4. UNDERSTANDING SNS: THE ARCHITECTURE OF SOCIAL NETWORK SERVICES (SNS)

In Chapter two we have explored a wide range of different behaviours linked to social networking and in Chapter three we have drawn out a number of principles for social network-aware communication from this survey of behaviour and a survey of how organisations are already engaging with SNS. In this chapter we take a broader look at the relationship between technological platforms, and their social impacts, seeking to highlight further key considerations that the communicator must have in mind when approaching social networking based communication.

Social networking tools range from those like the South African MxIT mobile phone-based instant messaging and group messaging tool which allow their users to manage their own social networking activities by keeping in touch with friends more easily and cheaply; through to full social network services like Orkut and Facebook, which are based explicitly around the idea of a centrally maintained, digitally stored and navigable network of people, media, conversations and other content accessible because it is stored digitally, sometimes in one network but, increasingly, accessible across networks and Internet platforms..

The features that are available in different social networking tools significantly affect the way their users behave and the potential opportunities for success in different communication approaches. The table below shows how some of the technical and feature set differences between text messaging (SMS) platforms, instant messaging, Chatrooms and Social Network Sites (SNS) affect the forms of social interaction that they support.

SMS or Phone	Instant Messaging e.g. MxIT	Chatrooms & Forums e.g. Hi5	Social Network Sites
Users have a phone number which they give to anyone who wants to contact them.	Users have an IM name and they create a mutual friend connection with people they want to talk to.	There is a persistent 'chat' or 'forum' space which users choose to visit. Their messages may remain in that space after they leave it.	Users create a public or semi-public profile and link to others by making mutual friend connections . Others can browse the connections. An action feed keeps a user informed of the messages and media their friends have posted.
Text messages are sent to a particular individual. Each additional person contacted adds additional cost. You have to explicitly choose who to share what information with. You don't know if the person who you message has their phone on them. It cots for the person you message to reply.	Messages are sent to particular individuals selected from a contact list which shows who is currently available and who is not. It is possible to add multiple people from your contact list to an ad-hoc group discussion, or to create ongoing discussion groups. You only pay for the costs of connection / data transfer – far cheaper than an SMS.	Messages can be posted in a shared space of synchronous & asynchronous discussion around a given topic, or in order to meet new people. You can watch the conversations taking place between people you do not already know, and you can start private conversations with these people also. You can post messages without having a set idea of who will read them – but expecting other current participants to read them.	Messages and media can be posted to your own profile page. Using privacy settings this can be public, accessible to selected friends, or to friends of friends (who may be strangers to you). The network will show your latest updates to your friends in an action feed along with the updates of all their other friends. You post messages and media knowing that people in your 'network' may see them. It is possible to browse the network, from person to person – seeing who is friends with whom – and who has posted what.
Messages are exchanged for: organising; asking short questions of particular friends; expressing ideas, views or feelings to a particular chosen friend. You don't always expect a reply. Group conversations are rare. Conversations end up being one-to-one and are personal or transactional in nature.	Messages are exchanged with people who you can see are online and only and free to talk creating more opportunities for 'chat' and informal conversation. Conversations can be private and personal, or can be group conversations following the norms, dynamics and patterns of a groups offline discussion.	Messages are posted to discuss topics, or for individuals who did not already know each other to get to know each other. The possibility of anonymity and the existence of private chat rooms may support deeply personal discussions between friends and strangers. Users may feel ownership over the chat room space. New users can be invited to the space.	Messages are posted to public/semi-public spaces to share something of interest, to spark discussions, to share information & to relive shared experiences. Users can comment on each others shared messages and media. You can 'overhear' other conversations taking place between friends and people you don't know. New conversations and contact can be formed with 'friends of friend's. Loosely bounded group conversations can form, and users can keep weakly in touch with a large number of friends and acquaintances.

Even once we have identified the potential user behaviours and forms of communication supported by different social networking tools, we need to understand the further diversity within different social networking services. Communicators are often used to considering which channels to use to reach a given target audience. SNS can be understood as channels, but also, more importantly, they can be understood as platforms on which a range of activities take place and as locations of interaction between groups and communities.

Whilst a large number of a communicator's target audience may be using a particular social tool, each of those individuals will be operating in and engaging with very different aspects of the network, from their own private view of the network (linked to a profile) through to a wide range of different public and semi-public communities, groups and media-sharing spaces.

The majority of social network services do a lot more than just allow individuals to have a profile and a friends list; they build upon and integrate many prior communication tools and technologies (e.g. e-mail like messaging, instant messaging, and video sharing). This inheritance of characteristics means communicators must similarly mix traditional communication strategies with newer approaches. As SNS introduce new forms of communication they can change the way that their users experience older forms of communication. For example, social video sharing affects the video content users consume, and the ability to comment on and rate videos, and to see the comments left by friends, can change a user’s experience of video watching.

We can trace a trajectory of communication technologies from the emergence of digital communication through to the modern social network service.

• Digitising communication allowed it to become faster, global, asynchronous and replicable (minimal marginal cost of taking a copy). Digital tools allow for new forms of measurement and analysing communication. Digital tools enable ordinary people and specialists alike to intermingle different forms of media promiscuously.
• The early Internet, now referred to as Web 1.0, significantly lowered the cost of publishing content to a global audience. Anyone with a connection could read content and traverse manually created links between items of content. The content of websites was generally still controlled by the individual, company or organisation that had created it. A set of software tools were developed for contributing content, using new standards for information and data exchange.  E-mail and instant messaging tools made it possible to keep in touch with existing contacts, and forum and chat- room spaces made it possible to discover and temporarily interact with new people or groups.
• Web 1.0 has been followed by the emergence of Web 2.0⁴⁵ which allows anyone with a connection to write as well as read. Online publishing tools have been massively simplified and the cost of publishing to a global audience has collapsed. High-powered search, user controlled content-tagging to supplement formal classifications, and user-generated content have all emerged to make it far easier to navigate topic-driven, or even person-driven cross sections of the web. Rather than surfing around a single site for information on a given topic, users hop from site-to-site, or find that content is brought together from many different sources and sites and is presented to them seamlessly.
• The pace at which content is published has accelerated even more, and context is not static, but is contained within “flows” of media.⁴⁶ Web 2.0 has supported the emergence of social media, in which individuals and organisations can easily publish media, discuss it online and in which media objects can act as loci for people to connect, converse and network.
• The Social Web and SNS build upon Web 2.0.  By making the social object not an item of media but a personal profile, they shift the online experience from one of consuming and contributing content to one of participating in a shared space with friends and contacts. Individual people and their online interactions are captured as published content on the web in a way that allows content and people-as-content to be traversed through social, rather than thematic or editorially curated links. Virtually everything is read-write with space for added meta-data and comments. New categories of communication spanning broadcast, narrowcast and private messaging are created.

Within SNS new forms of communication have developed. In particular, the individual status update. SNS such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Orkut all allow their users to post a short limited length message sharing what they are doing or how they are feeling. These messages are made visible to friends of the user in action feeds. That status message is both a tool for self-expression and sharing many small nuggets of context-specific social information (“Tim is elated after hearing the news about the project”), and a tool for starting discussions or sharing information that a user feels may be of interest to his or her  friends/network (“Tim would welcome your input into a research project on Social Network Sites and AIDS communication”). Most SNS allow for status updates to be commented upon.

A generation of SNS based predominantly around status updates have recently emerged, most prominent amongst them Twitter , (cloned in Nigeria by Naja Pulse). With Twitter  – where a user's presence within the service consists of a very short profile and a flow of status update messages -- users of the service choose to follow other users.  But Twitter  does not require the connection to be mutual (note that most traditional SNS explored above have some form of mutual connection). Users can use their status update messages to reply to others using a simple convention of messaging with @username at the start of the message. It is possible to traverse the network and explore who is connected to whom, both by looking at who an individual follows or is followed by, or by looking at who is replying to whose update messages.

However, as a platform that is open by default, in contrast to other SNS, Twitter  widens the number of people who view the status update. It has, therefore, also become a micro-blogging platform where people post links to interesting news, content and projects as well as a promotional channel for organisations and products

Most SNS also include a wide range of other features, both built into the platforms directly and provided by third-party applications. These can plug into and use the information the network holds about an individual’s friendship network. Features commonly found in SNS include tools for organising events, sharing photos and videos, joining interest-based groups (often with individuals outside your immediate friendship network), playing games and accessing information sources.

For example, the Make Your Mark application on Facebook, created by a youth entrepreneurship charity, allows its users to share ideas about issues they want to create change on. By drawing on the social graph from Facebook it can show its users ideas that any of their friends have already suggested, using the application, without them having to tell the application about their friends. The application adds to the underlying network in order to connect people around issues and causes.

This ability of applications to draw on pre-existing information that users have given to the social network about their friends is very significant. It both opens up a range of risks to users (unscrupulous applications could exploit this information) but also a wide range of opportunities. For example, a user is far more likely to adopt a given applications if they can see that their friends are already using it.

As well as allowing features and tools developed by third-parties to be added to their platforms, a number of major SNS providers (Facebook, Google) are allowing aspects of their SNS to be layered on top of other websites and Internet-connected services (such as digital TV and mobile services) meaning that SNS users can take their digital identity with them across a wide range of online spaces and platforms, sharing content, conversation and information from a wide range of different places with their friends.

For example: If I sign a petition or buy a product on a website using Facebook Connect, I may be presented with the option of posting a message saying I have done this back to my Facebook profile. This potentially alerts all my friends to the petition or product, with only one click from me.

SNS do not wholly replace old-media and existing forms of communication. However, they can lead to both new formats for old media, and new ways in which older forms of media are produced, distributed and consumed.

• News headlines and content can be fed into SNS and can be shared by users.  They may be more likely to spread on the basis of a user seeing that a friend is interested in a particular news story than they are to spread on the basis of users subscribing to a given news source or topic of interest.
• Video can be published through many SNS and media-driven SNS such as YouTube often include significant quantities of professional broadcast video content. However, the content is usually reduced to clip-form, with advertising breaks removed – and users come to expect the right to comment on & interact with the content.
• Many SNS allow for online advertising through text and banner adverts. Because they have access to significant quantities of demographic data from users’’ profiles they can often offer highly targeted advertising. (For example, on Facebook you can target users based on location, age, interests, relationship status and language). SNS are also introducing concepts of social advertising where an individual's response to an ad is shared with their friends, potentially creating a buzz around an issue.
• Word-of-mouth or street-team style marketing can take place within SNS but the presence of privacy controls, the social norms, and the existence of a public or semi-public digital trail for each street team marketer changes the nature and norms appropriate for this form of engagement. For example, in some contexts it may be more difficult for an outreach worker to approach people hanging out in the SNS space as privacy controls may prevent the outreach worker messaging individuals, or users may quickly delete unsolicited messages. The outreach worker will then need to find the right spaces and sorts of approach to engage with those hanging out in virtual space.

Users of SNS do not necessarily abandon old patterns of media consumption. Many still enjoy broadcast television or newspapers. However, their consumption of old media is dropping overall⁴⁷ and their remaining old-media consumption is conditioned by their experience of SNS (for example, wanting more opportunities to participate and feedback on broadcast TV).

Amplifiers of action

The degree to which individuals have access to social networking tools in different countries of the world and in different socio-economic contexts varies. Chapter 5 will explore levels of access to SNS in different countries and contexts across the world. However, it is useful to set the specific variations in SNS usage in the context of wider conceptual frameworks which help us understand the impact of social networking tools.

The network effect matters.

The more people who are present within a network and the larger the number of them who are willing to share information and the larger the number of non-overlapping friends they have to share that information with – the more rapidly and the wider it is likely to spread. The gain in potential for a message to spread within the network (and the increase in uncertainty about how far it will in fact spread) does not grow steadily with the growth of the network – but can follow a pattern more akin to exponential growth depending on the structure of the network.

The value is in the network.

The value of a social networking tool to a user depends upon it linking them into a network which is meaningful to them. At present most SNS are relatively limited in their interoperability; a user’s choice of network or tool will often depend on which network their friends, or the people/profiles they wish to connect with, are using. SNS users may have profiles on more than one network in order to communicate with different (but often overlapping) groups of friends, or in order to operate in different contexts (e.g. personal / professional). The choice of network by members of existing friendship groups or communities may depend on the network chosen by the early-adopters or influential individuals in that group/community.

SNS increase the velocity and persistence of information.

Social networking tools can both speed up communication and information flows, and make information and conversations more persistent and long-lasting. Many recent news stories have broken first through the SNS Twitter, spreading in a matter of minutes across the world, and sparking a myriad of overlapping conversations about the news.

SNS are as much about localising as they are about globalising.

Whilst SNS can act as a globalising force, shrinking time and distance, they can also be a hyper-localising force – keeping neighbours who are connected via SNS in touch with each other's status updates and shared media – and leading to online communities and networks that map onto very tight local geographic communities and local areas/.

SNS lower the burdens off organising group activities.

Features of SNS such as groups and events can make organising activity amongst large and small, local, national and international groups far easier. Shirky highlights how Internet technologies in general lower the transaction costs for group action and coordination.  SNS are a key part of this. SNS can also facilitate emergent organisation; where the combination of easy-to-join groups and information spreading through updates shared automatically with the friends of individuals who join a group can lead to the rapid articulation of a constituency around an issue.

SNS can impact on the distribution of power and influence.

Professor Bill Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute has talked about the role of the Internet in reconfiguring access to information, people and resources and the potential impact of this on the communicative power (and as a result political influence) of individuals, groups and nations .. In so far as SNS can act to increase the supply of information about political decisions to citizens, and in their ability to connect previously unconnected or co-ordinated groups, they can play a role in this reconfiguration of access and power. This said, if the networks within SNS mirror offline insider and outsider networks of power or cliques, then SNS can be less conducive to this redistribution than other online tools and spaces. However, it is crucial to recognise in either case that SNS can play a political role.

SNS are involved in remaking key social concepts.

Concerns about an abandonment of privacy are often raised when observers explore how SNS users, particularly young people, share, via online publicly accessible spaces, information that may have historically been considered private information. Similar concerns are raised about how SNS users may use the term ‘friend’ to refer to people who they have never met and who they only know online. It is clear that SNS impacts upon concepts of both privacy and friendship, and that it will impact upon other shared social concepts. These concepts are being re-negotiated in light of new technologies of communication, particularly SNS. It is perhaps useful, by analogy, to look to how notions of celebrity and the privacy of celebrities were re-negotiated in an era of multi-channel TV and low cost glossy magazines as opposed to an age of black and white newspapers.

SNS create new models of metrics, measurement and evaluation.

SNS provide new opportunities for measuring the impact of communication strategies – adding to the previous generation of quantifiable metrics (how many times has an advert or item of media been seen, clicked, downloaded, shared) the ability to “listen” to conversations taking place on a particular topic in public and semi-public online spaces.

SNS are not standing still.

SNS are constantly evolving, both with the creation of new services, and due to regular updates and developments of the existing major services. The SNS of today are significantly different from those we were using just 12 months ago, and there is no sign that the pace of change is likely to slow significantly.

SNS are increasingly mobile.

Mobile Phones are both a new platform and a driver for change. In markets where smart phones are becoming the norm, they are being used to access social network services. The simple, “what are you doing now” message of Twitter (and status updates in SNS) is tailor made for browsing and contributing on the move. At the same time phones already incorporate functions to assist location finding services, and these are being integrated into services such as SNS, increasing the connection between physical and virtual world networking.

In chapters five and six we look in more detail at the technical and economic trends that impact the growth and use of SNS. We also reflect on some of the patterns in global use suggested by the research.

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