Daily Dose of Pras

I recently met Danah Boyd at a Microsoft Research event called TechFest (you can watch some of the coverage of cool new gadgets here). She was giving a talk titled “Social Media is here to stay. Now What?” Rather than just regurgitating what she said, I thought I’d tell you about how her thoughts struck me. What neurons (mis)fired as a result. And basically what her ideas knocking around inside my head for a few days have produced.

First off, I love what she does. She’s a Cal alum with a Ph.D from Berkeley’s School of Information, who studies new media and is currently a Microsoft Researcher at their New England campus.  I love the idea of being able to spend your days actually researching social media, group interaction, and the changes happening in how we interact as a result of technology. I’m a mere casual observer in comparison, and perhaps I wouldn’t love trudging through the data, but I love building models for how things work and interact.

She also had a great presentation style. For an academic, she’s very down to earth. I felt like we could go have a cup of coffee no problem. I also felt like she had an elegance and style to her presentation - the use of Flikr photos to liven-up the presentation - calling them “three acts” instead of “bullets,” “buckets,” or some other mundane list metaphor. Finally - I loved the way she closed. Not the usual “Q&A” end-slide, but the simple words that perhaps all of us should live by: “question everything.” It has an elegant double-meaning here - telling her audience that she is humble and encourages - expects - debate, criticism, and opposing ideas.

I loved the way she laid-out the history of social networking. I was amazed at how many of the conclusions she came to parallelled my own two-parter Treatise on the History of the Wall. As a digital native I take it’s evolution for granted - I lived it - but from her perspective she was able to live it but also analyze it while it was happening - and reached some fascinating conclusions.

For example, she painted a picture of the death of Friendster at the hands of it’s own harsh policies - it apparently evicted two highly-connected groups of people - fakesters & bands - who fled - taking their social graphs with them - and found refuge on MySpace. I loved that she compared the cultures of Facebook & MySpace and came to the same conclusions as me.

I also loved that she analyzed the differences between Twitter & Facebook - pointing out something I hadn’t been fully cognizant of - that Twitter has pickup among adults, while Facebook has traction with youth, and that youth will never stay on a network frequented by parents - and that this - not innovation around new features - is the biggest challenge Facebook will face as it continues to grow. Here’s the argument: Essentially, Facebook for people who were born digital represents a way for them to connect in the present. However, for the growing number of parents on facebook, it represents a way to connect with their past, to “show their old highschool friends how cool they’ve become.” Twitter, because of it’s traction among the media and integration into media outlets like CNN.com, has had much more success among adults.

Danah Boyd also points out that after the death of Friendster, the digerati abandoned social networking, and instead spent their time on media-sharing sites - hence the popularity of Flikr among grown-ups - whereas Flikr has almost no users under 25 - because we use Facebook. Similarly, the digerati picked-up Twitter, and, indeed, Twitter is a darling among tech blogs like TechCrunch, which is constantly defending it’s heavy coverage of all things Twitter. Moreover, the content is different. Facebook for youth is about what we’re currently doing. Pictures. Music. Movies. Partying. Nonsense. Because of who is on Twitter - political junkies and tech junkies - that’s not where youth want to spend their time. In fact, Danah Boyd suggests that youth find the whole concept of Twitter “kinda stupid.” All super-fascinating to me, and in-line with my earlier entry “If These Walls Could Talk.”

The challenge Danah outlines at the end of her talk is one around how we - the users - will deal with the changes that result from social media. The nexus of these changes will be how we deal with our information - what we’re doing - being accessible forever, by anyone, searchable, and out-of-context. As friends today often joke: thanks to Facebook, we’ll never be able to run for president. There’s too much dirt out there.

Prasid here. This is a guest post by Erik Tomas Batallones, a Microsoft Student Partner at Fordham University. It’s also a cross-post from my blog over on www.Microsoft.com/Student. We recently asked our Student Partners to write about how Microsoft fits into a student’s life. I promised to showcase the winning blog entries as guest posts here. Once all the blog entries were submitted, we had our students vote for their favorite entry. Erik here won first place. You can check out Erik’s blog here.

Empowered by Technology

“I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.” – Bill Gates

-Erik

I was brought up with a love for singing. It started with my mother, then elementary school music class, then a boys choir in 6th grade, which gave me my first shot at the spotlight when I performed with 3 other guys in front of our whole school for Earth Day. Then I moved to Texas, where they take their gospel music very seriously, and I spent the next seven years singing everything from Beethoven to Broadway. I had solos in the big shows, I was in the show-choir that performed around the community, I was one of 5 guys selected to be in a musical my senior year, and every year for six years straight I competed to get into the All-Region choir, and aced my competitive solo recitals. And then I just stopped.

It’s now been another seven years, and besides the shower and the street corner, drunk, I don’t sing at all. I took an interest in music, I turned that interest into a passion, and then I turned that passion into something noteworthy - into an asset I could put on a resume, talk about, and showcase. And then I just stopped.

Here at Microsoft I have cultivated my passion for technology. But when I noticed it was happening, I realized I have always had an interest, I have always been drawn to technology, but I somehow never thought to take that interest, and develop it into a passion, and then into an asset. I was the kid who made stop-motion animation movies using PowerPoint in highschool. I was the kid who took two years of AP Computer Science, aced the AP Test, and never took another programming class again. In retrospect, I threw away an interest, that was beginning to bloom into a passion, that could have become an asset, rather than embracing it. And it wasn’t until I came to Microsoft that I rediscovered it, and cultivated ilt it into a passion.

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