Control all 3 (connectors + mavens + salesmen). Control the network.

The Law of the Few.
The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts:

1. Connectors = SML#Hub = SML#HR
2. Mavens = SML#Journalism = SML#Media
3. Salesmen = SML#Marketing = SML#PR

— Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

Control all three. Control the network.
— SML Network Theory

“Control all three. Control the network.” / SML.20121204.PHIL

People often ask me why I am so active on social networks, what I am trying to do, and what my “end game” is. My objective for SML Universe (org) is to give a voice to people who have no voice because of social bigotry. In order to do what I set out to do in order to effect change, Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point suggests that I need to become all three types of people: connectors, mavens and salesmen. And this is what I try to do.

1. Connectors = SML#Hub = SML#HR

I try to go to different universes to meet random people. People who don't do what I do is interesting to me because I don't know anything about them. I am usually interested in things which I don't know anything about so I ended up meeting lots of people who do not seem to relate. Because of this, I find myself often functioning as an HR for jobs, and I am more than happy to send introductions to people because I believe that when awesome people come together they often create amazing, beautiful, and creative things.

2. Mavens = SML#Journalism = SML#Media

When I see interesting things happening when I explore the random universe, I like to blog about them. I enjoy photography so I tend to record a visual record of what I see. Photojournalism is therapeutic and it gives me opportunities to write, so I do a lot of it. It was said that pictures say a thousand words and I certainly believe so. Often people don't have the time to read my essay length blog posts but most don't mind looking at photos. So that works out nicely. I also started turning my photography into videography interviews. I enjoy every opportunity to create as the act of creation gives me the thrill. It is my happiness life hacks. The bonus is that I get to write music as soundtracks so those are all very fun.

3. Salesmen = SML#Marketing = SML#PR

When I publish content I always simulcast to multiple social media networks. Most people believe that they only need to be on a single network, so in order to to reach the entire critical mass I post the same thing to multiple networks, all with very different audience. This works out nicely. Content where people like on Flickr are often very different than those for Instagram or Foursquare or Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr. Since I can't really tell when and why people will like something, covering the entire UGC content media network is important, and is also what I advise / recommend companies in the business of reaching critical mass do when I do marketing strategy for them.

Diversity – or why I moved from New York to Hong Kong to create SML Universe

There is a saying that ”every 7 years is a cycle”. I am not religious – but I did spend time studying philosophies from different religions and schools of thoughts – and interestingly the number 7 as an indicator for cycles kept coming up. This is interesting to me. Whether you believe in such numerology or not, I recognize that today, on my 36th birthday, was a moment of rebirth within my fifth cycle, for a decision which took me a year to finalize: my move from New York to Hong Kong after working and living for all of my adult life in America.

Those who know me for long know that I have traditionally been very active in social media – be it on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, SoundCloud, Tumblr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Vimeo – basically as someone I met on these social network said, I am everywhere. But if you look at the year before July 2012, I could not be found on the internet. I tweeted a couple of times mostly as an ambient device to let people (mostly my family) know that I was not dead, but that's about it. I did this because I wanted to not have any outside influence on my decision. I wanted to make sure that it makes the most sense to me. But to tell you why I made such a drastic decision, I have to tell you a little bit of myself.

As a gay man growing up in Hong Kong, I remember crying every single day after school in private – there was not a single day that I was not bullied. When I was accepted to Yale, I got excited because I thought that if Yale truly lived up to the popular claim of “one in four and maybe more” then I should be ok. It turns out that although Gayalies was a nice support group, my being Chinese was not that awesome within the predominantly WASP presence. I was invited to some Asian American functions but because I was gay, I did not feel welcome either. As an art major with close to none art background, I was not much of an item. Being a programmer almost automatically labeled me as a non-artist. When I took an interaction design class at the MFA program, I focus on making the programs work and not how pretty they are – it was completely dissed. I also recalled telling my graphic design professors that I had a great time the summer after my sophomore year (1997) working at Agency.com and they just gave me a disapproving look and questioned why I would want to do web design which was (and probably still is) ‘99% garbage’ anyway. Even after I started working for an interactive agency, since I prefer PC (at the time) over Mac (seriously OS9 is crap, sorry), I don't really fit in. The IT department thought of me as a trouble maker and annoyed their software licensing process. And if you think that coming out to your parents is difficult (I did that when I was 14), try coming out as a PC user at an AIGA event. I also had a lot of trouble explaining what is that I do – I use programming as part of my prototyping process to design interaction – which I felt and do still feel is the only way you can design interaction – to experience what you design as you refine over time. Storyboards just don't cut it. People like to place me as either category, but I am neither and I am both. It was very frustrating. I am thankful that over time I have met some people who became mentors to me because they understand me, but they are also far and few between. As a minority in a minority in a minority, I have never felt my voice heard. I struggled my entire life but I also accepted that reality that I would simply be a loner. I am ok with that.

Fast forward to the summer of 2007, I was invited to cover the gay pride parade for a company. Since I was already there, I also took the opportunity to photograph everyone else in the event. It was a very emotional experience for me. Before then I had long disregarded the gay pride as a complete marketing machine. But after that day, I truly understood why so many gay men and women choose to march down sixth avenue every year – the joy of being accepted. On that sunny afternoon, the streets were packed. It was a city-wide party. People all over the tri-state area came to New York. They were cheering in ecstacy. Yes I know they were probably cheering for the hot guys and gals wearing close to nothing :) but it doesn't much matter. For the first time, I feel accepted. If you had not been accepted for who you are all your life, you would understand how it felt. I have never experienced that until then.

When I got home that night, I wrote a manifesto about life:



Later, I created a Flickr group called Life Celebrates Diversity (Twitter) so people who do not feel heard can have a voice. As I started doing more photojournalism and started blogging about art, I suddenly recognized that there are a lot of artists around who do not have much media exposure because they are simply don't have the know-how to gain the social media klout. I have long been interested in network theories, and I enjoy using social networks and for a large degree Google as a testbed for network theory experiments, so I created SML Fine Art (Twitter), a Flickr group with the mission to preserve the diversity of art – be them small, medium or large.

All of my Flickr groups have a common objective and guiding principal: it sets no limits – no one is there to ‘curate’ the content. Life doesn't pose a limit on us, so who am I to set a limit on others? Subsequently I have created many others: SML Graphic Design (Twitter), SML Viz (Twitter), etc – all areas where I am interested in. I created them so it accepts everyone. It was also a really great way for me to notice works of interest and subsequently gave me the opportunity to meet them in person.

Since I belong to a ton of visual social networks anyway, I am more than happy to post things of interest to FFFFound, which get tweeted, and auto-post to Tumblr and basically let things sip inside the social net – a process which a friend called the ‘incestuous reality of any social network’. My hope is that through these networks the work which I believe to be important would at least gain a little bit of much deserved voice. This is what my passion lies: to do what I can to give a voice to the little guys – those whose voice were not heard mostly out of bigotry. I never had a voice when I was younger, and I wish for others that they could have the opportunity to be accepted.

I wanted to do this full time for a long time, but I could not while I was in New York. As an ’alien’ in America, I was bound by US law to work full time at a company. As such I joined a couple of startups whose philosophies appear to be in line with mine. Unfortunately, as investments come in and when revenue matters, so did their business plan. They were wonderful folks, but I cannot really work full time at a job which pays me no salary and are not inline with my philosophy. I am grateful and thankful for the experience – I have learned a lot, but I thought that it was time that I moved on and do my own thing. Having my own company allows me to do that. It doesn't really pay much right now. Starting from scratch is difficult. But you cannot measure value with a dollar sign. I have done a lot of freelance in the past in New York for lots of money but it never buys me happiness. I now only work on things which I believe to be meaningful regardless of pay. I am thankful for the support of my family to allow me the luxury to realize my dream. Conventional wisdom suggests that doing everything for free generates nothing in return, but my experience tells me that it is far from the truth. There are many things which could not be bought and those are most valuable. Even if we must focus on money, my experience with licensing everything for on my Flickr stream for free via Creative Commons suggests otherwise. It is a bit hard to believe but I actually made money from my CC content because people who had the budget for photography for their projects ended up giving me credits and send me cheques for photo placement. It's crazy. Those who couldn't afford to pay will never be able to pay anyway so what does it matter?

In any case, I still do some freelance projects on the side if it's meaningful to me. Money is not a measure of value for me. I prefer bartering – which before the concept of money was invented was how people do business anyway. I also hope to spend half of my time in the next 10 years documenting the change of China through photography as showing Chinese culture in a positive light is important to me. I may not agree with everything that the Chinese government is doing, but as a Chinese, I am proud of my culture. Which is exactly why I don't have an English name. You need not agree with the politics, but the people, the culture and the arts are really spectacular. I also hope to meet the local artists in my journey, as I have seen some really interesting things happening in contemporary art in China.

So there you have it. I am in Hong Kong now because after connecting all the dots of what I did in my life, I think that I have found out what I love to do and I want to do exactly that – which interestingly was the same conclusion that Steve Jobs came to while he was still alive.

Update: 2012-10-15

If you wish to learn more about how Creative Commons indirectly helped me gain influence on the social web, check out this article recently written about me where a photograph which almost got deleted from my camera ended up being the most popular photo on my Flickr stream and in turn became synonymous with Twitter when it comes to journalism.

Storyful tips and tools: How Creative Commons helps creators and journalists

SoundCloud = Innovative Social Network for Musicians

SoundCloud is a social network startup for musicians based in Berlin. Originally from Stockholm, the founders created the site after they have grown "tired of getting emails with YouSentIt links or FTP log-ins just to be able to check out [their] friends latest soon-to-be released tracks."

Just a couple of years ago, when you mention music and social networks, the first site that came to mind is MySpace. Yes, MySpace is a social network and they do put much weight on music and musicians, but MySpace fails to innovate beyond implementing comments + music player, and that is barely social. In this blog post I will go through the many innovations SoundCloud brought to the music scene and explain why I like it so much.

Innovation 1: Time-based comments

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Commenting is the backbone of every social network, but what SoundCloud provides which no one else did was time-based commenting. Each track on SoundCloud is displayed as a waveform, so you can visually see how the music looks like. You can leave a comment to the entire track, but most useful is to get feedback on a specific time segment on the track. Best of all, the UI automatically displays those comments when the playhead hits the time code, which is uber cool.

Innovation 2: Continuous playback of recent tracks from people you follow

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A really useful feature on SoundCloud is the ability to play all the tracks from people you follow. Most social networks for musicians tend to treat the musician as a social media object, and if you want to hear what's new, you need to browse the musician's page to hear his/her new songs. SoundCloud, on the other hand, treats each track as a social media object, and places all the tracks on the same page. Best of all, whenever you are on a page with multiple tracks, hitting the play button will play all the tracks on the same page one after another. Want to be forever entertained by great original music? Sign up an account, follow a bunch of people you like and voila!

Innovation 3: Push to other social networks

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SoundCloud has tight integration with other social networks. It currently supports integration with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. You can independently customize the message you want to send to push to the different networks, with the option to select whether or not to publish your own tracks and favorites. I push new tracks to Twitter + Facebook but to lower the noise level on my very active Twitter feed, I do not publish favorites to it. The customizable message is sweet as it allows me to hashtag my tweets more easily for data indexing and searching (which I now use extensively on Friendfeed).

Here's an official demo video so you can see this action:

Push to social networks by SoundCloud on Vimeo

Innovation 4: DropBox

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One of the most frustrating experience working with musicians and sound designers is sending large audio files back and forth. Do you put it on the FTP? Do you RapidShare? Host your own extranet? Creating custom and secured solutions are often costly, but SoundCloud made it easy with their DropBox. The DropBox enables everybody, even people who are not on SoundCloud, to share their tracks with you. The DropBox supports a versatile range of audio formats: AIFF, WAVE, FLAC, OGG, MP3 and AAC. Best of all, there is no file size limit to your uploads!

The embeddable widgets is written completely in html + css, which means that you can style it anyway you want, but the minimally designed stock widgets in both white and black fits in perfectly on any graphic design you already have.

See this in action:

The DropBox by SoundCloud on Vimeo

Conclusion

All in all I have had a very good experience on SoundCloud, and I have been recommending it to all my musician + sound designer friends. While SoundCloud intends to be a tool for musicians, it is also a really great way for music lovers who wish to discover indie music not found any where else. Because of the very active community and group participation, I am grateful to have met many great artists in Brooklyn as well as people around the world who are passionate about symphonic electronca.

If you are on SoundCloud, add me at http://soundcloud.com/seeminglee! :)

SoundCloud on the Web

+ http://soundcloud.com
+ Facebook: http://facebook.com/soundcloud
+ Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17862154200
+ Flickr: http://flickr.com/soundcloud
+ MySpace: http://myspace.com/soundcloudcom
+ Twitter: http://twitter.com/soundcloud

Facebook + Flickr + Vimeo + YouTube: Simulcasting videos on multiple social networks

I usually simulcast my videos on multiple video social networks: Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube. Many people ask me why I do this, so I thought that I would give give an analysis of these video networks, the pros + cons of posting to them, and the audience that they tend to attract.

Facebook

Screenshot: http://www.facebook.com/seeminglee?v=app_2392950137

Facebook is a closed network, so your Facebook friends will see your videos but if you intend your videos to be viewed by people who are not in your network, you are out of luck. While Facebook allow you to share the video with people outside of the network, it will never get indexed by search engines, so you will never get search traffic from it. This is good for personal videos, but for the sake of journalism / photojournalism it is possibly useless unless you have a very large following.

One benefit of posting to Facebook though is the people tagging feature. If your video is about a particular person, tagging them will auto-alert them so you don't have to let them know via emails. Additionally, if you tag the person who is also on Facebook, it will then get posted to that person's wall, which can potentially reach the friends of the person's Facebook friends, reaching an even larger audience.

Further, since your Facebook network is likely composed of people you actually know (compared to your Flickr / Vimeo / YouTube contacts who may likely be people you have never met in person, the likelihood of them checking it out is higher even if the video subject matter does not immediately interest them.

Flickr

Screenshot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/sets/72157622475325272/detail/

Most of my videos feature still photography, and since Flickr has traditionally been my social network stronghold (I have 3,000,000+ views on my stream), so it makes sense for me to post to Flickr. I could also link the still photography references in the description area so if someone sees something in the video that video that they would like to use per Creative Commons, they can find the source within the network.

Groups on Flickr are diverse and plentiful. This means that you can post your video to a very targeted audience, often outside of your existing social networks (aka contacts).

One annoying aspect of Flickr videos is that there is no way for you to set a thumbnail, so even if the thumbnail selected by the system is not the a good representation of your video, you are pretty much stuck with it.

There is a video duration posting limit on Flickr. Videos can be up to 1 minute and 30 seconds. If you post videos that are longer than that, they will be 'cropped' automatically. If your video is longer than 1:30, what you can do is post a 90-sec clip teaser / trailer on Flickr and then refer to your video posted on other network. I usually try to keep them all at the same length unless it is impossible to do it in a single go. This limitation has in fact got me to be a better video editor — constraints tend to drive better creativity. Sometimes the videos (mostly interviews) can be broken down into multiple parts anyway, and I post these clips separately. You might get a higher view anyhow as it's a lot to ask someone to sit through a 10-min video, but if someone like your first 1:30 clip, chances are they are more likely to check out the other video parts.

Vimeo

Screenshot: http://vimeo.com/channels/smlchannel

Vimeo provides many social features not found on other networks.

You can tag people who appear in the video, but you can also provide credits and set different roles for people who were involved in the production.

On Vimeo, you can reference still photography directly. If you provide your photo URLs, Vimeo will display those photos / stills from the video on the video page. This is helpful in cases where others wish to blog about your video or post to image sharing networks.

I wrote a bash script to facilitate this process more easily: flickr2vimeo (hosted on github). This is how it works: open up a Flickr page in your browser with all the images you wish to include. This may be a set page, photos from tags, whatever. Make a selection of of those photos and then view selection source, copy and paste those HTML in a file and run the script in your shell: it will then dishes out the comma-separated URLs that Vimeo requires. I am sure that there is a more elegant way of doing this, but it works for now. Eventually I would like to allow tag input or URL input so I won't have to do the selection source step - feel free to develop on top of it!

Vimeo requires your content to be original, and prohibits commercial postings, as such, there is a relatively large and active art / filmmaker following. So this is a network that you should definitely post to if you have contents in this area. Like Flickr, Vimeo has a diverse and committed community who participate in groups, and posting your videos to those groups will allow you to reach a larger and targeted audience more easily.

On top of your user page, it is very easy to create your own channels, albums, etc. If your videos are episodic, this is very beneficial as they get clustered nicely without additional navigation.

YouTube

Screenshot: http://youtube.com/seeminglee

If you wish to reach the largest audience on the Internet, YouTube is your best bet. YouTube is free and natively support HD content. Vimeo supports HD but you will have to pay extra for HD embedding. The same is true for Flickr.

YouTube is own by Google, so there is a very good chance that it will get indexed by Google servers almost instantly. If your video is time-sensitive, news-worthy or viral in any manner, it has high value as they also show up on Google web search results. Your videos will likely show up on Google video search as well. And while Google Video does index Vimeo and Flickr videos, the Google interface will not play those videos directly from the search results page. So again, if you are doing journalism / photojournalism and intend to reach the largest audience, YouTube is your friend.

One additional aspect regarding YouTube that is often overlooked is YouTube's partnership agreements with multiple mobile devices and consumer electronics. For example, Safari on the iPhone / iPod touch does not support the Flash player, so you can't really see video content on Vimeo, Flickr and Facebook natively. You can sometimes see video on Flickr and Facebook if you use their iPhone app, but on occasion they just won't play. I don't know if there are just kinks on those apps that the developers need to work out, but the YouTube app will play everything. YouTube's iPhone app also plays the highest quality video among others: the Flickr video in the Flickr app is often choppy and leaves much to be desired. YouTube on Apple TV is also top notched. HD videos is so much sexier on the 100" projector!

Facebook Network / 2009 / SML

Update 2009-10-14: The author of the program announced that the app is permanently shut down because of lack of resources to maintain it. They have published the source though. Get it while it's still up!

I revisited Nexus a week ago to check out how my Facebook network's topology has become now that I have made some new friends in the art and music scene. The interactive application is useful, but what interests me most is the forming of different clusters. Unfortunately, Nexus does not yet intelligently group these for you, so I took a screenshot of the result and did some visual mapping of the underlying cluster on Inkscape.


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The clusters are formed predominantly through the channel where I meet the folks:
+ Family and friends of family.
+ Sexual orientation: gay aka extended family.
+ Education: high school, college.
+ Professional: co-workers, clients, industry events.
+ Interests: art, music, photography.
+ Random: by chance meetings, dates, social networks like Flickr and Twitter.

What is important to note in this diagram is that it reveals the interconnectedness of relationships between your contacts.

Since I have spent a large part of my adult life working in interactive media in New York, most people that I know which forms the core of the diagram lies in the center of the graph. There is a separate cluster (green) which is fairly separate from the rest, from the network of friends living in Hong Kong.

There are interesting links moving from the interactive design world with the art and music world because it is not difficult to imagine the interconnectedness of the creative world. Some nodes do not connect with anyone else because I met them via social networks like Flickr and Twitter. These are folks I would not have met if not for those networks, so it is not hard to imagine that they likely would not have come in contact with the rest of my network universe either.

One feature that would have been nice is to see a time-lapse display of the graph changing over time.

The author of the program ludios on Flickr actually told me that he may implement an animated / temporal version of this program, but I guess he hasn't had time to get to that still after 17 months. :)

I don't really have time to hog in front of my computer to do screenshots of the program, but I did take some screenshots over time, so you can at least see the forming of the clusters. The image hosted on the Flickr contain notes if you wish to figure out where the clusters are forming (precisely the reason why I decided to map over it this time!)

2008-03-04: I just joined Facebook not too long before this so the hubs are mostly co-worker, but you will notice some fairly unconnected nodes, again, mostly from either being gay or people I met on Flickr.

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2008-04-16: 315 freinds. Small Hong Kong cluster on the right

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2009-01-11: the Hong Kong cluster is particularly pronounce in this one :)

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2009-09-01: same one as above so you can see the change

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Colophon
Created using Nexus with Facebook relationship data of See-ming Lee on 2009-09-01. Nexus is a Facbook network visualizer and can be found at nexus.ludios.net. Cluster mapping and infographics created using Inkscape.

Worldwide social network preferences by continent

The French newspaper LeMonde published a map on 2008-01-14 showing a divided world for social network preferences across the world.



Source: Le Monde.fr: Réseaux sociaux : des audiences différentes selon les continents

No clear winner here, though the front-runners are definitely Facebook, Orkut (Google) and MySpace (News Corp).

What is particularly surprising to me is Friendster is still alive and well—in South East Asia. This map does not represent Chinese social network sites though, which I think will likely tip the figures.

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

FriendFeed is now public

Friendfeed came out of private-beta and publicly launched today.



Friendfeed integrates with your friends' popular social destinations (e.g. del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter) and aggregates them in a single feed. It's all the things that you make Facebook addictive without the splur of application requests that annoys you.

One really cool feature of FriendFeed is the idea of imaginary friends. When you add an imaginary friend and hook up their user profile on other networks, their activities will get added to your friends' feed and you can enjoy the ambient voyeuristic addiction of your social sphere without the added guilt of spamming your friends to join yet-another network where you can be dumb-founded for explaining the networks' immediate benefits (think Twitter).

You can comment on any of your friends' items across all the sites. The comments you make are only visible to your friends, making it possible to discuss things among your own circle of friends on even the most popular items without the noise of the public Web that most won't want. I do wish however that FriendFeed would also post comments on the public web (particularly for Flickr).

I have been beta-testing this site since last year and I am very happy with it. Create your account and try it out!

Related SML Universe
+ SML FriendFeed
+ SML Network

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Notchup = Get paid to interview for jobs

At a time when you are getting bored with yet another social networking site with a professional twist following LinkedIn's success, Notchup joined the game with a truly innovative twist to the game: get paid of interview for jobs.

That's right folks: Notchup asks the companies to pay up for a time of you sitting in for an interview.



How much is your time worth? Apparently a whole lot. In fact, it looks like that I can possibly make a living out of going to job interviews.

Here's more: the company gives its users incentive to invite their friends who might be interested in other jobs: for each friend you invite, they'll pay you a bonus equal to 10% of what your friend earns on every interview they do for a year.

It sounds kind of like a pyramid scheme to me but I signed up anyway. We'll see what happens. Like Ziki, Notchup has a LinkedIn profile import option, which is very handy because who wants to enter yet another profile these days?

In my opinion, all network data ought to be stored on the user's end and an open API ought to be made available to import user data instead.

There's no direct profile linking yet and the site is fairly barebones--the news of its availability also appears to be causing some server load issues, but the idea is sound and I look forward to seeing how well it goes.

via email from Kit Latham (Flickr / SML Wiki)

Related SML Universe
+ SML LinkedIn
+ SML Network
+ SML Ziki

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

LinkedIn store now open

How do you make money off of social networking sites? Besides selling AdSense ads, here's another way to do it: open up a store and sell branded materials. Professional social networking site LinkedIn is doing just that. As I hook up with my 380th connection today on this popular site, I noticed this banner ad on the page:



which links you to the LinkedIn store. Right now the items are not very imaginative: but one can just imagine the magic of it all if they would allow customization. Something like See-ming Lee, proud LinkedIn user. Connect with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/seeminglee would attract customers like never before.

Truth be told, you don't even need a high-tech solution to do the job: You can do as as simple as giving people the option to write their URL or their name on a designated area with a water-proof marker (which can come with the shipped package) and people can create customize content by drawing directly on the t-shirt. That'd be fun!

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Social networking explained by CommonCraft

Folks from CommonCraft did it again. This time, they aim at explaining social networking to peeps in plain English:



The main focus of the video is the exploration of the core idea in network theory: "your weak links are your strong connection." The video suggests that social networks make these weak relationship apparent. Unless these applications allow an easier way to explore your friends' friends, I don't think that it is that apparent.

It does point out an important feature that most social network lacks: a way to explore your 2nd degree of separation, and perhaps your third. LinkedIn tries to do that by allowing users to only see profiles from people within your cluster. Most people don't realize that: of the 375 connections I have had on LinkedIn, that has only happened to me once, which felt really awkward to me at first, but after a while it was apparent what they were trying to do. Still a bit awkward.

SML Thank You
I would like to thank Olivia Lin, a video extraordinaire that I've only met on Facebook for sending me this wonderful video. When I finally meet Olivia in person, she would become a few handful of people who belong in my Life 2.0 circles--something which I have been drafting in my mind but never got my acts together to write about!

Related SML Universe
+ SML Facebook
+ SML Flickr
+ SML Network
+ SML Twitter

SML Copyright Notice
©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Zero Punctuation = Crazy = Good

So I was tweeting yesterday about the game called Orange Box and antikewl picked up my tweet and sent me to The Escapist, adding that Portal is worth the price alone. I was not surprised, given that I pretty much looked into buying this game based on the Gamespot review of it alone.

But this post is not about the Orange Box, because I haven't gotten it yet. This post is about this absolutely insane amount of information fired by Zero Punctuation:

This guy is funny + to the point + sarcastic + information-stuffed + crazy which equates to fantabulous in my dictionary. I don't think that I have yet experienced information-overload in this capacity before.

I am in awe.

Reviews of Orange Box at Gamspot
+ Gamespot: The Orange Box (PC)
+ Gamespot: The Orange Box (Xbox360)

SML Thank You
I would like to thank antikewl for being a fantastic Internet news correspondent from the UK. You rock! Much love :)

SML Friends
I met antikewl aka Trevor May when he was "shipped over" from London from IconMedialab (now LBi) to work on a global B2B content portal. Because of Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / Flickr and all these social networking goodies, we stayed in touch after almost 7 years now!

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

The Power of Tagging

If you are one of those people who simply don't see the point of tagging, here's a true story from a friend of mine who has become a recent Flickr-tagging convert.

I recently got Gregory Hull (Blog / Flickr / SML Wiki) into getting his Flickr account, and shortly after I noted that his photos are not tagged. A couple of emails later, he started tagging.

Greg posted this photo on 2007-10-28 onto Flickr and tagged it with dog, halloween, costume, tompkins-square and iPhone.


Source: Flickr: Gregory Hull: iPhone' halloween costume. © 2007 Gregory Hull

Two days later, he received an email from a newspaper from Chicago asking to see if they can publish his photograph, and the rest is history.

Now this little known artist from New York, who used to garden for Jasper Johns (Google), went from an unknown to being covered by hundreds of iPhone-related Web site:

• Gothamist: Pups on Parade at Tompkins Square Park
• Gizmodo: Halloween: Dog Dresses Up as iPhone for Halloween Celebration
• MAKE: Blog: Even dogs like iphones for halloween
• Textually.org: iPhone costume for dogs

The photo was posted 7 days ago, and so far it has already received 3,758 views and 12 favorites. It stunned him and most definitely stunned me! (While I have photos on Flickr that has received 15,000+ views, this photograph's views-accumulation rate is still a record I cannot possibly beat!)

Hopefully this will provide a glimpse into the magic of tagging to the next avid tagger. :)

Related SML Universe
+ SML Dogs

Skyrails = Social network visualization

I found this amazing 3d interactive visualization of social networks while browsing posts from my friends' friends' blogs on Facebook:



Skyrails is developed by Yose Widjaja (Google / SML Wiki). When he's not busy working on Skyrails, he writes Flash games. Very cool.

More information
+ Skyrails Blog: official blog by the author
+ Download Skyrails beta: PC only, one generation before the current release, published on 2007-10-10

Related SML Universe
+ SML Wiki: Social
+ SML Wiki: Network
+ SML Wiki: Visualization

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Maka-Maka = Google's Facebook

TechCrunh: Google's Response to Facebook: "Maka-Maka" / 2007-10-29

Highlights (SML transcription in semi-SML.SML syntax):

• Maka-Maka encompasses Google’s grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications.
• Google to "out open" Facebook with new APIs for developers to build apps for Orkut, iGoogle and eventually other applications as well.
• Google new APIs for social network expected announcement = November 8 or 9th
• Number of partners that have created apps on top of the APIs = 50
• Of the 24.6 million monthly visitors to Orkut, only 500,000 of those are in the U.S.
• Google should bring everything (Contacts in Gmail + Feeds in Google Reader + IM buddy list in Gtalk + Events in Google Calendar + Widgets in iGoogle) into a social application without your realization that you just joined another network.

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Microsoft Beats Google for Facebook Deal / WSJ

WSJ: 2007-10-24T16:48-04:00: Microsoft Inks Deal with Facebook

Wall Street Journal reports moments ago that Microsoft just agreed to invest $240 million for a minority stake at Facebook (Google). The companies have discussed a valuation for Facebook as high as $15 billion.

Google Vice President Tim Armstrong declined to comment on any Google discussions with Facebook.

User distribution for social networking sites by the end of 2007 - Research Data
Source: DataMonitor (Google)

• 35% = Asian
• 28% = Europe + Middle East +e Africa
• 25% = North America
• 12% = Caribbean

Related

• Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook / 2007-10-25 / New York Times
• Microsoft Pays $240 Million for Stake in Facebook / 2007-10-24 / Bloomberg
• Google News Launches Facebook Application / 2007-10-20 / Slashdot

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Facebook SocialAds = Advertising + Social Network Data / AdAge

Advertisers and agencies in New York are invited to an event held on 2007-11-06 with Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook executive team as they unveil a "new way of advertising online."

The exact details are not disclosed, but Advertising Age speculates that it may have something to do with "SocialAds", a term which Facebook traemarked on 2007-09-24, which is described as "advertising and information distribution services, namely, providing advertising space via the global computer network [and] promoting the goods and services of others over the internet."

Read the full article here:
Facebook Set to Introduce Major Ad Play: Social Network Could Unveil 'SocialAds' at NYC Event Next Month by Abbey Klaassen / 2007-10-23 / Advertising Age

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Gender Behavior Differences on Social Networks / Advertising Age

Advertising Age recently did its annual survey on college students and found that there is a significant split in social-networking activities between sexes.

Gender behavior split on social networks
Stylistic edits are mine

• Facebook ranked as the most popular website among the 18-to-24 set
• Social networking was twice as popular with young women as young men
• MySpace, which was No. 1 last year, ranked No. 2 with females but dropped out of the top five for young men
• That means marketers using social-networking sites to target young people are reaching far more females than males
• Men are far more likely to use social-networking sites for business purposes such as LinkedIn

Male college students + UGC / Community

• While their tech savvy showed, particualrly among men who ranked Digg and Engadget among their top 10 websites, they didn't make the leap to consumer-generated media.
• Only 8% said they had uploaded videos to YouTube
• 64% don't make videos at all
• 14% don't share them with anyone
• 75% surf social-networking sites
• 71% read news online
• Only 14% write blogs

Popularity Contest
College students' favorite brands

Source: Anderson Analytics

Advertising Age: 2007-10-04: Apple, Target, Facebook Tops for College Students
Read full article online

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Corporate Social Networks / Business Week

The Water Cooler Is Now on the Web: With a nod to Facebook, large companies are starting in-house social networks / 2007-01-01 / Business Week / pp.78-79

Statistics

• Share of employees at large companies who say they contribute regularly to blogs, social networks, wikis and other Web 2.0 Services = 20%
• Number of professionals on LinkedIn = 13 million
• Starcom MediaVest Group’s internal network = SMG Connected
• Number of SMG Connected Users = 2,060 = 1/3 of the comapny's workers
• Number of Ernst & Young (Google) workers with Facebook accounts = 11,000
• Number of users on KPMG Alumni network = 10,000 former and current employees
• KPMG (Google) credits 14% of total hires to their alumni network
• Estimated time saved by the Film Foundation (Google) to create educational materials for schools = 50%

Benefits of social networks

• Efficient way to mine for in-house expertise
• Discover new recruits
• Share information within businesses' own walls
• Reduce time spent mailing documents and e-mailing comments

The Fear of being open

• CIOs from large companies, especially financial institutions such as Citigroup (NYSE:C) and Lehman Brothers (NYSE:LEH), block employee access to public social networks for fear of losing control of information in response to the “open” ethos of the social Net
• Accounting firms ensure members don't provide tax or accounting advice through their networks in order to comply to regulatory / disclosure issues
• Awareness tracks network posts and sends potentially inflammatory words into “moderation boxes” to be reviewed by a manager.

Corporate Social Network Platforms

• introNetworks (Google)
• Jive Software (Google)
• IBM Lotus Connections (Google)
• Microsoft SharePoint (Google)
• SelectMinds (Google)

Read the full article on BusinessWeek.com: The Water Cooler Is Now on the Web: With a nod to Facebook, large companies are starting in-house social networks / 2007-01-01 / BusinessWeek.com

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Sexual Relationship Database = World Health Optimization Management

In the his book titled Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi suggested that:

[AIDS] must have followed the route already spotted in the spread of innovation and computer viruses: Hubs are among the first infected thanks to their numerous sexual contacts.

...The scale-free topology at AIDS’s disposal allowed the virus to spread and persist.

...Whereas the early spread of AIDS was attributed primarily to homosexual sex, today heterosexual sex is the leading means of transmission. As we’ve established, hubs play a key role in these processes. Their unique role suggests a bold but cruel solution: As long as resources are finite we should treat only the hubs. That is, when a treatment exists but there is not enough money to offer it to everybody who needs it, we should primarily gives it to the hubs.

...The problem is that we do not know for sure who the hubs are.

SML Reference: Barabasi. Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life. pp 138-139 (Google Books)

Analyzing the sex web is a huge undertaking.

Whereas most will be happy to disclose their personal or professional relationships using sites like Facebook, Friendster or LinkedIn, few would be readily compelled to disclose personal information about their sex life.

Finding out the topology of sex is important in the ever-changing web of human existence, however. So it is not at all surprising that a scientific research tool called Sexual Relationship Database was created.

According to the Website, the World Health Optimization Management created the project “in an effort to better understand society’s interconnected nature.” For this project, a sexual partner is defined “as a human with whom a person has had oral, anal or vaginal sexual contact.”

Like the Wikipedia, anyone may edit the sexual histories. To ensure accuracy of the study, the organization requires that users log in with a valid email address. They also reserve the right to ban users who knowingly provide false information.

Here is a map of the sex web of a few celebrities to get you started:

• Brad Pitt


• Britney Spears


• Paris Hilton

Related Blog Posts

• SML Pro Blog: Innovation = Synergy of existing ideas


• SML Pro Blog: Product Space + Wealth of Nations = Visualizing Economics


• SML Pro Blog: Sex


• SML Pro Blog: SML SEO = See-ming Lee + Search Engine Optimization

Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee (SML Pro Blog) / SML Research. All rights reserved.

Socialistics = Facebook + Analytics

Alex Rainert (Blog / Google / LinkedIn) sent me an interesting Facebook application called Socialistics today and it looks fairly interesting.

Essentially, it's an analytics application that visualizes the raw data from your Facebook profile as readable charts. Mashable has a write-up on this, but I felt that their illustration does not do a very good job in showing the power of this application.

I took some screenshots of the application using my Facebook data and this is what it looks like:

SML Facebook + Socialistics / 2007 / SML Analytics (Flickr Set: Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow)

Hopefully this will do better justice for this little gem!

SML Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee (Blog / Google / LinkedIn) / SML Analytics. All rights reserved.