None of these social sharing systems do a very good job of rewarding the initial curator. Who was the first of my friends to watch the video that later went viral? Which person I follow was first to tweet out the link to that amazing blog post? Who listened to that cool band before they went big time?
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Flickr was an early site that let you identify relationships with fine grained controls—a person could be marked as family but not a friend, for example—instead of a binary friend/not friend relationship. You can mark your photos “private” and allow no one else to see them at all, or identify just one or two trusted friends who may view them. Or you can just share with friends, or family. Those granular controls encouraged sharing, and commenting, and interaction. What we are describing here, of course, is social networking.
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researchers found that the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating food, getting money or having sex.
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The researchers found that the brain regions associated with reward — the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA) — were strongly engaged when people were talking about themselves, and less engaged when they were talking about someone else.
— Facebook, Twitter, other social media are brain candy, study says
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Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+
Online social networks have become indispensable tools for information sharing, but existing ‘all-or-nothing’ models for sharing have made it difficult for users to target information to specific parts of their networks. In this paper, we study Google+, which enables users to selectively share content with specific ‘Circles’ of people. Through a combination of log analysis with surveys and interviews, we investigate how active users organize and select audiences for shared content. We find that these users frequently engaged in selective sharing, creating circles to manage content across particular life facets, ties of varying strength, and interest-based groups. Motivations to share spanned personal and informational reasons, and users frequently weighed ‘limiting’ factors (e.g. privacy, relevance, and social norms) against the desire to reach a large audience. Our work identifies implications for the design of selective sharing mechanisms in social networks.
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Another design goal for Tumblr is the idea of taking away the intimidation of blogging — you know, the dreaded confrontation of an empty page. This is achieved with with smaller text fields and even a range of non-text options. “We don’t want to make you feel like you need to write three paragraphs and post a photo,” he says. “You can just post a photo.
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“co-rumination” = persisting in negative thoughts and feelings with other people.
while social sharing could be shown to build relationship quality and reduce stress, both rumination (conducting the process of co-rumination on your own) and co-rumination were shown to drive friends away.
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Pinterest is conducive to sharing. There’s a very low barrier to sharing [pins] with everyone who is following you.
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80 percent of all pins are re-pins, meaning that an overwhelming majority of content shared on site is recycled between users. […] For comparison, just 1.4 percent of tweets were retweets at a similar time in Twitter’s history— Pinterest keeps and engages members better than Twitter, data shows
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Make a prototype.
What stories will it create?
How might it show who you are?
How might it provide feedback?
What will the privacy defaults be? -
Because Path is such a trusted, private network it turns out people are more willing—not even more willing, they actually *like* sharing very personal information, health stuff… what Nike+ is doing is cool, Fitbit’s cool, Withings is cool. There’s a lot of different personal health related gadgets. If you look at what’s going on with companies like Nest, there’s a lot of sensors that are kind of getting all over the place. So it seems that that trend is going to continue and multiply very quickly. And the passive inclusion of that in your Path is very important to us… what that requires though is a *trusted* network.
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People are more likely to share information from their strong ties, but because of their abundance, weak ties are primarily responsible for the majority of information spread on Facebook… a majority of influence can be generated by weak ties, even if strong ties are individually more influential.
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With Facebook users now able to make posts to previous dates — as far back even as their birth — there is an opportunity for developers to build apps that facilitate this ‘past-tense sharing.’
— Open Graph issues inhibit past-tense sharing, force apps to make trade-offs
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social network users are sharing less online because they don’t have the ability to control who sees what they share
— Posterous Releases First Annual Report on State of Online Private Sharing
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The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than an “audience”, since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.
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In research with teens across multiple regions, similar patterns emerged. People’s real world social networks consisted of 4-6 groups of up to 10 people. People explained it was painful to try and mix these groups. Even online, most status updates have an intended audience but they usually go out to everybody.
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Design for the system not for the individual
• It’s not about any specific user, it is about the network
• Facebook always get asked for a “recent visitors to profile” feature. But this feature doesn’t just go out to one person, it goes out to the Facebook system and may negatively impact sharing.
