about your Facebook Page? Is it its size, the kinds of discussions happening on it? Who is responsible for your Facebook Page within your office or within the city?


      [We] keep a hands-off approach to it. We have no rules about what can be talked about. Certainly, we have rules around etiquette and those kinds of things. But, it really is an opportunity to put issues that are interesting to citizens out there and let the citizens discuss [issues] with each other and with the city....

      I think the best reactions that we get are about quality-of-life issues. Obviously, in a city like San Francisco, there are many sides to that issue and, therefore, many opinions on that issue. When we put those quality-of-life issues out there that are of real importance to the citizens, that's where we see the most use and the best use. I think that's why we have so many people out there, because we are willing to put those tough, thorny political issues out there and let the community talk about them and see where they are....

      Many jurisdictions are still looking at social media outlets as something that has to be contained. My belief is that social media and sites like Facebook and Twitter are just new or relatively new portals into the City and County of San Francisco, and they're just like a telephone or just like a fax machine or walk-in [counter]. These sites are ways that people are accessing different services, and we have to get ahead of it.


      It seems like that's a discussion that not just your city is having in the County of San Francisco. What advice would you give to other cities about how to take advantage of these tools?


      The first thing is don't be afraid of these new applications because our experience is that yes, you always have outliers, but the vast majority of information that's being exchanged is useful, it's positive and you may not always like it, but it does bring a whole new set [of people] into the legislative process that you've never had before.

      The second [piece of] advice is to use it as a tool, use it as a way to understand what your constituents are concerned about and what they want from you. Take that information and start building your policies around it, because it is such an efficient way of gauging public support or public desire around the issues.

      Third, I think you need somebody who is willing to be in a pothole, if you will, someone who is willing to always talk to everyone about how important these channels like Facebook are to not only the citizens but also to the government and how [they can be] used to make efficient changes to government services.


      Adam Conner, an associate manger on Facebook's public policy team, can't wait to be able to pay his parking tickets on Facebook.
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    • Topics: Government, Connecting with...
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    • Connecting with Emily Liebert: Author of 'Facebook Fairytales'
      by Matt Hicks on Monday, April 5, 2010 at 11:21am
      At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people—from experts and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our "Connecting with..." series.

      New York-based writer Emily Liebert released her debut book last week, Facebook Fairytales: Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit," a collection of 25 inspirational stories made possible through people's Facebook connections. I recently talked with Emily about the book and the stories of triumphs and... struggles that most struck a nerve with her. In future blog posts, we'll be sharing excerpts of the fairytales.


      What inspired "Facebook Fairytales" and the writing of this book?


      My inspiration was my fascination with Facebook and how it's revolutionizing modern society. I joined in the summer of 2008, and at first my intentions were purely voyeuristic. I was one of those people who read other people's posts but never updated my own status. Eventually, like the hundreds of millions of other users, I got sucked in, and I really started thinking about the cultural impact of social networking, specifically Facebook.

      It occurred to me that there had to be some amazing stories evolving from these hundreds of millions of connections. I decided that someone needed to write a book sharing these stories and who better than me?


      As you were investigating the idea for the book, did you run across any specific story that provided the "aha" kind of moment that this was really a great idea and something that could be done?


      Liebert
      Initially, when I started looking for stories, I posted a query to my Facebook Wall detailing my idea for the book, and I asked my friends to repost the query. I thought, "Wouldn't it be fitting if I could find all the stories through my own Facebook connections?" And I probably could have. But they wouldn't have been the 25 absolute best or most diverse stories. I did find a couple this way, and they were quite good, but they didn't provide that "aha" moment.

      So I decided to reach out to Facebook's press department to see if users had shared stories with them. They had. Thousands, in fact. Facebook immediately passed along the story of a young mother in Scarsdale, N.Y., Beth, who'd received a kidney from a young mother in Tallahassee, Fla., Cathy, via a mutual friend's status update. Cathy absolutely saved Beth's life even though they were complete strangers, living over 1,000 miles away. And I thought, wow, that's one of those goose bump stories. It was amazing to think that something as simple as a Facebook status update could have a hand in saving someone's life. That's when I started digging some more.

      Through my own online research, along with significant support from Facebook, I was able to find the 25 miraculous stories that made it into the book. Though it was really the kidney donor story and a great romantic story that initially launched the concept.


      Which one was the romantic story?


      The romantic story is called "Summer Love." It follows Roni Tropper and Allen Applbaum, who'd originally met at summer camp when they were teenagers. They'd briefly reconnected in college, but hadn't stayed in touch after that. Years later, they reconnected again on Facebook and now they're getting married.

      What I love about their story is that it's complex. They weathered a lot of ups and downs to be together. Many times, despite the fact that fate seemed to be pushing them together, it seemed that their relationship might not work out. Had it not been for Facebook, it probably wouldn't have.


      Did you find as you were doing the research to discover these stories that any specific themes were emerging?


      I know this sounds simple, but I believe the common theme is happiness. The book features personal triumphs, business feats, and political coups—generally speaking—modern-day miracles. And, in one way or another, Facebook is responsible for infusing happiness into these situations when other prospects seemed dim.
      One way or another, Facebook is responsible for infusing happiness into these situations when other prospects seemed dim.

      The elaborate domino effect of social networking continues to intrigue and inspire me. In today's society, it feels like everyone is super busy and swamped all the time, and I think the stories in this book really remind people that the resilience of the human spirit is powerful. And that when given the opportunity, people do the right thing or open themselves up in a very positive way, as in the case of the kidney donor.


      On a personal level, what were some of the other stories that stood out to you?


      The story "Waiting for Baby" is one of my favorites. It's about a couple, Seth and Melissa Edlavitch, who had been trying to conceive a baby for years. They'd experienced a tragic stillbirth of twins and had undergone multiple IVF (in vitro fertilization) cycles. Melissa's sister had even acted as a surrogate, but nothing was producing the outcome they so desired—to be parents. So they decided to pursue adoption, which can be a very long and expensive process.

      One night on a whim, Seth converted an adoption flyer they'd made to a JPEG and posted it on Facebook. Through the domino effect of social networking, two months later, they took home a baby boy.

      One of the other stories that really resonated with me is called "Heaven Sent." It's not your typical fairytale, because it's about a family in Alabama who lost their teenage daughter, Jessica Elkins, very suddenly to meningitis at Christmas time a couple of years ago.

      Not only were they able to create a cause page and a group on Facebook to help raise money and awareness for meningitis, but the really touching Facebook aspect to the story—and the reason I chose to include it in a book of fairytales—is that Jessica's father has used Facebook as his means of coping with his grief over the loss of his daughter. He was her friend on the site, and for the past two years, has written her a Facebook message every single day.

      It's what helps him get through each day. He also keeps in touch with her friends on the site, which allows him to feel connected to Jessica. So while this may not seem like a "happily-ever-after" kind of story, again, Facebook infused some happiness into an otherwise awful situation.


      Matt, a manager on Facebook's communications team, is becoming a fan of Facebook Fairytales on Facebook.


      Tip: Share your stories here with us about interesting and inspiring ways you use Facebook.
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    • Topics: Facebook Fairytales, Connecting with...
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    • Connecting with Chuck Martin: The Facebook Grader
      by Matt Hicks on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 10:19am
      At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people—from experts and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our "Connecting with..." series.


      Chuck Martin and a team of researchers from the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business & Economics recently found that the amount of time students spend using social media and services like Facebook does not affect their grades. I talked with Martin, a lecturer at the school and the CEO of... organizational research firm NFI Research, about those findings as well the use of social media in his classroom and its impact on the workplace. Martin is the author of eight business books, including his soon-to-be released "Work Your Strengths."


      You and a team of researchers recently looked at the correlation between using social media and grades. What would you say is the big finding from your perspective?


      Martin
      The big finding is that there is actually no correlation between the amount of time that students spend using social media and their grades. We found that basically the heavy users and the light users get pretty much the same grades.


      In addition to the finding that there isn't a correlation, what were some of the results about just how much students are using social media?

      For the purposes of the study, we considered social media to be Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.... This study was very wide. It was 1,100-plus students out of the 12,000 at the university, and we surveyed every college at the university.

      But of the heavy users of social media, 63 percent got high grades, and of the light users, 65 percent got high grades. So there is no real difference between the two. And of the heavy Facebook users, 62 percent got high grades. The light Facebook users, 62 percent got high grades. It was identical.


      And did that surprise you?


      It didn't. Interestingly, the hypothesis of the students was that there would be no correlation and they were correct. But if you talk to any adults, adults were totally surprised by this. And adults and parents typically have the view that you need to spend more time on your homework and less time on your social media so that your grades stay high. Well, it turns out that it makes no difference.


      Why do you think there is this disconnect? Is this just a generational gap, or something about how people use (social media) differently?


      It's not just generational, it's actually behavioral. If you look at the students today, they have grown up with things like Facebook and YouTube and blogs and so forth, so it's not a separate thing. In the early days of the web, people would be at work or school and they would start surfing the web and two hours later they would come back and say, "What was I looking for? I forgot."

      They basically got lost in the experience, and today with social media it's actually become integrated with people's lives. So it's not a separate thing where people leave life and go do (social media). It actually has become part of what they do every day....


      They have a multitasking ability that's a little different?


      I created a course for the university called "Social Media in Marketing." (During class) we had my presentation on the screen live, and we were dipping in and out of the web. We had a live Twitter feed projected to a large screen, and we had a third screen with another projection, where we had a back channel so that people could communicate anonymously on the big screen.... There were three big screens in front of the classroom with three live network feeds, and we also had video and we had people patched in by Skype.

      Everybody in the room used a computer for the entire three-hour class, and they were encouraged and actually did interact. They were tweeting with people around the country during the class about the content, and people were tweeting from outside the classroom from different parts of the country with questions that we would then tackle as a group.

      And it turns out that the engagement level of the students was higher than a traditional classroom. We talked to a neuropsychologist, who is actually one of my co-authors, about this multitasking aspect and his view was that it's not really multitasking. It's really using different media simultaneously on the same subject matter.


      That's really fascinating because the conventional wisdom is, "Oh, this is just a distraction from paying attention to the lecture."


      Right, we had people come in and monitor the class. We had trustees or we had the finance people, and they were all astounded by what they were seeing. Every class was longer than it was supposed to be because we couldn't really get the students to stop.


      Do you find that it extends the conversation outside the actual class, and are there other ways of using things like Facebook beyond the lecture?


      We actually, for that course, ran the course on Facebook.... Since this was social media, we decided that we needed to use social media and we created the course on a private (Facebook) group. So all of the members of the class were in the group, and then each of the (study) groups created their own Facebook groups for their teams. The difference between that and a traditional course was the course then ran 24/7 because people were having conversations about the content all the time.... We will be teaching this course again in the summer and will be using Facebook for that as well.


      Thinking further out, though, do you think that more classrooms will begin to adopt this idea of using social media both in the class and outside?


      When we were doing the social media course...we had requests from outside the classroom from other parts of the country that they wanted a live streaming feed. So one time we just streamed it live onto the Net, and that's because of the demand. It's not necessarily because the teacher said he wished to do this. It's because the market said, "Hey, we should do this." Once you use the back channel in a classroom, for example, and it's highly interactive, it's difficult not to have it.


      Where do you see Facebook and social media fitting into the workplace moving forward? What would be your advice to business leaders?


      Let (employees) do it and encourage it. It's just like in the classroom: The great fear of adults for our class was that (we would have) all these people behind computer screens and that they weren't going to be paying attention to the class (but) going to be shopping and doing all these other things online.

      Nobody did that, nobody. It just didn't happen, and if that happened it would mean that I was failing as a teacher.

      It's the same thing in business. If you let your employees do their work more effectively, they will work more effectively.


      Matt, a manager on Facebook's communications team, passed paper notes as a back channel when he was in school.
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    • Connecting with... Jonah Seiger: Online Politico
      by Matt Hicks on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:01pm
      At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people — from experts and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our "Connecting with..." series. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jonah Seiger, a pioneering Internet campaign strategist and the founder of Connections Media, where he develops online campaigns for U.S. issue groups, political candidates and companies. Most recently, he worked on the 2009 reelection campaign for New York Mayor... Mike Bloomberg.


      Given that you have been working in Internet policy and online advocacy since 1993, what do you think, looking back, has been the biggest change that the Internet has brought to politics?


      Transparency, and I think we still have a long way to go. But the ability of citizens, voters, to have access to source information, to engage with each other outside of the filter of the media, establishment and traditional media, has changed the whole dialog, and I think brought mostly good things to the politics of America.


      Can you think a seminal moment where this was made clear to you?

      Seiger
      The Starr Report (in 1998). I think it was like within the first 24 hours, it was downloaded 25 million times...People now have access directly to the same information that the reporter gets, and they can parse it themselves...

      There were things that followed very quickly after that. John McCain's victory in the New Hampshire primary in 2000. I guess you would have to rewind and say Jesse Ventura's election as governor of Minnesota (in 1998). John McCain's fund raising success in the aftermath of his victory in the New Hampshire primary. Howard Dean's success in 2004. And then it just kind of cascades. People give Obama credit for inventing all this, (but) it actually starts a lot earlier than that.

      The one change we have seen in recent years is the rise of various types of social media. How has that in your mind changed what the Internet can do in politics?


      It gives more power to the true grassroots. It makes it in many ways a lot easier to organize, but more challenging for the top-down type of organizing. And it changes the calculus of a campaign's communications operation, because it's much more difficult to have tight control over every aspect of the message. And the tighter the control attempts to be, the less successful you will be in social media. You have got to give people the ability to add their own flavor and their own voice to your message, and that could be really scary.

      The Internet is all about decentralization; it always has been. Social media extends that to another level. The ease of sharing (which) Facebook and Twitter and other platforms provide accelerates that. And I think it's great for politics, but it also makes it challenging for people who practice (politics), especially people who come from a more traditional approach to political communications.


      Who do you think is further ahead: The everyday voter who is using social media or the campaigns themselves? Where is the balance right now?


      What we continue to see—and this is not a hard-and-fast rule—is the challenger has an advantage because they have more degrees of freedom. The incumbent has more to protect, and so it's a little bit more difficult to embrace fully the openness and decentralization that the Internet and social media, in particular, provides.

      So those opportunities are more available to the insurgent challenger candidate, that Jesse Ventura example, the John McCain in 2000 example, Obama.

      It's why the success of Mayor Bloomberg in New York City is an interesting example, because he was the incumbent. He was one of the only incumbents to win since the 2008 cycle. (Gov.) Corzine had lost in New Jersey (and) the party in power lost in Virginia in that same election. So there are examples to the contrary, but I think it gives, generally speaking, more opportunity to the challenger...


      Looking more recently, like in the past year, has there been any specific examples of either where social media played a really big role in the election or in the public discourse about an issue that surprised you in some way?


      I don't know about surprised me, but I think the example that's most salient right now is the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts (as a Republican U.S. senator). There was a combination of Martha Coakley's campaign running a very traditional establishment (approach) against a very energetic challenger, who successfully nationalized the race using social media. And that (nationalization) channeled money, it channeled support, people talking about the campaign, generated press coverage, and just helped to propel them forward.

      Now at the end of day, the election happened in Massachusetts, people voted only in Massachusetts. So nationalizing a race only gives you so much, but I think that story is an important example of some of what's happening with politics and social media.


      What if you are not a Barack Obama or you are not a Mayor Bloomberg or you are not looking to even nationalize a campaign, but you are a local candidate or you are a political advocacy group. Are there certain things you can learn from what some of these big campaigns have done?


      I think what social media provides is a new way of doing old things. Organizing has always been about talking to as many people as you can, to find those people who support you and get them engaged. Social media is one more avenue for that. It provides new ways of quantifying the return on every dollar or hour or new person that you are going after.

      So I think that the same old tried-and-true tactics of organizing still absolutely apply, but the platforms that social media provide give you more efficiency, more reach, and may create opportunities for news coverage and an interest in your campaign that otherwise wouldn't be available.


      So you have seen all these changes in the last decade-and-a-half of Internet advocacy, what do you think is the biggest change to come that we are yet to see?


      I hate that question, because...technology alone is not the story. Technology enables things, but successful campaigns are about connecting with people, and persuading (people) that you have the better solution to a problem that's commonly understood... What I have seen is that the Internet has enabled more people to participate than might otherwise have. (It) provides a way of channeling latent public interest and attention in ways that can be measured and directed, and no matter what the next technology is that will still happen.

      I do worry (that) as much as social media is powering greater participation in politics, it also has the effect of fragmenting and distilling (issues) to a slogan, almost. And I think it is becoming more difficult for us to have national conversations about complicated issues... I see it in the discussions about climate change, for example, and healthcare reform and creating jobs in this economy. We have lots of new opportunities to kind of shout at each other, and it's a little harder to build consensus around complicated matters...

      Four years ago we were talking about podcasts. I don't know, is anybody still doing them? Blogs have found their natural place in the panoply of media. They are definitely having a major impact in challenging the establishment of media, but they have their role and we understand it now. Social media will settle into its own place.

      So what's the next platform? Somewhere in (Silicon) Valley here someone is figuring that out. I don't know the technology, but the communications dimension, I think, is going to continue to be driven by people sharing information, and that's very cool and very positive.


      Matt, a manager on Facebook's communications team, is connecting with his local candidates for San Francisco supervisor.
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    • Connecting with... Sam Gosling: Facebook Psychologist
      by Adam D. I. Kramer on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 12:56pm
      At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people—from experts in their field, academics and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook Blog in our "Connecting with...." series. I had the opportunity to speak with Sam Gosling, professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and author of "Snoop: What your stuff says about you." He recently published research that found that people are expressing their real personalities on social networks like... Facebook, rather than inflated takes on themselves.


      Gosling
      What made you interested in researching the psychology behind people's profile on Facebook and social networking generally?
      I think it was a confluence of two different forces. First, I had already done a lot of research on how you can look at people's physical spaces as reflections of what people are like and how people use that physical space to communicate messages to others and make them feel certain ways. …It just seemed quite a natural extension to apply this approach to a virtual space…

      Second, so many people are on the social networking sites. And although from the outside their activities may appear frivolous, they clearly aren't because so many people devote so much time and psychological energy to them.


      So you found that people are in fact reflecting their real personalities in their Facebook profiles, is that correct?
      That's correct. We found that judgments of people based on nothing but their Facebook profiles correlate pretty strongly with our measure of what that person is really like, and that measure consists of both how the profile owner sees him or herself and how that profile owner's friends see the profile owner. The combination of those self and friend-based ratings corresponded pretty strongly with the judgments made by strangers.


      Why do you think people actually are being their true selves online, even though they could just present whoever they'd like to be seen as?
      Well, it's not clear that many of the people could just present how they would like to be seen. I think there are a number of obstacles to doing that. So, one of the obstacles is really knowing how to be different.

      I can see my colleague's office, which is immaculate, and I can see my office, which is messy. So if I went into her office, I could pull one of the journals a quarter of an inch from the bookshelf and she would notice that right away and push it back, whereas you could mess up my books, put them on their sides, take some out and put them in the wrong shelves and I wouldn't notice for a few months. It's very, very hard to fake those differences in perception...

      Another reason why it's hard to fake is that you'd have to consistently and persistently do things in order to be a seen certain way. So if I wanted to pretend to be much nicer than I really am, it's not just half an hour [of] really focusing on it. You've only got to slip up once or twice for you to completely negate that: You've only got to, you know, do something really mean to someone for that impression to go, for example.

      If I want to appear to be a sensation seeker [and] be seen as somebody who "swims with the sharks," then I actually have to go swimming with the sharks in order to have photos of me swimming with the sharks. I can't just create a picture of me scuba diving, I have to really do it... There is accountability there because if I claim to be someone who enjoys swimming with the sharks, my friends in the real world would say, "No you don't, you're totally scared of sharks."


      So the next question is a little more broad: How do you think that the Internet has changed our sense of identity overall?
      I think that's a very good question... Once cultures became industrialized that resulted in people segmenting their social audiences because they would leave home and go to work and then perhaps go to another venue, or audience, to engage in leisure activities. I think these developments allowed people to develop different identities: I will have a home or family self, a friend self, a leisure self, a work self. We were able to have all of these different selves and maintain those things quite separately. And it's quite common right now to have people from work who know nothing about your home life and vice versa.

      As these new technologies emerge, they are for the first time now bringing those identities together. On my Facebook profile, I have colleagues, I have family members, I have students, I have people who've read my book, I have all kinds of different people there and it's much harder now to maintain that separation. So I think one of the things we are being forced to do is accept the merging of identities that we may have tried to keep apart before. So as a professor, I may not want people to think that I go out and have a few drinks occasionally, but now I have to find a way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self.


      Plus at the same time, if everybody sees that everybody is doing that, they might come to terms with it a little bit better so that they don't find it quite so scandalous?
      Absolutely. I certainly agree with you. I think that is happening. I think we're now accepting that just because you see your accountant going out on weekends and attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he's not a good accountant. We're coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of identities.


      Would you say that sharing is basically the same when you're doing it on purpose? In social media, all of the sharing that people do is sort of intentional; it's on purpose, as opposed to in a more naturalistic context where you may happen to say something and then even regret it or forget that [you] shared that.
      Yes, I think you're right, and I think one of the other things that we're having to face up to is that in our normal social interactions, we may be deliberately sharing things but under the guise of letting them [out] accidentally—"Oh did I mention, I just go back from Monaco?" or something like that.

      And now, of course, because you deliberately do these things, I think sort of the norms of "letting things slip" and the other ways we might try to communicate deliberately [while] pretending they are not deliberate are changing too... When you first see these things [in social media] it looks very unusual in terms of people showing off about all the cool things they have done. Yet, they have always done that and they just kind of did it in a different way.


      So what's next? Are you planning any future research into people's Facebook personalities?
      We are trying to look in a bit more detail right now in terms of which elements people use when they are forming impressions of others. Which ones should they use, which ones have they been neglecting that they shouldn't? Which ones are they wrongly using [and] which ones actually are diagnostic of what people are like? Also [we're] trying to look at how information changes and how preferences may be communicated amongst people.

      So, for example, with people becoming friends—looking at what we can learn about friendship, say, with the sharing of preference information. If you and I become friends and then you suddenly "like" all the music that I have "liked," what does that say about our friendship? Or, if we share more equally, what does that say about our friendship? Or if we never share. So [we are] beginning to look at Facebook interactions as indexes of these social processes.


      Adam is a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Oregon and an intern on Facebook's data team.
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    • Topics: Connecting with..., Research
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    • Connecting with... Brian Phillips: The Facebook Matchmaker
      by Kathy H. Chan on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 1:04pm
      At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people — from experts in their field, academics and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our "Connecting with..." series. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Brian Phillips, a co-founder of Thread, which is one of 24 companies that in the fbFund REV incubator program for startups building Facebook applications and that announced funding today. Read the previous blog post in this series here.


      ...The basis for your company, Thread, is to introduce friends-of-friends on Facebook. How did you come up with the idea?
      Personal experience. One of our co-founders, Skye Lee, is a consummate matchmaker. She loves nothing more than to set me up. A typical day: I'll get a phone call from her before we even start thinking about business. "I just found this really cute girl on the street, and she's single. You should take her to coffee next week. I told her all about you." When we started to think about business ideas, it hit us — we should just make it easier to introduce people by applying cool technology like Facebook Connect.

      What have you learned with fbFund REV this summer?
      First and foremost, the collaboration has been great. We're co-located with 23 other fantastic start-ups with brilliant people behind them, and we're all working on things on the Facebook Platform. If we have a question, problem or challenge, surely someone in the building has had the same question, problem or challenge before.

      Secondly, it's been really educational. fbFund REV has a great curriculum with speakers who come to our office almost every other day — whether it be a representative from Facebook or Tim Ferris, author of "The 4-Hour Workweek," and experts in marketing, SEO, public relations or venture capital.

      And third, it's just been fun. For instance, every Wednesday afternoon, we have weekly check-ins to talk about what we're working on, and afterwards, the entire group goes out for a beer. We have our own happy hour. There's a great vibe, lots of energy.

      Facebook has never focused on dating. What made you think it would be well-suited for an application built on that idea?
      We try to take activity that people do off of Facebook and make it easier to do with Facebook. Two-thirds of all marriages are the result of friend introductions. This is how people are actually meeting in the real world. Now, you could actually make that easier. Instead of having to go to 30 dinner parties, I can use Facebook to browse my friends' friends and ask questions about them, instead of meeting every single one of them in person.

      How do you think the Internet is changing people's dating patterns or ability to meet new people?
      Historically, it started out with slow adoption. There's a good chunk of people who've never been on a dating site or sworn them off. The stigma is going away and people are becoming more comfortable with the idea of using the Internet. At some point, it will be rare for people not to use the Internet in some way for dating. One of our goals is not to have people think of us as a dating site. Thread is a service that just makes what people do offline really easy.

      Would you call yourself a matchmaker?
      I like to think I'm actually a pretty good matchmaker. I just recently set up two friends of mine. They met through Thread, and they've gone on three dates. I parade around the office high-fiving people about how creative a matchmaker I am. We have a competition going at the office: Who can make the most successful matches? One of our key metrics for success will be actual weddings.

      Now, obviously we're a new service, we've only been around for eight weeks or so, but I'm hoping this couple that I've set up will be good candidates for marriage. Let's say this couple is ultimately successful and someone asks them, "How did you guys meet?" Their answer will be, "We met through friends." Not a dating site or Thread, just through friends.

      How many people have you set up? What's the track record for your setups?
      Probably over a dozen couples. On Thread, you get an opportunity to look at what information people have available through Facebook and learn a little more about them. Instead of a blind email, which I may have used before to set up my friends, people can see a profile photo, what networks they're part of on Facebook and some of their interests.

      In the case of my 12 setups, probably a third to half of them went on second dates. You can put anybody on a first date if you're convincing, but if they go on a second date, that's something. That's just me, though. If you're a bad matchmaker offline, Thread isn't necessarily going to make you a better matchmaker. We'll just make it easier.

      What sort of criteria do you use on Thread to set people up?
      There's no better substitute than your friends' own judgement. The whole premise of our system is that your friends can either make suggestions for you or you can ping your friends and ask them if they think someone would make a good match for you. What's different about our site is that everybody you see, you know through at least one person and sometimes more than one. It's all about friends of friends.

      What do you think of the six degrees of separation theory? It's the idea that everyone is, at most, six steps away from knowing any other person.
      I buy it. Everyone probably is connected by six degrees. I haven't thought about the math or statistics behind this, but I would suggest that the person you're going to marry is probably not six degrees away. They're most likely one, maybe two, degrees away.

      Two degrees away is a huge number of people. On average, people on Facebook have somewhere around 120 friends. If you have 120 friends and they each have 120 friends, that's 14,400 people. And if those 14,400 people each have 120 friends, that's 1,728,000 people.

      So, are you single?
      I am single. My personal interests and business interests are perfectly aligned. A lot of people think, "Wow, Brian is really interested in meeting girls."

      This begs the question, why haven't you found someone by using Thread already?
      I've dated more in the last two months than I ever have in my life.


      Kathy, Facebook's resident blogger, is checking which of her friends are single and ready to mingle on Thread.
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    • Topics: Applications, Facebook Connect, Connecting with...
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    • Connecting with... Ray Kurzweil: The Futurist
      by Kathleen Loughlin on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 2:07pm
      At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people — from experts in their field, academics and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our "Connecting with...." series. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist and author of several books who's been called a "restless genius" and "the ultimate thinking machine." Read the previous blog post in this series here.

      You spoke at Facebook about the exponential... growth of technology. How do you think that relates to Facebook and what we are doing here?
      Facebook is a great example of the acceleration of technology. The first technologies — stone tools by the wheels — took 10s of thousands of years, the printing press took centuries to be adopted. The telephone took only half a century to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Now, we have a phenomenon like Facebook that takes just a few years. You think about life without Facebook and social networks, it sounds like ancient history. That was only a few years ago. If you think about life without search engines, it sounds like very ancient history and that was only a decade ago.

      The pace of change is accelerating and the progression is exponential. We are actually doubling the power of these technologies now in less than a year. Computers today are a billion times more powerful per dollar than when I was a student [in the 1970's], and we'll do it again in the next 25 years. Facebook is a great example of that — a whole new paradigm of connecting people that now puts together 250 million people in just a few years' time.

      Your latest book, "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" is a guide to how medicine and technology will allow people to extend their life expectancies and slow down the aging process. Can you expand on that?
      I just mentioned the exponential growth of information technology and the important point is that it's not just computerized devices or social networks. Health and medicine has just become information technology. They now have the genome, which is the software of life. We have means of changing our genes. We can design and test biological progresses on computers.

      We made progress in the linear manner. That's been significant as we had life expectancy of 23 years a thousand years ago, 37 years in 1800 to pushing 80 years today. Now that health and medicine is an information technology, the power of these technologies double every year. These technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years. This increase in our life expectancy is going to go into high gear very soon.

      Is Facebook helping people live longer?
      Facebook is enabling us to share knowledge and achieve the wisdom of crowds. By being able to harness the wisdom of 250 million people, now on Facebook, we can ferret out the truth of what's going in the world very quickly. We can see this in recent political events. From a practical perspective, it enables somebody with a new idea or new insight to share that, for it to spread virally through these kinds of knowledge-sharing sites.

      It really does foster freedom and democracy, and not just on the political level but even things like health and medicine. Patients are going to their doctor's office, armed with the latest knowledge. By being part of the community of people who have their condition, they'll be more knowledgeable than the doctor. [This] changes the nature of the relationship.

      You're most well known for optical character recognition. With more and more user generated content online, do you think all the information on the Web will one day be available in speech form?
      We are learning more and more about the human brain, and we are able to transform the information in one modality to another by recognizing patterns. I realized at a fairly young age [that] the heart of human intelligence was pattern recognition, and that's now being confirmed by neurology and brain reverse engineering. Even with the state of the art today, these technologies are still not as good as human pattern recognition, but that gap is gradually closing. With information technology growing exponentially, the ability to change information from one form to another — particularly those forms that allow us to search for it and intelligently use that information out on the Web — are fundamental to ongoing progress.

      What are the most interesting inventions you've come across recently, and what areas would you like to see more focus and development?
      Mobile phones. The fact that half of the world's population has access to these devices that allow them to access all of human knowledge in a few keystrokes, to actually see it happen is amazing to me. The "have-have not divide" is dissolving. Fifteen years ago, only a wealthy person could have a mobile phone, and they didn't work very well. Today, 3 billion of them are out there and they are becoming increasingly intelligent.

      Creative applications. I am impressed with the number of things we can increasingly do on these tiny little devices, cell phones. They do thousands of things. It's 50,000 apps for the iPhone. We have a cell phone that can capture print in 15 languages, speak it out loud and have synchronized highlighting, and translate from one language to another.

      There are early prototypes of where I think computing is going. To make devices smaller and smaller, they are more and more convenient, but we actually don't want to look at a tiny screen. We'd like to actually have full immersion screens that we sort of live in. We are going to put these devices in our eyeglasses. We can just create a virtual screen that's large and hovering in air that's high resolution. Electronics will be just woven in your clothes or your belt buckle. The display will be augmented reality, and we'll be online all the time.

      You've won a number of awards and honors for innovation and have even been inducted into the U.S. Patent Office National Inventor's Hall of Fame. What advice do you have for aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs?
      Track technology trends. When it comes to the key measures of information technology, they are markedly predictable despite the common wisdom that you can't predict the future. I got into technology forecasting because I realized that timing was critical to being an inventor. If Facebook had been started 10 years ago rather than five years ago, it wouldn't have worked. Plan your project for the world that will exist, two, three, four years in the future when your technology is perfected and narrowed into the marketplace, because that's the world that you'll be interacting with.


      Kathleen, an associate on the communications team, is taking the fast lane to the future.
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    • Topics: Connecting with...
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    • Connecting with... BJ Fogg and Linda Fogg Phillips: The Facebook Parenting Duo
      by Kathy H. Chan on Monday, July 6, 2009 at 11:22am
      BJ Fogg and Linda Fogg Phillips
      At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people — from experts in their field, academics and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our new series titled "Connecting with...." I recently had the opportunity to speak with BJ Fogg and Linda Fogg Phillips, the creators of "Facebook for Parents," an experimental course that was offered at Stanford University. Read the next blog post in this series here.


      How did you... come up with the idea for the "Facebook for Parents" class that was recently offered at Stanford University?
      Linda: I have eight children, seven of whom are old enough to have a Facebook account and do. I saw that among parents there wasn't a lot of comfort and knowledge about Facebook and how it functioned. We tried to remove the fear from parents around Facebook and social networking.

      If you could tell parents one thing about Facebook, what would it be?
      BJ: If you're not on Facebook yet, you don't have to join. You don't have to drive cars or have a mobile phone either, but it's part of being in the modern world. If you choose not to be on Facebook, you're choosing to be left behind. That's too bad.

      What was the biggest take-away for parents who were in the class?
      Linda: That Facebook actually can be a great parenting tool that enables parents to be aware of their children and what's going on in their world. It allows further modes of communication within a family, even among people living under the same roof, as well as those that aren't. Facebook also helps parents teach life skills that are outlined on our website.

      BJ: The biggest surprise was the shift from anxiety to opportunity. Most parents joined the class because they were concerned about privacy or their kids putting up photos that would stop them from getting into college. By the end of the class, I think they saw the opportunity of this great new world that their kids were involved in. They connected with old friends and saw the charms of Facebook.

      We've heard that some kids are uncomfortable "friending" their parents on the site.
      Linda: I am friends with each of my children. The reaction was mixed. I found that it depended on the age and maturity level of my child and to some degree, the relationship I have with that particular child. I will admit that one of my daughters got mad at me and blocked me for a period of time, but then we worked out our differences and she added me back as a friend.

      Are you friends with your kids' friends, as well?
      Linda: Yes, quite a few of them. It really helps bridge the gap as far as communication and for me to be comfortable with their friends, too. I don't request them, they request me. I'm not going to intrude on their lives.

      Any other ground rules?
      Linda: Depends on the child. That's also what we talked about with the parents in our class. If your child doesn't want to "friend" you, don't worry about it. We found that the No. 1 reason most kids don't want their parents to be their friend on Facebook is that they're afraid their parents will embarrass them — more so than being exposed and letting parents know what they're doing.

      BJ: In some cases, that means, "Don't ever post on my wall," and in almost all cases, it means, "Don't post baby photos of me naked in the tub and tag me." The more the parents in our class learned about Facebook, the more their kids seemed to relax.

      Linda: I try to respect my kids' space, but at the same time, I try to be a responsible parent who is involved in their lives. In turn, they actually enjoy interacting with me on Facebook.

      How else did the parents in your class evolve?
      Linda: Parents would go home after class and know more than some of their kids about Facebook. It became a mutual teaching tool where the kids would teach the parents something, and in turn, their parents would say, "Oh, look at what we just learned." Parents would gain respect from their kids, "Mom's not such a dummy on this, maybe she does know something." Eventually, the kids realized their parents weren't on Facebook to spy on them. It was a huge bridge to communication and building relationships within families.

      Do you think parents being on the site is influencing how their kids behave?
      Linda: It's helped kids realize that there are other eyes on them besides just their friends. They realize it's more of a public venue than so many think it is. It's sort of a self-regulating, self-checking mechanism, which isn't bad. We all need to have that.

      BJ: The fact that kids are changing their privacy settings to stop their parents from seeing photos also means that they could do that more generally. It just means they are paying more attention and being more thoughtful about the implications of their status updates photos, notes — whatever they're doing.

      When's the next installment of your class?
      BJ: We will teach this again, but we know that not everyone can come to Silicon Valley. So we're looking at ways of helping parents get going with Facebook in a way that scales for anyone in the world. Stay tuned to facebookforparents.org. Sign up for our mailing list and our free newsletter.


      Kathy, Facebook's resident blogger, is thankful that her parents haven't posted any embarrassing baby photos of her on Facebook.


      Tip: Share your family information on Facebook through the Information tab on your profile. You can list your immediate family members or even link to their profiles if they are on Facebook.
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    • Topics: Parents, Connecting with...
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