Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

One of the most interesting aspects of Structuration theory (ST) is the idea of reflexive monitoring of action by human actors, which offers an insight into how structuration processes can persist over time and space. ST's basic concepts: duality of structure, structuration and its three modalities, as you can see in my previous post, explain how human action and social structures are interdependent. The modalities (or dimensions) of structuration: interpretive scheme, norms and facilities define the process of structuration but also provide us with analytical lenses through which we can explore it.

How do people use their social structures and modalities to act? Or as Orlikowski (2000) would say how do people enact structures?

Giddens' explanation is through the concept of reflexive monitoring of action. When people act they use their knowledge (of what they are doing) at the level of practical consciousness. Practical consciousness is the actors’ ability to act according to their stock of personal knowledge but which they are not able to explain. It is what they “know how to do” Giddens (1979). Another level, discursive consciousness, is the actors’ ability to explicitly articulate their actions and motivations in terms of their knowledge. That is when actors are able to explain what and why they are doing things. To achieve practical and discursive consciousness actors need to act in a reflexive way. Reflexive action happens at an unconscious level, so you do not need to be thinking on what you are doing all the time. It is the natural way of doing things based on what we know and have (as in the modalities of structuration.) Reflexive monitoring of actions means that actors are always assessing their own actions, the ones of the people around them and the results of those actions. The result of this assessment may be a continuation of actions as they were happening or their modification. The reproduction of structures (as they were) leads to routinisation of actions. This means that routines are created which form patterns of interactions which become institutionalized, that is they become part of the structure of the social system in which actors are interacting. However these routines are only a temporal effect as unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences of action can alter the results and lead to change. These adjustments occur at incremental paces as each actor monitors their actions. Seen from a societal point of view these changes can be seen as individual, slow, imperceptible changes but which aggregated lead to the evolution of societies.

Atkinson and Brooks (2003) see the reflective monitoring of actions as not accounting for conscious, dramatic change. That is, for overt initiatives, such as the implementation of an information system in an organization, which can interrupt the flow of slow change to impose new technologies. This means that there is one actor or actors (e.g., the IT department) which is consciously trying to solve a problem by changing the structures (and interpretive schemes, norms and facilities) of their users. However Jones and Karsten (2008) disagree and state that the dimensions of the duality of structure already account for emancipatory change in every instant of action. That is, the actions of the IT department could be studied by the use of the modalities and considering the reflective monitoring of actions of Software developers' own actions and the ones of their users.


Giddens, A., (1979), Central problems in social theory : action, structure and contradiction in social analysis, Basingstoke, Macmillan.
Jones, MR, and Karsten, H. 2008. "Giddens's Structuration Theory and Information Systems Research," MIS Quarterly, 32(1), 127-157.
Orlikowski, W. J., (2000), 'Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations', Organisation Science, 11(4), 404-428.

• Interpretive scheme: is the stock of knowledge based on experience that is used to convey and understand meaning.
• Norms: dictate whether a conduct is appropriate or not. Conducts are legitimised by actions.
• Facilities: resources to accomplish desired outcomes. They produce structures of domination.

One way of using the model of enactment of technologies-in-practice is with software... have you ever wondered how people use software and in which circumstances? Do they really use it as it was intended? or maybe Why do people reject software even if in theory it is the perfect solution for their problems? Asking users is a good start, but having a tool like Orlikowski’s model to analyse what they say and contrast that with what we think and have can be very helpful.

On a similar theme... It can also be helpful to look at the processes of software development and implementation as structuration processes. So instead of focusing only on the technology and its users we can also see software developers as acting on or enacting structures while they develop software. Software developers are influenced by structures within their working environments but are also influenced by the requirements and needs of their users. However, being the users’ organisations separate entities, we should treat these structures as perceptions or interpretations. Developers are not working with their users and neither will use the software they produce as their users. So in reality software developers use “what they understand” from their interactions with their users to develop software.

The diagram shows an illustration of what I said. It shows software development as a structuration cycle. The boxes on top of users and developers represent their structures and their images represent their actions, as in using software and developing software.

Here a practical example. The following is an extra-short portion of the structuration processes taking place when students write their theses:

1. Structures: University culture, time pressures, personal/family commitments
2. Action: students use technology to write their theses
   

• Interpretive scheme: I need to use a word processor to write my thesis. A word processor is more efficient than a typewriter. I need a reference manager to manage my bibliography. A reference manager is more efficient than doing it manually. If I do not have "facilities" (below) I cannot write my thesis.
  
• Norms: University regulations require me to submit an electronic version of my thesis. Avoid plagiarism: sources have to be cited. Theses have to have a minimum of 70 thousand words and a maximun of 100 thousand words. Theses have to be formatted according to the University's regulations.
  
• Facilities: Computer, a word processor and a reference manager.

From the above one can understand what a student needs and why... of course this is a very limited example, but I hope you get my point.

Orlikowski, W. J., (2000), 'Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations', Organisation Science, 11, no.4: 404-428

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I work as a Project Analyst. Strictly speaking I am not a techie (or a nerd or a geek!) but I know about the techie world. I understand the processes by which software are designed and produced. I also know about users and their work. I talk to them, I study their behaviour and business processes, their needs (what they need and what they think they need), and make conclusions about how we can help them. I pass that information to developers. This is not an easy task, believe me. I am bilingual. I am like a U.N. interpreter. I speak the language of software developers and the language of users. I listen to users and then tell developers about them by using words like searching, browsing, screenshot, widget, dataset, datalink and object. They, of course, would consider these very basic terms and reply with machine-code-like language. I take those words plus samples of their work (prototype, pilot, etc) go to users and explain them what we are doing. For that I use words like browsing and searching but avoid technical words as that would confuse or annoy them.

As a project analyst I also have to do some reach out, project advocacy and dissemination: meet people and talk to managers, directors and alike. Tell them about our work and the benefits for them. Then, I am trilingual because this last one is management, strategist language.

I think that, within a project realm, a project analyst is an important role. Techies, users, strategists and other stakeholders speak different languages and have different agendas. A project analyst is the person who keeps all of them together. Without the project analyst all these people would be heading in different directions.

This feels like being a double sandwich. Like the meat between users and software developers, and the cheese between the producers of software and the project stakeholders.

I also have to do a bit of academic dissemination through traditional means: conferences and papers (I work in an academic institution.) Perhaps this aspect of my job takes me to a different dimension, not completely related to the practical aspects of the project. For academia it would not be enough to produce software and to make it succeed. Academia needs explanations and analysis, reflections on how things were achieved, design of models, building up on established theories or developing new ones based on the data collected. Academic dissemination does not necessarily play a crucial role in the success of the project but I find it the most fulfilling as it allows me to reflect and analyse strategies and also build on my academic career.

I’m starting to see the picture of a chameleon here.

Now, you may want to ask me why on earth I am doing working as a project analyst in a software related project if I want to pursue an academic career. The answer is... I don’t know :p lol Did I mention that I like my job? I think I like the "practical (hands-on)-academic (reflective)" combination. I am an analyst, I like software development and I like to talk to users. I am also a sort of ethnographer. I like to mingle with techies and users. I like first-hand experience in (not necessarily academic) projects. I question different interpretations and I like to reflect on what I see. And I like to write about the things I do.

I have been on Twitter for a few months and I have formed an opinion. My opinion is limited of course. It is based on the few interactions I have had, the few people I am following, the tools I am using and some technical problems I have encountered (yeah yeah problems too).

Having used Hi5, Flicker, Facebook, Linkedin and similar sites I have to say that Twitter feels quite different. My first impressions are:

Twitter is not so good at allowing social interactions. In that sense Facebook and MySpace outplay Twitter. Social relationships on Twitter feel incomplete and weak as there is only one way to communicate. Twitter is a one way communication channel. Facebook and MySpace offer a number of possibilities for expression and communication which help members to know better their contacts.

Twitter asks a question “What are you doing?” which does not make sense to me. Are they suggesting we should only post about what we are doing? Can I post about what I did, will do or haven’t done? Can I post about what I am thinking? Can I repeat other people’s posts? and so on... the answer is yes we can, and that is why lots of people ignore the question and post whatever they want.

One can chose the kind of information to get in their personal timeline by following relevant people. Some people post about their personal live, their leisure activities, sports, etc. Others post about their work or businesses. There are people who use twitter to advertise their businesses and websites. And among them there are some who see Twitter as a market and not as a social space. Problem is, there is no guarantee that one will understand everything these people say.

Twitter has poor content. 140 character tweets are not enough for providing context and meaning as most people are used to. See for example the following tweet: “God help us... the adviser has a heavy accent :(” Ok I understand the adviser has a heavy accent and that isn’t good, But I do not understand why, what they are doing, who the adviser is, where he is, etc. To know this I would probably need to search for previous tweets and hope there is an explanation there. But do I care so much to take the time to do that search? NO.




Although one can post consecutive tweets to convey better developed ideas, we do not know if followers will receive the whole package as we intended. Each individual twitterer has their own timeline comprised of the tweets of the people they follow. Those tweets come all together in chronological order, so some packages intersect between them. Again, to understand some of these tweets I would need to filter my timeline and of course I rarely do this, unless there is something there that attracts my attention.

Having only 140 characters forces people to communicate by small, discrete blocks of ideas. Best twitterers are the ones who master this art. For example: “What a day! What a week! I'm shattered. Tomorrow: snooker with #timsawesomegrandad & lunch with my sis & niece b4 #timsgoingsurfing @ t'wknd” Mastering the art of text compression isn’t easy and I admire the ones who can do this and still say something meaningful and interesting. But as usual I always want to know more. I would like to know why “What a day! What a week!” Was it tough? Was it good or bad? What happened??

I can always ask the twitterer if I want to know more. That is something I prefer to do rather than browsing through tweets. I have found that exchanges with other people are more interesting. It is a personal opinion of course. When I talk to someone on Twitter, the context gets clearer after each message, and it feels like having a conversation or a social interaction. However although Twitter can be used for conversations, it isn’t a natural chatroom or forum.

One way for making up for poor content and lack of context is to use tools which help to organise content by filtering it. The hashtags site is one of them. I usually go there when there is a major event like the Wimbledon final and follow the tweets there. I also use the TweetDeck search option to filter tweets by a certain topic, like for example #socialsoftware.

Twitter is excellent for distributing and disseminating messages. Like a chain reaction machine. This is because people RT a lot! For example if a celebrity tweets he is getting married, one hundred thousand followers would probably RT that message to their own followers, some of those followers would RT it again, and so... in a few minutes millions of twitterers can come to know about that wedding, even if they do not follow or do not like that celebrity.

People post links to the online resources they write and/or read. These sites have longer texts with more complex and elaborated ideas. Bloggers for example do not use twitter to say what they want but to disseminate what they write in their blogs. I follow a few news accounts as well and I find them very convenient to know about what is going on in the world. The news posts have a short text usually the news headline and then a link to the actual news site.

Some people send their tweets to their FB accounts so their friends can also read what they are doing. I do not think that is a good idea as those are different contexts with different audiences. This presentation does a good job at explaining this http://www.slideshare.net/themarketingnerd/why-your-tweets-should-not-feed-to-your-facebook-status-its-a-fail-1314380.

From the above I conclude that Twitter is good as media and not so good at social. Through my twitter account I come to know about lots of things happening around the world, have found good blogs, read a lot, but I know very little about the people who post those messages. On Twitter I have developed rather loose links with some people whereas for the rest I am just a lurker, occasionally reading their tweets sometimes without understanding them. I guess it would take a few million tweets more to get to know some people.

Speaking of people, for some the success on Twitter is measured by the number of people who follow them. That is a measure of popularity, which in most cases, I believe, does not say anything about the quality of their relationships or the quality of the content of their posts. If you are public figure thousands of people will follow you even if you post boring tweets. With this I am not saying that all twitterers who have a large list of followers are boring to everyone. People in general follow people whose tweets are interesting to them. But of course there also people who would follow people expecting they would follow them back.

Followers and following lists are very important. They are connections to the rest of the Twitter world. Losing them is something that can ruin the twitter experience. Rebuilding these lists could be an impossible task especially where they are made up of people who are not know to the twitterer. And it is here that I want to talk about one of these many “bugs” that affect twitter, and has affected me as well. I recently lost over 70 followers and while seeking for support I saw I wasn’t the only one. Hundreds of people are losing their followers and what is more worrying their following lists are going down to zero. Following zero people means they do not get any tweets and are virtually blindfolded. That has never happened to me on FB or Hi5 and makes me wonder about Twitters reliability.

Regardless of the above Twitter has this addiction effect. I see lots of people who are obsessed and cannot live without tweeting everyday (yes, I am talking about you!) However I think I am still immune to Twitter because of the reasons I discussed above (I prefer social media rather than just media). However there was one thing that boosted my participation maybe by 5%. At the beginning I found the Twitter.com interface boring to use. I installed twibble on my mobile and then I became a bit more interested. After that I installed TweetDeck and twhirl in my computers and things became even more interesting. Getting notifications when I get a Tweet and being able to organise posts makes this thing a bit more manageable. Because of this, I think, I tweet a bit more.

There are other tools that help to complement tweets and enhance the Twitter experience (or addiction?) These are just a few examples. Twitpic is used to post twitterers’ pictures. There are also tools to tag users and find people with the same interests: Twibes, TwitR or wefollow. There is also Twibbon where one can start a campaign, cTwittLIKE where one can see Twitter like someone else, Tweeting Too Hard where one can find original tweets and Cursebird where you can see who is swearing on Twitter (this one's fun). Oh and TweetRadio where you can listen to Tweets as if they were news by Twitterer or by Topic. I have explored these and more sites but still Twitter does not convince me as a social networking tool. Ok, I can have fun conversations here and there but I do not consider them as social relationships but as random loose links. I think Twitter is poor at social, weak at meaningful content, good at quantity of content, good/excellent at disseminating news and links. And if you want to explore the potential of Twitter as a disseminator you can use Tweetburner a tool that shortens URLS and tracks the links that you share.

Anyway, last point I want to make in this post is that I would not have been able to say all this on Twitter. That is why I have a blog :) But hey, don't panic I'll stay on Twitter. I won't call it social networking but broadcasting machine. It is interesting and I kind of like it.

Social networking and social media are concepts that define activities that integrate people and technology. These activities can take written form as in online conversations, oral form as in video or audio streams or visual form as in video again and pictures. Social media can also be seen as the places where you go to have social interactions (in many forms as stated above) with other people.

Social media has this enormous and growing audience of people hungry for online interactions. Millions of people use social media and it has become one of the most popular online activities. This is why, I think, it has become a very attractive gold mine for wolves.

Yes, marketers and strategists see social media as places they can use to do their business and to increase their profits. I see this as interference, as having uninvited guests in a house party(1). Businesses have their own places on the web, they can also have their own forums, online communities, etc., if they wish. However as real social networking sites are more populated they are potentially more fertile lands for businesses to grow profits. Yes, it is easier to go where the people are than make people come to them.

Have a look at http://mashable.com/2009/08/03/what-is-social-media

By engaging into apparent social interactions with real people they want to gain their trust and make them buy their products or follow their religion. Marketers and strategists accounts in Social Networking Sites (SNS) are in fact social masks that they wear to appeal to their public. But those are not the real them. In reality marketers and strategists have their own agenda: make money out of you. They do not want to be friends with you they just want to sell you things, they do not want to listen to you they want you to listen to them.

I do not blame them. That is how businesses have done business for years. Before, they kept themselves to their places. Slowly they claimed territory into our private lives, in the newspapers that we read, on the TV, and now into our online social interactions. This had to come sooner or later, and I think we will get used to that. What worries me though is that by carrying out this invasion they are changing the nature of these spaces. They are taking the social out of the social media and adding the profit to their business playground. In fact they are misusing and subverting SNS in a way that potentially threatens their existence.

For example I do not mind a few ads on Facebook but I mind too many. I mind strange accounts sending me messages about buying this or that, or reading this website about god knows what! Facebook is an excellent SNS exactly because you can have social interactions there. You can do all the non sense you like. You can talk to your friends, you can gossip or bitch. You can share your photos and videos, you can fill these stupid questionnaires, or eat fortune cookies, or you can follow your favourite music band or charity organisation. That is what Facebook is about. If it gets infected by people who think I am their audience or their customer I will not like it anymore.

There is one place though where marketers and strategists fit better: Twitter. Twitter is this strange place where people talk to everyone and to anyone at the same time (unless you are using the @.) Some people on Twitter are geeks, some are egocentric, some are normal (like me) and some of them are into business. Thousands of people join Twitter to advertise themselves or their businesses. I can post links to this blog and tell people hey there is a new post! Promoting or advertising things on Twitter is an accepted practice even though that does not answer Twitters question “What are you doing?” but who cares if people are happy. On Twitter promotion and advertising do not feel as intrusive as in other sites. This, perhaps, is because Twitter is very impersonal and has very low social presence. Twitter is more media than social. What Twitter has is a very high rate of exchange of information and lots of potential readers (or buyers!)


There are other kinds of interference attempted into social media. One of them is by eLearning. Some people would like to use real SNS to teach and I cannot understand why. The fact that children and teenagers use these sites a lot does not mean that they will welcome their teachers or their classes there. I however think that social networks, web2.0 type of tools can be used for teaching, but in separate spaces where purposes are clearly defined and the word educational replaces the word social. Have a look at http://monitorhypothesis.typepad.com/esl/2008/07/facebook-and-i.html Added later --> I also think that initiatives such as eGovernance can make good use of web2.0 kind of environments because citizens are familiar with them. And I think I would welcome their intrusion into my social network as long as they are kept minimal and seek citizens' benefit.

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(1) This view is perhaps influenced by my understanding of social media as online communities. In fact I think social media is just another buzzword that represents the latest step in the evolution of online communities.

I keep forgetting to blog about what I write outside this blog. It might be that I have been totally immersed into social software ... Not that I waste my time uploading photos in social networking sites, no no nooo... I waste my time thinking and reflecting on why I upload photos in social networking sites :)

I am not a natural writer so I have to make conscious efforts to sit and write my thoughts. Writing this blog is easy for me because this is a sort of leisure activity, I write about whatever I like or comes to my mind, and I am not bothered about academic rigour at all. But when it is about serious writing I turn to serious mode (and grumpy and anti-social mood.)

When I finished my PhD I was so tired of my thesis I promised myself to never write anything again. But that is a promise no one can keep if one works in academia. And this is how my first paper happened. I was working on a project that had to do with eLearning and eMentoring when a colleague of mine came to my office asking if I could fill a space in the next issue of a journal she was editing. She knew I had just finished my thesis and that it was on the Information Systems field, a perfect fit for her next issue. I broke my promise and said yes. I gathered some sections from my thesis and put them together (that was my Frankenstein version.) I worked on them for a few weeks, transformed them in one (I hope!) coherent paper and submitted it. The final result was a not so ugly discussion about a structuration-based framework (Giddens, Orlikowski) which explained social aspects of software development.

Next paper was a sort of accident as well. I was still working on the eLearning and eMentoring project when my boss came to talk about a conference that was going to take place in the school. She wanted to submit a paper about the project. She had put together some chunks of text from the project bid and from her own thesis, but she needed help. So I had a look at the paper and found a gap where I could contribute. The paper was about language learning in the logistics industry and explained how participants in our project acquired language proficiency through online interactions (i.e., by carrying out eLearning and eMentoring activities). My contribution was an introduction to Online Communities of Practice and Online Pragmatics; and an analysis of online textual interactions by using these theories. We presented the paper in the conference and we were lucky enough that it was chosen for a special issue in a respected academic journal.

After these two accidents I thought that writing serious stuff wasn’t that bad after all. So I decided to be more proactive. About a year ago I wrote a to do list and then I reviewed that list at the beginning of this year. You can see that for six months that list didn’t change that much! Writing is a time consuming task, especially if your job involves other activities which are not directly related to the subject of your writings. But if you are persistent you can see the results… eventually. This is what happened.

Last December, after a few months of work and while working on the VGS project, my ex-boss and I submitted a paper which analysed eLearning and eMentoring processes by using Orlikowski's model of Enactment of Technologies in Practice. (This is a second paper about the eLearning and eMentoring project and has a slight overlap with my first paper). Orlikowski's model is based on Structuration theory, a social theory developed by A. Giddens. In March I got an email from the editors saying that the reviewers had suggested publication but they also had asked for minor changes in a couple of figures. So we did the modifications and a week after I got another email saying that our paper was going to be published. That felt great... almost no corrections. We did all the formatting the publishers asked us to do like for example provide figures in 300x300 dpi TIFF format. I signed the copyright agreement and posted it to singapore. I don't know when it is going to be printed but I hope it will be this year.

I spent the winter weekends writing a chapter for a book about eGovernance and eParticipation. I was supposed to do this at the end of last year, but I couldn't. So I had to sacrifice a few (or a lot!) weekends this year to do this :'( My chapter is a discussion of the nature of online communities (one of my favourite topics) and from that discussion I drew some conclusions on how eGovernance initiatives could make use of common online strategies to improve their rate of success. My point was that online communities success depends on community engagement. That is, members need to be kept interested and satisfied with their participations for the community to survive. That usually happens naturally if they are given the right tools to express themselves. Designers should therefore understand community members' purposes, interests and social dynamics. And that is where the intersection with eGovernance efforts is, as eGovernance is about providing better electronic services and promote citizen participation through online means. I finished that chapter, got feedback from the reviewer and then made a few corrections, like changing the title of the chapter because he didn’t like it! I submitted the final version a month ago and again I am now waiting for this book to be published.

Now I have reached a point where I have to be proactive again. By the way I am not bored or have nothing to do. Quite the opposite. I have a busy job. I am just finishing a 14000 word (maybe longer!) analysis report at work. This report is about requirements and uses for research activity data, and it will be used for the design and implementation of a research information infrastructure. Very interesting by the way, and I think the data I gathered has the potential for a paper in the information systems field. I write about that in my other blog.

A couple of years ago I drafted a paper on Online Research, again based on the methodology I designed for my thesis. Somehow I forgot about that paper, and I thought I had lost it. But I found it again two or three months ago. So now I am thinking on resuscitating it and probably ask someone to co-author with me as I think it needs a new angle.

Another one, 1 friend of mine and ex-colleague, the #awesome guy, has asked me to write with him about social networking. He is a Twitter advocator and I think he liked my previous posts about social networking. This is something I would really like to do, although it will involve some long hours of immersion in the library as I need to catch up with the social software/social media literature.

I have liked software most of my life, but not every kind of software. I like software which has the people and social aspects embedded in it. Why? because I find it more interesting to think on people using software than only on software. Software that fit that criterion are Software for Information Systems and Social Software.

Information Systems are all these systems within organisations which make information accessible to the people who use it. Information Systems are aligned with the aims of the organisation. Software that supports those information systems are designed mostly to fit the (pre-designed) business processes which keep the organisations alive. On the other hand as they have to support the people working on those business processes they have to account for the unpredictability, nonlinearity and ambiguity 1 of humans. People are not robots and cannot be fixed as business processes on a blueprint. Most information systems and software development methodologies struggle with this. Old, traditional methodologies assumed organisational environments remained unchanged through time and focused only on the practicalities of software development. (E.g. Payroll was a system that did the same calculations every month.) With time things started to change, and human and social aspects started to play a more important role. Systems like workflows and groupware started to appear. Those applications modelled better what people were doing at work, they accounted for group work and collaborations, and they were a bit more flexible. Yet the feelings I got from using those applications were that they were rigid, too computer-oriented rather than people oriented.

During my PhD (a study of software development) I came across the term social software. Social software is software that encourages and allows social interaction within groups and facilitates the control of the information created through those interactions. Modern forms of social software include weblogs, Wikis, IM and online forums. Yes, that’s right; I am talking about software to develop Online Communities. Although this term has evolved from groupware and similar kinds of applications, now social software is mostly focused on web 2.0 technologies and aiming at online interactions, but not limited to them... social software ≠ web 2.0.

Social software has what traditional information systems perspectives lacked: it pays explicit attention to human and social aspects of groups using software. This means that the design of social software considers individual and social characteristics of their users, or in other words, the nature of their interactions through the computer: CMC (Computer Mediated Communication.) Designers have to translate traditional old usability guidelines to new group-usability ones, old Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methodologies to Human-to-Human interaction (through computers obviously) approaches. For example, by asking questions about how groups of people (and not only individuals) would react to a certain event, they could design effective tools to allow (or impede) those reactions. The interfaces resulting from these experiments would not be only computer interfaces but social interfaces which are tailored to the kind of community they want to support. This means that social applications contain embedded within them some rules or norms which reflect the rules and norms that distinguish these communities from the others and that keep them alive.

And here is where I start giving some examples. YouTube, one of the biggest social networking sites, hosts a community of video creators and sharers. A priority for YouTube therefore is to allow the creation and sharing of video files. Users of YouTube can create their profiles and upload their videos. They can also create channels containing sub-sets of videos. An example would be a YouTube member having a sports channel and a holiday channel. All these videos and channels help users to create an image for them, an image which they can use to interact with other users. As YouTube are supporting a “community” they also encourage interactions between members. For example by allowing commenting, they let members talk between them about their videos. This talk is enhanced by the ability to respond to videos with other videos. Also with the embedding of videos option YouTube allows its community to spread its arms beyond to other communities. For example a blogger can embed a video in his blog.

Different kinds of communities have different kinds of tools, because their users’ needs are different. Justin.tv a community for people who share live streaming video have chat rooms facilities along their videos, so users can talk while they are watching what’s going on where the camera is.

Facebook users can share lots of different thingies but that community is more focused on developing personal profiles. So they draw on the self-centred nature of people as well as their voyeuristic facet (members can secretly see friends’ profiles.)

Twitter, hmmm, at first sight Twitter is a community for attention seekers, nerds, celebrities.... or just people with particular communication skills... so particular that they can fit in 140 characters. By keeping posts to 140 characters Twitter are restricting the kind of users they get to the stereotype above. It feels to me that talking in Twitter is like trying to fill a glass drop by drop, but in fast motion. Yes, tweeters have to be quick at reading and at writing, the more people they are following the more information they have to organise and assimilate, and that information comes in little chunks of 140 characters. Twitter is not a place for people who are shy, it is a community of people who want to share everything they do and think, now, not tomorrow or next week, but now.

So, why do I like social software? I've alread mentioned one part of the answer in the introduction, I think it is more interesting to think on people using software that just on software, and that is what social software does. The second part of the answer is because, although tailored to particular communities, social software provides more freedom to users, to explore their chaotic, unpredictable, nonlinear and ambiguous nature. That makes life even more intersting.

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1 Software is structured and predictable. People are unpredictable, nonlinear and ambiguous. Social interactions are even more chaotic. One cannot predict exactly how users are going to behave when they use software. They can use its features as they were designed by developers, or they can subvert the system, inventing new uses or just using the software incorrecty. People are non-linear, their behaviour looks more like a web rather than a line because human behaviour is variable. After one input thousands of possibilities for outputs can emerge. Ambiguity migth be one of the characteristics that software developers hate the most. People cannot always be straight and express their thoughts or feelings. When asked about their job they would tell you what's on the paper and not what they do in reality. There are always hidden agendas flowing in the underground of organisations.Have a look at Cockburn's...

This post is the third instalment of my social networking series where I discuss some of their success factors. For me there are three factors which are essential for these sites to survive. First, good social networking sites should be places where I can find friends and people I know, people I can talk to so I do not get bored. Second these sites should have attractive communication tools which help me to engage at a deeper level. Third, these sites and tools should work in my computer and/or mobile and for the situations I am when I use them. (I have talked about the first two factors in previous posts, this one is about the third one.) These factors are obviously biased by my preferences and by my personal experiences (I like ethnographic approaches!) I am also influenced by the little bit of theory I know about computer mediated communication (CMC) and online community dynamics, theories like online communities of practice and online pragmatics. (Read an essay on CMC I wrote a few years ago.)

As you can see above, my practical and theoretical biases are mainly on the human and social aspects of online dynamics. And I have to say I have a fairly narrow experience in the hardware/platform field - which is partly the focus of this post. I have used lots of computers in my life. However, for the last 8 years or so, I have been restricted to the Ms Windows platform, out necessity and chance, not choice. Well, not 100% restricted, I own a smartphone with Symbian OS v9.1-UIQ 3.0. which is veeery nice. I guess what I am trying to say is that my discussion below is (very) limited to the platforms I have mentioned. So keep an open mind.

Since my smartphone has a browser (Opera 8.65) I should be able to access most online sources I access from my PC, particularly wap enabled sites. However I never use my phone as a computer. It is a small computer of course but not "a computer." I use my computer for work and if not at work for more than 10 minute tasks. On the other hand I use my smartphone for short online tasks when I am on the move and when I find a free hotspot!

My computer social networking activities are based around writing emails, Facebook and Hi5 (and sometimes LinkedIn1,) reading and commenting friends' blogs, and uploading pictures. Some of these are a bit passive, reading things, clicking here and there. Some other actvities are more active, I create and upload content, which will be read and seen by someone else. I also use Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and Skype for chatting2. All at the same time. I do not use more because it then becomes a mess. My approach to IM is simple: keeping IM turned on (online/busy) all the time I am at the computer. I have long, informal conversations with whoever is online (one or more people). I intercalate these conversations with other tasks, so sometimes my contact and I can be silent for one or two hours and then we continue talking again when we are free. IM software come with some nice features such as video chatting, graphic emoticons and access to email accounts. I like to use these tools whenever I can.

My mobile phone social networking activities are very different from the above. The point I want to make is that it would not make sense for me to translate all this use from my PC to my mobile phone, mainly because the situations I am in and the reasons for using them are different. And also because my mobile has a small screen not suitable for some tasks I perform at the computer.

So what do I use my smartphone for?

Obviously I make calls and send texts. I download RSS feeds with the news and my emails (don't like push emails though.) I also use Twitter and chat. Facebook? hmmm, no. I don't like accessing Facebook (m.facebook.com) through the browser, it is just not usable for such a small display. And I do not like interacting with Facebook via text messaging either. That is too restrictive for all that Facebook can offer. Facebook client? Not yet, haven't found any for Symbian.

You may have noticed I did not mention twitter a couple of paragraphs above. That is because for some reason I find it boring browsing Twitter when I am at the computer. I find it too static or maybe too simple. Just one list of posts for such a big screen! I thought on installing a Twitter client in my laptop but decided to do that in my phone (for variety you know.) At the moment I am using Twibble which I find usable and attractive. So for example, if I am waiting in the dentist's and I am bored I use Twibble and download the lastest Tweets. I just need to scroll down to read them all. If I wanted to write something, say "I am at the dentist" that would be as simple as writing an sms. I bet a great percentage of twitterers are mobile users. I think their 144 character post model fits mobiles nicely. I however have to emphasize that I do not find Twitter as engaging as Facebook. So far my participations there are not as abundant as any average twitterer and they are random rather than with an objective. This is a content and language problem I would probably write about later. But what I can say now is that Twibble is a good way of killing time when you are bored.

I also use my smartphone for chatting. I installed Fring (Instant Messaging) in my phone. I did this just as an experiment (not a need) to see what sort of use could come from it. In Fring I have activated my MSN and Google accounts. Contacts from different sources have different colours, off line contacts are in grey. Conversations appear in new tabs and you are alerted by a sound when someone talks to you. So far I find Fring little to medium fun. It might be that I am useless at it. I just can keep track of one or two conversations at the same time, and as in a mobile phone I cannot type as fast as in a computer my exchanges are very slow. I think it is just a matter of getting used to it and not trying to mimic my computer (which I do unconsciously). If I can't do that I will probably dump it and get another application which I find more natural for a mobile :) Maybe a location-based social network app which I can use and definitely need when I am on the move.

Social Networking is not restricted to PCs. They are in other kinds of devices like mobile phones, PDAs and TVs, and they keep growing into other devices. Who knows, maybe in the future you'll read your tweets in your treadmill screen or you'll see your friends in the Facebook Holodeck. However moving applications from one platform to the other will not just work like that. One has to be careful to not take anything people throw into the market without thinking on its usability and reasons for using them.


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1 LinkedIn is a networking site but it isn't social, therefore it's kind of boring.
2 I know, these are not social networking sites per se but Instant Messaging applications. I think they have similar purposes: both are social applications.

This post is a continuation of the post below this one titled Social Networking. Since I wrote that post many things have come to my mind regarding engagement in online communities, particularly social networking sites. One question I see everywhere is how do you create a successful online community or social networking sites? How did Facebook manage to take over MySpace? Why are those sites so popular? What do they have that the others do not?

In my last post I talked about people. People you find in those places. For me they key is finding friends and people I know. For others it could be finding new friends or contacts. But something I did not address in that post was how those people ended up in those places in the first place.

You cannot expect to turn up at one of these sites and find everyone already there waiting for you. Open arms and big smiles, and then you stay there. These communities grow slowly. Users come and go, and if more users keep on coming than going then you have good chances to become a successful community.

So there should be another factor that makes people come and stay in a social networking site. And I guess that is its tools. Good looking, user friendly tools that do not fail, provide security and gain the trust of their users. And if with them you can do cool things you never dreamt of, you'll get thousands people joining, acting like kids with new toys.

When I joined MySpace I really didn't like the looks of it. I could design my own website, by using html, etc... but I didn't have control over everybody else's websites. I like it clean and simple. But I found websites so so ugly and unreadable I wanted to cry. Just the look of their websites prevented me from talking to their owners. But on the other hand, being able to design their own space must have attracted thousands of people. I bet lots of people did not feel intimidated by the fact that they needed to learn html but maybe thought that was something cool to learn. So the same feature attracted some people but prevented others from participating.

Facebook... what can I say. hmm I liked its white and simple style. Everyone's got the same looks in their profiles. The differences depend on the tools people choose to use and of course in the actual content. Another think I like is this easy customization, i.e., adding of applications. You just need to pick an app from a list and voila. Facebook have done various modifications to their platform across the years. Just in a few days they are going to introduce another one in their homepage. I see many people annoyed with these changes, but I do not see them quiting. It must be because those changes work. They are easy to learn and do not interfere with users ongoing interactions.

Twitter... Twitter IS THE PLACE TO BE at the moment. Twitter is very simple, it has a text box and you can enter 140 characters each time. You have followers who read your entries (or tweets) and you can follow other people whose tweets you read. Personally, I see Twitter as a messy, context-less bulleting board. But that is a content issue. As a tool it works. How could it not? It is a simple idea. One thing I like about Twitter is not the Twitter site itself but all these Twitter desktop and mobile clients (Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twibble, etc) which are much nicer than the original site. They use Twitter's feeds and organise them in different ways, for example according to topics.

And if I want to talk a bit more about Twitter I have to talk about content (I think this is the weakest link of Twitter at the moment). Users of Twitter or Twitterers or Tweeterers continuosly develop new conventions of communication. I guess, because they need to put some order into those millions of context-less posts. One of these conventions is the Hashtag. Hashtags are like metadata within the content of tweets. They define "groups" or topics of conversations. For example, if I include #watchmen in my post, I will be creating or participating in a group conversation called watchmen. If you want to know who else is talking about watchmen in Twitter you can search for your hashtag in the hashtags site: #hashtags. I think Twitter has an interesting model for creating and connecting data. 140 character posts which can be interconnected by different kinds of tags. Sounds cool, especially now that the semantic web is getting more attention. Not saying that Twitter could ask people to use semantic web vocabs (nooooooooooo!!!) But twitter's future certainly looks semantic webbish to me... if it is going to survive it needs to improve the quality of their content by adding meaning to it.

So yeah, many things to talk about in this area. New software tools are created all the time and it is hard to keep track. Thing is, we should think on keeping a balance between programming the best, coolest, state of the art applications and seeing what users really want and do with them.

What is Social Networking? connecting and interacting with people, online, through a variety of tools, which are mostly available in one site. Members of these sites create a set of connections with other people who they can call contacts, friends, followers, etc. All these connections form a network of contacts through which social interactions happen, hence the name social networking. There are hundreds of Social Networking sites out there. You may know names like MySpace, LifeJournal, Bebo, WAYN, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Orkut, YouTube, Windows Life Spaces, etc, etc, etc.

I have tried some of these and others... and with little success, except maybe for Facebook. But I have to say that the magic is fading.

What do I call success? Well, for me, a successful SN Site is one where

1. I can find friends and does not get boring (because people keep on creating new interesting content)
2. It should have a series of attractive interaction, communication tools which
3. work on my computer and on my mobile phone.

Each of the points above deserve a separate discussion on their own. In this post I will focus on point 1, and will leave the other 2 for later.

Why did I stick with Facebook? I use Facebook not because Facebook is Facebook but because there I can find people I can interact with. And those are people I have met at some point in my life: friends, family, colleagues, someone I met in a holiday, in a conference, etc, or people who are friends of friends and I know by name. Of course there are people I have met in my life that I don’t like, I block those. I know there are people who send friend requests to everyone because they want to meet new people or just want to have millions of friends. I don’t. I like to have a network of contacts I know because then it is easier for me to talk to them, because there is something to talk about. As it happens Facebook is that network. If I could find the same people elsewhere I'd probably move. This is a personal opinion of course, and you may have different reasons to join a social networking site.

I started with this Social Networking thing years ago. I think it was in 2003 (or was it 2004???) when I got all these emails from friends inviting me to join Hi5. I joined Hi5 and found it a bit dull, so I used it very little. I kept on adding friends though. On rare occasions I would upload pictures or comment on friends profiles.

When I did my PhD fieldwork (2004-2005), I turned to Social Networking as well as to other online media (discussion boards, weblogs, etc), to collect my data from. I remember I opened an account in MySpace, as at that time that was THE PLACE TO BE. When I got there I couldn't find anyone I knew. All my friends were in Hi5. I kept the account though because I was supposed to be looking for information for my PhD. My research topic was related to software development and I joined some software development online communities. However I also needed to understand the dynamics of online communities to write my methodology chapter and MySpace proved to be very useful... as an object of study of course but not as a social networking tool for my personal use.

I kept that account for months and as far as I remember I couldn't engage on a personal level. It might be my nature but I didn't feel comfortable with talking to strangers who were so different from me. I made friends with a Poet though. A guy who would send his friends a poem maybe every week. Sometimes he would send me romantic notes! At the beginning I thought it was fun but after a while I found them boring. I like poetry but not cheesy poetry. However I had a good look at his profile and at the way he kept on getting new friends who liked his poems. His friends would also send him poems so he had a huge archive of amateur poetry... and big number of fans. Another interesting character I found on MySpace was this lesbian movie director, who had recently made a movie, about lesbians, and who had a large fan base of lesbians :). Everyone was asking her things about the movie and the actresses, etc. One interesting thing she did on MySpace was to schedule a free online screening of her movie. Free for her MySpace friends. That attracted even more hundreds of friends. Her profile was exploding with posts from fans!

At the same time I also joined YouTube and found Terra Naomi a singer who was advertising herself there. I subscribed to her videos and saw how her fan base grew as well. She made her videos at a small studio. Some of them where guitar lessons! And the kids loved them! So did I and I also liked her music. One interesting thing I witnessed here is hundreds of people video taping themselves playing her music. I thought she was doing well. And I think she did. The other day I saw a CD of her in a London shop.

So yes, MySpace and YouTube were working for them, and did work for my PhD as well. But they didn't work for me. I closed those accounts when I finished my thesis.

Then two years ago a friend of mine invited me to Facebook. At that time it was restricted to students or university staff, so you needed a university email address to open an account. I didn't like Facebook that much at the beginning because I had very few friends. but i liked its desing. I thought it was simple and clean. As time passed, Facebook opened to everyone, and my friends started to join in. I found it a very useful tool for keeping in touch with people and for having fun. I found friends from my primary school there... or should I say they found me!

I have engaged with FB at a personal level, but been able to think about it a bit as well. One of the main characteristics of the Facebook community is that everyone one seems to be self-centred. And this might be due to the design of the site. Most interactions I see are people showing what they are, have or do in their profiles. So for example I don't need to talk to everyone, or send messages to my friends, I just need to put some stuff in my profile and they will see that. A friend of mine can upload a holiday video and I see what he did. He doesn’t need to e-mail me. By uploading his video he is telling his network of contacts what he has done. That might save him a lot of time. I may make some comments... about how cool he looks in his video and those comments will be kept on his profile for others to see. If I go to the movies and like (or hate the film) I can write a comment on the movie app and my friends will see that. I don't have to tell them one by one.

There is one thing about FB I never liked though. It is all these useless, dumb, mind numbing applications where you can hugh people, or send butterflies, or complete stupid questionnaires, or find out how male/female you are. I really hate those!

Anyway, after two years of use I have to say, I am not using Facebook as much as I used to, but I am still there... and all the links to my friends profiles are still there too. So I can come back to them any time I feel like. However I think I am bit tired of doing the same thing all the time, logging in and checking my feeds to see what other people are doing, and then commenting on how cool they look in their pictures or, uploading my pictures so my friends can tell me how wonderful my life is. Facebook hasn’t changed much, its core is still the same, but I think I have changed. I know Facebook will be there when I feel the need to come back but for the moment I am seeking new pastures. (I think my Facebook will end up like my Hi5, it's there, I am there, but I don't use it very much.)

A few weeks ago I opened an account in Twitter, only because a friend of mine said it was better than Facebook. And he is in love with Twitter, so I thought I should give it a try. It might be that within an environment like twitter’s I may be able to talk to strangers! I think it is still too soon for me to say if I like it or hate it. What I can say now is that Twitter is the equivalent of the FB status. Everyone communicates by saying what they are doing, not to someone but to everyone. And unlike FB you don't need to be a friend to see what someone is doing. I have few followers there but I will wait a few weeks to see what happens.

Do we really need gadgets? Or do we just buy them because everyone does?

I've been asking myself that question in the last few days. I have a few gadgets but hey I don't think I am a gadget freak (or am I???) The gadgets I own at the moment are in the following list which includes my reasons for having them:

• Sony Ericsson W960i mobile phone: I need to communicate! and this one is cute, has touch screen, wifi (which I use very often), a good camera, 8GB memory and walkman.
• Pentax Option L20 Digital Camera: I like to take pictures when I travel or meet with friends.
• iPod nano: I take it to the gym, I hate gym music.
• Dell XPS M1330 laptop: my favourite... I don't know what I would do without it.
• TomTom GO530: this isn't something I would normally buy but I need it to get to work (just changed jobs in another city) I am using it as an MP3 player as well with it's FM transmiter, it has 1GB of memory.

And that is it! I thought I wouldn't buy any other gadget for a long time (gave up on the iPod Touch and the Wii as I thought I didn't "need" them)... but

in this new job I have met new people who own some and I have been tempted.... The other day I had a meeting and I brought a paper notebook and a pen to take notes. When I got there I saw everyone had either a laptop, netbook or PDA.

Another day I went to a meeting in a nice coffee shop and of course, took my paper notebook and pen with me, the other guys had nice mobile devices with them.
Should I keep strong and carry my paper notebook everywhere or should I sucumb to the gadget fever?

A few months ago I wrote a to do list of things I needed to write. Today I want to check how all this blah blah write write went. I have to say I haven't done my homework as I wished because I had some interruptions. I moved cities and then I changed jobs! In my new job I am working with digital repositories and the semantic web. I will definitely write about that in a future post. Hopefully it won’t be about RDF, or similar standards, but maybe about what you need to design the “inputs” and “outputs” of such framework.


As the end of the first stage of the VGS project was coming, I wrote a short Project Report, which was part of all the documentation we needed/wanted to produce to explain what we did with the money we got. I guess people liked it because we also got more funds for one year and a half to expand the project's pilot web site. The VGS project was about building an online environment for PhD students and Researchers with research resources created from their own material and or personal accounts that I recorded in video/audio tapes. The report was far from being technical; on the contrary, it was very qualitative as it explained the process I went through from identifying candidates for interviews or focus groups, to running those and analysing the data collected. That data justified the approach I took at creating and providing the research material.
Structuration paper.

Structuration paper: In December my ex-boss and I submitted a copy of that paper to a journal (don't know if they will like it.) As I thought, the objective of the paper changed several times during our discussions and writings. My ex-boss is more into e-learning and learning theories, I am more into online tools and communities and software. We managed to find a middle ground where we were both comfortable. At the end we used some Structuration concepts such as the dimensions of structuration, time-space distanciation and Orlikowski’s model of Enactment of Technologies-in Practice to explain what happened in this e-mentoring project I worked in 2 years ago. If you wonder why I would write a paper like that or if there is any “technology” involved... well yes, a lot. E-mentoring is mentoring carried out by using online tools. So what I was interested in is in seeing the effects of the technology in the reactions of people, the way they used the available tools and the overall outcome of the e-mentoring process in their professional careers.


The book chapter... I am now working on it. The editor liked my abstract, although I think it was awful! The chapter is about online communities and governance. What I am trying to do is to explain the dynamics and norms of online communities. Those dynamics and norms show the way online communities self-govern and keep control of what happens there. This is the only way they can stay alive. Hopefully by seeing how these things are done online we can learn some useful lessons as to how we can go about e-government and e-governance. I just started a few days ago and it still needs a lot of work (have written only 2000 words which may not like later), but as a good friend of mine told me a while ago, when I asked him about his PhD upgrade report, it's not the Mona Lisa, but it's smiling :)