Digigen & The TinMan

4Chan’s Moot (Christopher Poole) and Mark Zuckerberg of some social network called Facebook, seem to have very differing opinions on internet identity. One is in the anonymity camp (I won’t say who to make sure he remains anonymous) the other is in the open identity camp. Both are right but I think there is an optional middle ground.

Mark Zuckerberg is arguing that Facebook log-ins should become the defacto identifier for the internet user. Your pass to the internet without having to log-in or remember too many log-ins. I tend to use the handle mattbambow everywhere, so Zuckerberg seems to be right. For areas where I want to identify myself and am happy to be called out on things I say, I always use mattbambow and generally log in through Facebook Connect, enabling me to comment quickly and easily.

As we pointed out yesterday and as Christopher Poole pointed out in a speech at SXSW, the openess of the Internet means these comments can be seen and interpreted in anyway the reader wants them to be. You might be reading this thinking what an idiot, or better yet, what a genius. I am hoping the latter. What Poole, Moot, Chris, argues is that in his site, 4Chan, people interact more freely because of their anonymity. Only the brave reveal their true identity in 4Chan. He says that the ability to do this leads to more creativity, people experimenting, and playing.

I think both these arguments are essentially right, but how about this for an alternative. I log-in with my Facebook account, meaning the site has all the information from me that it needs, it reduces spamming and is more secure for the site. However, once logged in I can choose to act anonymously. That way I get to be both creative and connected at the same time.

For many, there is a desperation for a “Like”. As one of the planners said here the other day, if someone asked you “do you like me?” in every single conversation, you would probably hit them or think they were a bit weird. 2010 has certainly be the year of the “Like” and fortunately, in 2011 sensible people will be trying to put a value on what this actually means.

In a few conversations I have had, people talk about loyalty when they talk about a “Like”, some even talk about “intent to purchase”. Alot of these people do not know what they are talking about. Loyalty to a brand cannot be defined as a “Like” especially when these people that like the page “believe this “loyalty” should be rewarded with discounts and vouchers”. Loyalty has never been defined by people looking for a great deal, because when this great deal goes… so does the user.

A “Like” for me is nothing more than an intent to participate. It is not a participation itself, it is an intent to participate if you the brand, the product, give me a genuine reason to participate further. Yes, the “Like” opens up a socialCRM channel for brands, but why is this valuable if these people are not actively participating in your community. So for me, brands should be thinking about how we convert an intent to participate to actual participation (commenting, liking content, responding, uploading, activating, shooting). When they have nailed this, then surely the next step is understanding actual value of a participating like and actual value of a non-participating like.

After all, this is what it looks like when someone really does “Like” your brand

I’d be interested in hearing how your brands and businesses value the “Like”. Respond in the comments below.

This is a great bit of work from a guy called Paul Butler, who spent time trying to figure out how to visualise friendships across Facebook. It took alot of work but by using some open source technology Paul developed a stunning picture.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

Link here to the full story.