Monthly Archives: February 2009

Twitter vs. the Dunbar Number, and the Rise of Weak Ties

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There’s a great post in The Economist about Social Networks that has a nice little review of the Dunbar Number. The Dunbar Number is a number that social network theorists have been tossing around for a long time that refers to the maximum number of people that an individual can maintain (meaning: interact with at a regular enough interval to maintain a stable relationship) at a given time in his or her social network.  It is commonly believed to around 150. It appears over and over again in social network research. Continue reading →

Scobleizer, Twitter Onset Addiction, and Blogging’s Rebirth

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Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) posted a new blog post (not a tweet, mind you) this morning about how he’s going to be returning to blogging more. The post is in response to the idea being circulated out there that the death of A-list blogging is imminent. Scoble credits his own personal upcoming return to long-form blogging in no small part to his waning obsession with Twitter (read: 18,007 updates at time of post); in his own words, he says “I am starting to have longer thoughts again.” I think we can all celebrate Scoble’s emergence from his bout with Twitter Onset Addiction. Continue reading →

Why You Should Tweet, A Conversation I’m Sick Of

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“I’m finding that social media is so much easier to ‘do’ than to explain.”
- Twitter: @ittybitties

This is a quote from a college student in one of Brad King‘s (@brad_king) Media Informatics courses at Northern Kentucky University (just outside of Cincinnati – my own home town). And this is the first thing I thought about when I started working on a post about the conversation I’m sick of having: “Why should I use Twitter, and how would using Twitter help me?” I have three problems in trying to engage in this conversation effectively…

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Social Partitions, Honesty, and the New Social Media

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More open and honest relationships with the entirety of our social network are coming soon whether we like it or not.

Things are changing. The speed of evolution of communication technologies is moving at an unreal pace when viewed in a historical perspective. But it’s like the physics experiment of shooting a projectile straight up from a moving cart (the incomparable Julius Sumner Miller – skip to 7 minutes), or jumping in a moving airplane. These leaps and bounds are taken more or less in stride because, from our perspective, we’re standing still as this system we’re a part of is hurtling from one paradigm to the next. Continue reading →