My two previous posts described Gladwell’s influencers, and posited that while family members make a big impact on our purchasing decisions, it was still worth our while to find these influencers. As for Duncan Watts’ theory—that some people have a disproportionate impact, but that it’s impossible to identify those people in advance—well, that’s a radical and fascinating perspective.

Gladwell’s position (as reported here) that we’re a young field, and we’re explaining small pieces of the variability in influence, is exceptionally similar to the thoughts that I expressed in my earlier blog post. Watts’ simulations are interesting, but none of them caused people to actually act, by purchasing something or going to a movie or voting for a candidate. Perhaps it takes a real-world influencer to make someone act on a preference—to bridge the gap between attitude and behavior. Connectors, Salesmen and Mavens are all action-oriented beings: their power comes not in their attitudes, but in their abilities to turn their attitudes into action, whether that action is social connection, market mastery, or persuasion.

In summary, influencers may not play the role that marketers have expected them to play, but they’re still worth finding. Even if Watts is correct—if social phenomena spread more randomly than anything—we’re still not wasting our time, as these people can still help spread trends once people are willing to accept them, and might also be able to guide general trends towards specific products or services. If he’s wrong, and influencers are still the kindling for wildfire-like spreads of information or action, then we don’t have to stop searching for them merely because many of them celebrate holidays with us.

(note: the image here is a representation of 30,000 random numbers from an interesting post on codinghorror.com)

Last October, Google launched an attack against the much vaunted Facebook platform by promising to be even more open with its own OpenSocial. It had also managed to assemble an impressive line-up of launch partners including MySpace. For a while it seemed as if the world had split into two camps — Facebook and the rest of the world. It seemed as if yet again, Google had pulled the rug under someone with its stellar execution and superior technology. Or had it?

Fast forward just a few months later to Spring 2008. Pretty much every one of the launch partners is announcing its own proprietary extensions to the standard. It seems OpenSocial is fast becoming the lowest common denominator — a spot it shares with many such poorly executed standardization efforts. Clearly there is huge consumer benefit if there are open standards in this space. A walled garden is not the right model. But, as OpenSocial partners and application developers (including us) quickly discovered, each of these networks caters to a different user base and serves different needs — from the attention-challenged MySpace to the staid LinkedIn. So, in practice, the promise of write-once, run-anywhere will not be possible with OpenSocial. As an application developer, I am forced to design my MySpace application differently from my LinkedIn application.

A better model that is emerging is exemplified by applications such as LivingSocial, Chirp and ours (See a sneak peek below). Each of these applications is offering a valuable service and does not require you to be logged into the various Social Networks. You get to share your information and get updates from friends no matter where you are — just like you IM with friends in AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber or MSN using either a multi-protocol chat client or through gateways that allow you communicate with friends elsewhere. Users will not remain stuck in a walled garden and will cruise wherever they want to, however they want to. Then, and only then, should Open and Social be mentioned together.

“We barely had TV when I was growing up.”
“Really? So you must have been on the internet all the time then…”

This was just one of the highlights from our West Coast trip last week. Though we’re deep in developing our social web applications (coming real soon!), a colleague and I took a quick detour last week to go to the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego.

It was a great opportunity to meet and learn from a number of the leading players in the social networking space: Facebook, MySpace, Google (Open Social), application builders and users, and social ad networks, among others.

Forrester’s Charlene Li had one of the more interesting talks. She started things off with a simple concept: “Social networks will be like air.”

They’re becoming so commonplace (if you have kids, is Webkinz not your top bookmark?) that they’re just part of the environment…nothing special. Heat, food, Facebook?

Coming down the road in the not too distant future she sees data portability and then ubiquitous social networks emerging. But what do people do on social networks today? Certainly a big chunk is collecting ‘friends’ and wasting time playing lots of basic, simplistic games. The novelty of the plethora of available applications is still new, and there’s certainly lots of interest based simply on these applications’ existence, rather than any compelling value or true insight being shared. But I thing we can all agree we’re in the early innings of this game.

One of Charlene’s recommendations was to “compete on creating the most compelling social media experience, not social graph lock-in.” We couldn’t agree more. Our social web applications will leverage your existing social graph, wherever it is, while adding value to your time online and presenting opportunities for you off-line. Walled gardens, silos, whatever you call it - that just doesn’t fly anymore.

She added that you need to “develop social applications that have meaning.” Exactly. The voracious appetite for the volume of simplistic Facebook and other networks’ applications will likely wear thin and users will instead focus on a few solid applications that provide a real value-add to their social networking (whether on-line or off-).

This was good to hear. Compelling experience and apps with meaning. Sounds like a plan.

The new year has brought a lot of excitement here at Signal Patterns. In addition to moving to new, larger digs to support our growing team, we’ve launched a new website. But don’t get too comfortable w/it just yet!

Over the last year, we’ve spent quite a bit of time on the engineering and design front, based on our research team’s work and all the volunteers who’ve helped us. So shortly, we’ll be launching a major self-discovery and social networking product across our site that we believe you’ll find quite compelling and innovative. You’ll be able to learn a lot more about yourself but also use that information to engage with your existing friends as well as develop new ones.

In the interim, we invite you to sign up on our Facebook page to become part of the Signal Patterns community.

And for those who’d like to participate in our research and help beta test our upcoming products, please sign up on our contact list.

Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective [dating] partners that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases…. It amused us at the time… But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently…

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

For Rob, Dick, and Barry music was everything. From the moment they woke up to the second they fell asleep they listened to music, thought about it, and talked about it. Thus, it is no surprise why they supposed that a questionnaire asking about such things as music preferences would highlight valuable information about the character of a person. As it turns out, music aficionados are not the only ones who hold this belief. In fact, a rapidly growing body of research on folk theories of music reveals that many people believe music reflects important aspects of their personalities and the personalities of others.

The idea that the type of music people listen to can reveal important information about their personalities appears justified. Several empirical studies in music psychology have identified connections between the styles of music people like listening to and a range of personality traits. For example, die-hard rock and metal fans tend to have high scores on measures of sensation seeking. This means that people who enjoy “living on the edge”—who engage in risky and sometimes life threatening recreational activities—also enjoy listening to intense and somewhat rebellious styles of music. People who love listening to jazz and classical music tend to have high scores on measures of open mindedness, tolerance for ambiguity, and need for cognition. This means that people who enjoy engaging in abstract thought and who take pleasure in “wild flights of fancy” tend to listen to music that may, in some respects, be regarded as vague, complex, and intellectual. Fans of rap and dance music tend to have high scores on measures of Extraversion and social dominance. This means that people who enjoy being around others and who place a lot of importance on social status enjoy listening to energetic music, music they we might say encourages extraverted behavior.

Given that there are connections between the styles of music people listen to and their personalities, it is reasonable to suppose that people with similar music preferences may be more likely to get along and enjoy happy relationships than people with radically different preferences for music.

In a recent study concerned with music preferences among adolescents, a team of researchers from the Netherlands found that close friends were more likely to share similar preferences for music than were less intimate friends. Moreover, friends with the most similar music preferences were more likely to remain friends three years later than were friends with less similar music preferences.

Another study concerned with the links between music preferences and relationship satisfaction focused on music-preference similarity among university roommates living in the US. The roommates who participated in the study completed several surveys, including a personality questionnaire, a music preference measure, and a few questions about how much they enjoyed living with their roommate and whether they would choose to live with them the following year. The results showed that roommates with similar personalities were no more likely to enjoy their living arrangement than were roommates with different personalities. However, roommates with similar music preferences enjoyed more pleasant and satisfying relationships and reported a stronger desire to continue living together than did roommates with different music preferences. Closer inspection of the results indicated that roommates with similar preferences for rap and dance music, and similar preferences for classical and jazz music were the most likely to enjoy their living situations. Furthermore, students tended to segregate themselves into dorms with other students that tended to match their music preferences than any of the other characteristics measured in the study.

Why do people with similar music preferences enjoy such happy and satisfying relationships? Based on research documenting connections between music preferences and personality, we know that the styles of music people listen to are related to their values, political views, and leisure preferences. That is, people who like the same music are more likely to have similar attitudes about religion and politics and they’re more likely to spend their time pursuing similar interests: J.D. Salinger or Danielle Steel? MTV or HGTV? Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh? People who like listening to the same music will agree more often about a range of things than will people whose record collections disagree violently. With less tension, there is more harmony. 

Is there ever a bad time for Champagne and cake? If so, it’s definitely not late December. Here are a few pictures from our “company new year’s toast”. We are moving to new offices in a couple of weeks, so there is already a little bit of nostalgia here.

Right now we are sharing a second floor with a life coach, and the pictures were taken in the room that used to be the waiting room, so I guess it has life-coach kind of colors…

Cheers!

By the time I first spoke to Ran Zilca, he already had hundreds of social-science research years at his disposal. I mean, Lew Goldberg was probably in textbooks that my parents used in college (and will be in textbooks that my grandkids use, too). Although Jason Rentfrow came on the scene about a half-century later, he’d made his mark with some terrific articles; I was amazed at how he investigated complex real-world behaviors while remaining deeply rooted in theory. And Dan Levitin seemed to pick up his Ph.D. in neuroscience in between his lives as a musician, author, producer, and techie. So I was walking into an all-star team of psychologists.

This was quite a contrast to the situation at my old company, where I was the chief psychologist behind personalDNA. There, I was the social scientist. Whatever I said about the readiness of a test, the accuracy of feedback, or the presentation of information was accepted, because while what the programmers did was a mystery to me, what I did was just as much a mystery to them. Here, everyone is a scientist. We don’t all run around in lab coats, holding test tubes up to the light (at least not on Thursdays, when I’m typically in the office), but at the same time, we do like to make graphs, run analyses, quantify things that seem abstract, and corroborate our assumptions. And if you’re a scientist, all of these things seem like great fun.

Applying these tools to human behavior is endlessly fascinating to me. When I teach statistics, I get really excited when I present social science as a concerted effort to explain what people do. Anyone can describe the behavior of others on a case-by-case basis, but we need statistics to explain that behavior systematically, and to make the most accurate predictions of other behaviors. Social psychology is really only about 125 years old, so we’re really just getting the hang of finding causes of behavior and thought. When I think of all of the variability in people’s actions and cognitions, and how little of it we understand, I can’t help but get excited about discovering just a little more of what motivates, elates, frightens, changes, moves, hurts, satisfies, and generally affects people. I’d be terrified if we could ever explain or predict all of human behavior, but for now, I get excited by exploring bits + pieces of it.

And that’s what drew me to signalpatterns. Somewhere in what people express is some sign, some signal, that indicates a lot more about them than we can notice at first blush. And detecting those signals– and relating them to other signals, from other people– can help people gain insight into themselves. Ran, and the crew he’s assembled, had some interesting ways of fostering this process, so when he asked me to sign on, I was thrilled. So here’s to detecting signals, and making a small dent in understanding who we really are.

-David

Don’t we all remember that Friday when OpenSocial was announced. People sat and watched the hour-long campfire 1 video, held meetings, made calls, sought further input… When the smoke cleared it was certain that this is going to be big and important - some day…

The business practice of engaging with a small set of partners and announcing an alliance is a legitimate one. However, an alliance is not a consortium, and it has little to do with standards and with being open. In fact, a standard is agreement among competitors.

For OpenSocial to be open, it should be open with “write permissions” not “read only”. Back in the day when I was still a speech-processing research guy at IBM labs I participated in IETF and W3C standardization activities. What I’ve experienced is companies opening up their internal APIs or technology, and then having to go through revisions of it for their competition before a widely accepted (and then hopefully adopted) outcome is finally reached.

We all love Google, and for good reasons. They changed great and fundamental things about the web, and they introduced a new standard of web ethics and practices - Google is king. OpenSocial is clearly a significant and important development towards a more open web, but the way the OpenSocial move was carried out is not in line with Google’s do good spirit.

I guess it can’t go unexplained, so here are a few words about the name Socialito…

The first time I ever got on a plane was on a business trip with a colleague to Sunnyvale, CA. I was in my twenties and had pretty high expectations for joining the jet set. Darn sure though, after sitting tight for 18 hours in transatlantic coach the magic faded somewhat. I arrive at SFO in pretty poor physical and mental shape, swearing that I will never fly again. But this is when things start changing.

As we limp to the rental car parking lot, my pal and I realize we got upgraded to a sparkling new Buick LeSabre – a true American boat. Being the two idiot tourists that we were, we stand there for 15 minutes taking snapshots of our hot new ride, including bold pictures under the hood and in the trunk. Eventually, we head out of the airport, starving to see the closest American icon we know about: the Golden Gate Bridge. I guess if it’s a part of your daily commute it stops being exciting, but for a first-time tourist the bridge was quite something. Driving in mid air high above the bay and checking it out from bird’s eye view, I tell you, it was a treat. Then, right after the bridge we take the first exit to Sausalito, our first spot on US soil outside an airport.

I return to Sausalito every time I’m in the bay area, and it always reminds me of this first day. So, what’s in a name anyway… It’s about the web becoming social, and how Sausalito, for me, is a new path in a hot new ride.