Archive for March 5th, 2008

WordPress Enters the Social Networking Ring


Via TechCrunch (”WordPress: The Social Network“):

“Can WordPress become the basis of a social network? Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg hinted today on his blog that WordPress might go in a more social direction. He announced a new hire, Andy Peatling, the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project.”

This is a really interesting concept that I plan on investigating further when time permits. From the sound of things access to BuddyPress has also been temporarily disabled, though TechCrunch has indicated there are alternative means of acquiring the code via cached copies on Google servers and Google Code.

Perhaps not surprisingly people are wondering out loud why on Earth we need yet another social network when there are seemingly more of them now than you can possibly use. However Wordpress founder, Matt Mullenweg, is quick to point out the circumstances of this development are an entirely different scenario:

“The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards. We invest countless hours giving our data to networks like MySpace, essentially sharecropping on their land for the privilege of being able to connect to our friends. It’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.”

When you use MySpace or Facebook, your information is stored on somebody else’s servers, rely on a foreign set of racks and disaster recovery equipment, lay within the shadow of another organisation’s security umbrella, and are framed within an established set of business rules and policy that you can only agree or disagree with. Ultimately you have minimal control over anything.

WordPress and BuddyPress are open source, and free. And as the saying goes: “This is free as in freedom and free as in beer.” The code is openly available to anyone who opts to download and tinker with it. You don’t need to know what you’re doing, or even have your own server; but if you do you can avail yourself to a tremendous amount of power and flexibility in use.

Free as in freedom refers to the premise that the all program code is available under a public license. This public license permits developers to download, install and change the code however they see fit, so long as the result adheres to and is released under a similar license. This has powerful implications, because you can effectively take a pre-existing, fully functional and time-tested application and customise it to serve your own purposes.

Free as in beer refers to the price: Free. No charge. No fees. Nothing. You download it, you use it and the only financial investment required is the hardware it runs on, the network traffic to deliver the commands and data, and the human resources to support it. There are no fees or hidden costs associated with use of the software whatsoever.

It should also be said that open source software is not created in a vacuum. It is supported by a vibrant, passionate and participatory community of users and developers. This means that an incredible amount of user and technical support exists despite there being no formalised agreements in the way there are with proprietary software. In fact my experience has been that the support is more comprehensive, the response time to questions is faster, and the overall experience is far more positive. This too costs you nothing.

That being said though many companies do exist that cater to businesses that need technical support for open source software and are willing to pay. The point is that avenues exist if you would prefer the free route.

What I will be interested in seeing is how the WordPress/BuddyPress framework stacks up against other highly popular open source social networking programs like Drupal and Elgg. Drupal for example is used by some exceptionally high-profile companies and major music labels. This marks a tremendous victory for open source in its perception and profile in the eyes of an ever so skeptical proprietary-minded public.

Given WordPress’s status as pseudo-market leader in blogging platforms, I see many good things coming out of BuddyPress’s acquisition.

References:

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

open source, social networks No Comments

Thoughts on the coverage of Swinburne Uni’s Blogging Study


Following on my post last night regarding the ABC News Online article on blogging being good for your social life, I’ve just finished reading the research study itself and would like to add a few parting comments and thoughts.

I found the study itself to be quite interesting and have no issues with the methodology used, nor the way the data analysis was presented. My concern is the way the study is being reported in the media and by bloggers. The coverage has been far too superficial and tends to omit important aspects of the study and data set, and therefore leaves room for false assumptions and over-generalised conclusions.

Important Points:

According to the study:

“The aim of the current study was to survey new users to the social networking Web site Myspace.com, comparing those who intended to blog with those who did not intend to do so on several psychosocial variables. Myspace.com was chosen over blog-specific Web sites in order to obtain a comparative sample of non-bloggers in addition to intending bloggers. Myspace.com has a large volume of new users (23,000 daily at the time of publication), and all users have the option of blogging with ease.”

First of all, the age demographic of MySpace users is quite narrow and specific and not representative of the aggregate of users of social software and particularly the Internet. Reports have placed MySpace’s demographic roughly in the 18 to 24 year old range, which corresponds to the developmental period between adolescence and adulthood in which individuals are still solidifying a sense of self, personality, personal identity, as well as the wider question of their purpose and place in the world.

It is an incredibly awkward period highlighted by psychological and emotional change, which is much more extreme relative to other age demographics.

The fact the entire research sample came from MySpace, and has a mean age of 24.5 years (median of 23.5 years for males; 25.8 for females), needs to be emphasized because the same study performed on an older demographic would probably yield entirely different results.

Furthermore, in their association with the online community, users of MySpace have already identified themselves as individuals who are attracted to social networking tools. So despite the fact only a percentage of respondents indicated they were planning on starting a blog, they had all make the decision to join MySpace. This would suggest the presence of one or more common motivators amongst the entire sample, and may have served to skew the results.

Therefore the conclusions reached in this study cannot and should not be extrapolated across the wider pool of users of online applications in sweeping statements.

Secondly, this report was specifically studying psychosocial and behavioural characteristics and growth patterns of users of online applications. No mention was made in the report on motives for blogging, or planned blog contents; nor was a copy of the survey questions made available.

Importantly it is also unclear whether respondents were specifically asked whether they planned to use blogs as coping mechanisms, or whether the study sought to infer the answers to this question based on their overall responses.

Depending on how the survey questions were worded, it is possible that the nature of the questions would have attracted or repelled people who were contacted, thereby skewing the results.

Concluding Remarks:

All this being said, this study did not seek to make generalized statements about blogging, only to report the quantitative findings gathered from a specific data set and provide an interpretation on what these results seem to suggest. The generalizations have been injected into the discussion by the media and bloggers, and this is unwise.

As with any preliminary study on an emerging activity, far more research is necessary before wide sweeping statements like “blogging is good for your social life” can be made. The devil is in the detail and dependent on a myriad of different variables.

Reference:

  • “Distress, Coping, and Blogging: Comparing New Myspace Users by Their Intention to Blog”, CyberPsychology & Behavior. February 1, 2008, 11(1): 81-85.

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

social networks, social software 1 Comment