On Thursday 18 April 2013 the University of Oxford’s Facebook page reached one million ‘likes’. The University took this opportunity to promote a video they had made when it became clear that they were approaching this figure:

Wow! Our Facebook page has more than one million likes. Many thanks for following us! Have you seen our Twitter page @UniofOxford too? Here is a special thank you video from us – why not share this video with your friends and see how quickly we can get to two million! http://youtu.be/uYNOgWgb-5E

Monitoring Weak Signals

As part of my work for the JISC Observatory I have an interest in observing weak signals which can help to spot technological developments at an early stage which may turn out to have a significant impact across the sector.

It was back in May 2007 when I wrote a post entitled Something IS Going On With Facebook! which highlighted “the announcement of Facebook’s F8 platform – a development which lets users embed other services inside their pages in Facebook“.

In November 2007 I post entitled UK Universities On Facebook described how “A Facebook search for organisations containing the word ‘university’ revealed (on Friday 9 November 2007) a total of 76 hits which included, in alphabetical order, the following UK Universities: Aston, Cardiff, Kent and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan)“.

For a period of several years I monitoring growth in use of Facebook, focussing on the Russell Group universities in order to have a manageable sample to analyse. The accompanying blog posts were Use of Facebook by Russell Group Universities (January 2011), Is It Time To Ditch Facebook, When There’s Half a Million Fans Across Russell Group Universities? (September 2011) and Survey of Institutional Use of Facebook (May 2012) with the final survey in August 2012 which recorded Over One Million ‘Likes’ of Facebook Pages for the 24 Russell Group Universities capturing a snapshot the day after the numbers of Russell Group universities had grown from 20 to 24 institutions.

It was the final post in which I realised that the most significant growth in Facebook likes was taking place at the University of Oxford, as can be seen from the accompanying image.

Implications

What are the implications of the popularity of Facebook at the University of Oxford for the wider community?

I hope we have moved away from the instinctive dismissive of Facebook for reasons such as “It’s not open source“, “It’s a walled garden” and the strange arguments that we sometimes encounter in the sector: “It’s popular but so is the Daily Mail” and “It’s popular, but so was MySpace and look what happened to it“.

Some questions which may be appropriate to ask include:

• What benefits can be gained by institutional use of Facebook?
• What level of resources should be allocated to managing institutional use of Facebook?
• What ROI can be gained from institutional use of Facebook?

I appreciate that some people feel very uncomfortable with the notion of ROI in an educational context? But since students are now paying £9,000 per year we need to acknowledge that going to university is a significant financial investment for students, with the provision of the leaning experience also clearly having significant costs. Understanding cost effective ways of engaging with students, listening to students, supporting informal learning, etc. will therefore be important.

There is also a need, I feel, to embrace what could be regarded as a ‘post-digital’ perspective on social media, in which the important issues shouldn’t address the technical aspects of services, but their relevance as part of the accepted infrastructure.

Issues such as the institution’s brand value on such services then become relevant. It is then appropriate to see what can be learnt from the commercial sector’s valuation on Facebook.

A post entitled “Facebook Fan value rises 28% since 2010” was published yesterday by BizReport which described how:

Fans of brands on Facebook have significantly upped their worth over the past three years, according to new figures released by social media marketing firm Syncapse, with some brands averaging Fan values in the thousands of dollars.

and went on to provide estimated values:

Fashion brand Zara’s Fans are worth over $405.54, found the research, followed by Levis at $312.01. Meanwhile, the value of Coca-Cola Fan is relatively low at $70.16.

In his tweet which alerted me to this people Dion Hinchcliffe gave a caveat:

Tho’ fans are just 1 measure of #socbiz value & not a good one.

How then can we measure the value of an institution’s Facebook page? What should we make of the (public) analytics for the University of Oxford’s Facebook page which tell us that as of Monday 22 April 2013 there are:

• 1,002,967 like for the page. 
• 7,794 people are talking about the page.
• 9 December 2012 was the most poplar week (why was this?).
• The most poplar age group are 18-24 year old.

In order to enable others with responsibilities for managing institutional Facebook presences to be able to compare their experiences, discuss operational practices and, perhaps, develop mechanisms for helping to measure ROI and allocate appropriate levels of resources, at this year’s IWMW 2013 event there will be a birds-of-a feather session on “Institutional Use of Social Media Services“.

I hope this session will be of interest to those who, perhaps quietly, are using Facebook to engage with potential students, have conversations with current students (and staff) and, perhaps, looking at enhance use of Facebook.

In order to inform the session a simple survey has been set up which aims to gain feedback on respondents views on institutional use of Facebook. The form is embedded below or can be accessed on the PollDaddy Web site.

The “A million likes: how big is a million?” Video

The video produced by the University of Oxford is available on YouTube and is embedded below.

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

Yesterday Twitter announced Vine: A new way to share video. As described in a TechCrunch article “[Vine] integrates with Twitter in the same way that Instagram does, except that Vine never turned off permissions randomly, meaning that Vine videos can be embedded directly in tweets, showing up in followers’ streams“. An article in the Guardian explains how “Vine clips automatically play when embedded in tweets, although their sound is turned off by default. The clips also play within Twitter’s official mobile app. Users can add locations to their clips – the app draws on Foursquare’s places database for that – with three options for sharing: Vine, Twitter and/or Facebook.” The Guardian article instantly attracted comments on how Vine might be (mis-used):

• Sexting app
• Advert app
• oh no it’s the video equivalent of gifs, twitter is gonna become as annoying as tumblr is with these.

although others provided more thoughtful responses:

As with everything, it’s all about how you leverage the technology. 
Yes, for the most part, this app will feature videos of no importance whatsoever, but there will, as always, be some gems in the dirt.

Leaving that aside, you have to remember that with Twitter, many people end up forming a close circle of people they meet physically in the real world – so Twitter augments that. 
I don’t give a damn about someone I’ve never mets photo of their dog on twitter, but I do care if a friend of mine posts a picture of their dog.

The same applies to tweeting – to most people, the “Did xyz run in xyz area this morning, totally knackered” is completely meaningless and banal. But to this persons friends, it’s likely to promote conversation when they next meet. “Saw your tweet Dave, how was the run down at xyz? Did a run there recently” …

So, before you instantly dismiss tech such as this, perhaps give it a *little* more thought?

I would agree that we should give a little more thought to the implications of new technologies, especially their potential in higher education.

Initial Experiments

Earlier today I installed the Vine app on by iPod Touch and recorded a number of video clips. I asked what could be said in 6 seconds (partly to get a feel for what could be said in such a brief period. In my second video clip I said “E=MC² and the DNA is a double helix” to illustrate how important scientific concepts could be described using the Vine app. By then I had gained some familiarity with the app. In my third post I described what I liked about the app: being able to stop and start reshooting by simply removed my finger for the screen. My four post described what I didn’t like – the lack of support for the iPod Touch’s forward-facing camera.

I then started to write this post – and discovered that I couldn’t find the URL for the video clips I had created and uploaded to Vine. I can view the videos using the Vine app and people who follow me on Vine will see the videos in their Vine timeline but it seems as though they are not available via a Web interface; this was confirmed by Giles Turnbull, one of my Twitter followers who is also experimenting with Vine: “only way to find out the URL of your Vine post is to share it somewhere. if you choose not to share, or forget, you can’t find it on the web“.

I therefore created another clip which is available online. However there does not appear to be a Web interface to my Vine profile, so I can’t access my clips via a Web browser in order to change access rights, delete videos, manage Vine followers, etc.

Perhaps it is unfair to be too critical of the limitations of the initial release of the app: these short=-comings may be remedied in a subsequent release. However I thought I would summarise my initial experiments for others who may wish to evaluate the app. And rather than describe possible use cases for 6-second long video clips in higher education I’d welcome suggestions. If you’d rather not describe possible uses, perhaps you may wish to complete the poll on whether you think Vine has a role to play in higher education.

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [Bit.ly]

Yesterday my Twitter stream was full of tweets about Facebook’s announcement that they were Introducing Graph Search Beta - and this morning the headline Facebook’s Search for Supremacy featured on the front page of the Metro newspaper.

The significance of this announcement can be gauged by the BBC news headline: Facebook’s Graph targets Google in which Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent, describes how his initial scepticism may have been misplaced: “If [Facebook's] Graph Search more closely resembles what Bing describes, then users will be able to stay on Facebook, earning the company huge advertising revenues as they search for goods and services“.

A TechCrunch article which asks “What Can You Search For On Facebook Graph Search?” has focussed on the social aspects of this development (dating, finding places to eat and drink, etc.). But what could Facebook’s new search system offer researchers?

What Does The Evidence Tell Us?

Importance of Evidence

Although people may be tempted to be instinctively dismissive of any developments to Facebook, as described in a paper on “What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” (available in PDF and MS Word formats)” involvement with work of the Jisc Obervatory has led to a greater emphasis on evidence-gathering. In addition the Jisc Inform article which announced “A Bright Future for Independent Jisc in 2013” described how a greater emphasis for development work will be based on the needs of the institutions. There will therefore be a need to gather evidence on how Facebook is being used across UK higher and further educational institutions in order to understand whether Facebook developments can enhance uses of made of Facebook to support institutional activities.

Institutional Use of Facebook

Facebook ‘Likes’ Across Russell Group Universities

Back in November 2007 a post on UK Universities On Facebook provided early evidence of use of Facebook by early adopters, when there were only about 76 universities with a Facebook presence. A year later a post on Revisiting UK University Pages On Facebook started to keep a record of Facebook usage by the early institutional adopters. More recently a post on Over One Million ‘Likes’ of Facebook Pages for the 24 Russell Group Universities provided an indication of the scale of use of Facebook across a selection of UK universities.

This might suggest that the enhanced searching techniques announced yesterday may be relevant for those involved in university marketing activities, although there may be some interesting privacy issues to be addressed.

But beyond use of Facebook by students, what about its potential to support researchers?

Use of Facebook by Researchers

As described in a post of The Sixth Anniversary of the UK Web Focus Blog Facebook is “in third place behind Search Engines and Twitter in referring traffic to this blog” (as illustrated). This suggests that Facebook may have a role to play in supporting dissemination activities for bloggers. But does Facebook have any relevance for enhancing the dissemination of research papers, beyond the indirect dissemination which research blogs may provide?

A year ago a post entitled Facebook and Twitter as Infrastructure for Dissemination of Research Papers (and More) described the SpringerLink mobile app.

Earlier today I used the app to search for papers on ‘Web Accessibility. As illustrated a relevant paper can be shared across my professional networks using Twitter or Facebook as well as sharing with selected individuals using email.

As I described in the blog post “the Springlink app suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be becoming part of the dissemination infrastructure for research papers, especially on mobile devices“. But is there any evidence that researchers are using Facebook, in particular, to facilitate access to research papers?

Back in October 2012 a series of guest blog posts were published during Open Access Week 2012 in order to share the experiences of a number of institutional repository managers. In the posts on SEO Analysis of WRAP, the Warwick University Repository by Yvonne Budden, University of Warwick and on SEO Analysis of LSE Research Online by Natalia Madjarevic, LSE there was no evidence that Facebook was a significant driver of traffic to the two repositories, according to the MajesticSEO tool used to carry out the analyses. This was echoed by William Nixon in his post on SEO Analysis of Enlighten, the University of Glasgow Institutional Repository. William described how:

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter don’t appear in these initial results, it may be because the volume is insufficient to be ranked here or there may be breach of service issues. Google Analytics now provides some social media tools and we have been identifying our most popular papers from Facebook and Twitter.

Reading William’s post on the Enlighten blog it seems:

Looking at the data for the past year the following papers have had significant numbers of referrals from Facebook:

van Dommelen, P., Gómez Bellard, C., and Pérez Jordà, G. (2010)Produzione agraria nella Sardegna punica fra cereali e vino. In: Milanese, M., Ruggeri, P., Vismara, C. and Zucca, R. (eds.) L’Africa Romana. I Luoghi e le Forme dei Mestieri e della Produzione nelle Province Africane (Atti del XVIII Convegno di Studio, Olbia, 11-14 Dicembre 2008). Series: L’Africa Romana (18). Carocci, Rome, Italy, pp. 1187-1202. ISBN 9788843054916. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/48143/

Cockshott, W.P., and Zachriah, D. (2012) Arguments for Socialism.Amazon. ISBN B006S2LW6U. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/58987/

So at this stage it would appear that this is little evidence that Facebook has a significant role to play in enhancing access to papers hosted in institutional repositories. But are the experiences from these three institutional repositories typical across the sector? Might the early adopters, such as P van Dommelen and W. P. Cockshot and their co-authors be gaining advantages in enhancing access to their papers? And, finally, might the announcement of Facebook’s Graph Search prove of relevance to those with an interest in enhancing the discoverability of research papers?

I’ve asked questions, rather than suggested answers in this post. In part that is because the potential relevance of Facebook’s Graph Search will be based on the use of Facebook, rather than advocacy or critique of use of Facebook in a scholarly context. I’d therefore welcome comments from repository managers, in particular, on evidence of Facebook as a driver of traffic (whether large or small) to institutional repositories. For those who may not wish to leave a comment I’ve created two polls: one of the amount of traffic provided by Facebook and the other on interest in understanding the potential of use of Facebook’s Graph Search in a repository context.

Finally, if you’d like to know more about Facebook’s Graph Search, the following links may be of interest:

• Background:www.facebook.com/graphsearch
• To learn about Graph Search and privacy: www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch/privacy
• How Graph Search was built: click here.
• A behind the scenes video, click here.
• A collection of screen shots, click here.
• How Graph Search can help people discover your business, visit Facebook Studio

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [Bit.ly]

From August 2013, we will continue to build on this reputation and we very much look forward to working with you again in the future.

In order to support UKOLN staff in exploiting new opportunities I recently gave a training session on “Managing Your Digital Profile“. In the talk I described the value of social media in developing relationships with potential new partners, co-authors and funders which can be of value in one’s current job as well as in finding new jobs and opportunities.

During the session I was asked if there was one key service to make use of. I highlighted the importance of LinkedIn and provided examples of effective uses of LinkedIn. Just before Christmas @suebecks alerted me to a post entitled For job recruiters, Monster out, LinkedIn in. This post provided evidence of the ways in which LinkedIn is being used:

LinkedIn, the biggest professional-network​ing website, got into the field early with the introduction of Recruiter in 2008. The service lets headhunters search its more than 187 million profiles and contact potential candidates.

Since last year, Adobe has found more than half its new hires through LinkedIn. Adobe, the biggest graphic-design software company, uses job boards to fill only about 5% of openings.

In the session I went on to describe how I felt it was a mistake to think there was a single key service to use. I argued that there were a range of services which provided different functions and were used by different communities. I went on to describe how researchers could find value in claiming a Google Scholar profile and providing access to their research publications using services such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, as well as claiming an ORCID ID.

I was asked if Facebook had a role to play. I described how this would relate to the personal ways in which one uses the service – but mentioned that Facebook is the third most important referrer of traffic to this blog. In addition I suggested that Facebook may have a role to play in finding new opportunities, and illustrated this by showing how a Google search for “Facebook Bath jobs“ found a Facebook page for jobs at Future Publishing. The potential relevance of Facebook for job-seekers was highlighted in the article For job recruiters, Monster out, LinkedIn in:

Two-thirds of companies already use Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking service, to find recruits using the site’s friend-finding search function, according to a June survey of more than 1,000 human resources professionals by recruiting software maker Jobvite. Fifty-four percent use micro-blogging service Twitter to learn about potential candidates’ views and interests, the survey found.

The article then went on to suggest new developments we may see for people looking for new opportunities:

The next challenge is to develop advanced tools that find greater detail on candidates from more social networks, says Brian O’Malley, a general partner at Battery Ventures. His firm has invested in social job-search startup Entelo, which trawls Twitter, Google’s Google+ and other sites, using proprietary algorithms to find candidates for specific positions and predict who among them may be open to offers.

Can you afford not to make use of social media if you are looking for new business opportunities in the future?

Note as mentioned above the slides on “Managing Your Digital Profile” are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy]

Last year’s anniversary post, entitled How People Find This Blog, Five Years On concluded that “most people now view posts on this blog following alerts they have come across on Twitter rather than via a Google search or by subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed“. I went on to say that “to put it more succinctly, social search is beating Google and RSS“.

Figure 1: Referrer Traffic to this blog, 2011-12

But what do usage statistics now tell us about the previous year? Looking at the referrer statistics for the last 365 days (as illustrated in Figure 1) it seems that WirdPress.com has changed how it displays the referrer statistics compared with last year.

Figure 2: Referrer Traffic, 2006-11

Last year’s findings (illustrated in Figure 2) had Twitter in first place, followed by Google Reader and the UKOLN Web site. However this year we find Search Engines in first place, by a significant margin.

This reflects comments made last year by Tony Hirst who felt that the statistics were somewhat misleading:

my stats from the last year show a lot of Twitter referrals, but also (following a three or four day experiment by WordPress a week or so ago), inflated referrals from “WordPress.com”. The experiment (or error?) that WordPress ran was to include RSS counts in the stats. The ‘normal’ stats are page views on wordpress.com; the views over the feed can be found by looking at the stats for each page.

It would appear that last year’s conclusion: “social search is beating Google and RSS” was incorrect. In fact Google continues to be significant in driving traffic to this blog. However I think we can say that “social services, especially Twitter, are beating RSS readers“.

The importance of Twitter is widely appreciated as a means of ensuring that the intended target audience  - those with whom you are likely to share similar professional interests – are alerted to your content. But the thing that surprised me was the importance of Facebook – in third place behind Search Engines and Twitter in referring traffic to this blog.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised by Facebook’s high profile. After all, a post by Daniel Sharkov, an 18 year old student and a blogger, which provided a 9 Step Blog Checklist to Make Sure Your Posts Get Maximum Exposure included the following suggestion:

Did You Share Your Post on Facebook?

An obvious one. What I do is share the post both on my personal wall and on my fan page right after publishing the article.

I appreciate that use of Facebook won’t be appropriate in all cases, but for blogs provided by individuals who have a Facebook account and who wish to see their content widely viewed, it would appear that Facebook can have a role to play in supporting that objective; the evidence is clear to see – even, or perhaps especially, if you’re not a fan of Facebook.

Tony Hirst alerted me to the recent post on Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook. Facebook is, of course, one of those services which generates strong opinions, rather as Microsoft used to do. In the case of Microsoft the criticisms have been centred around its proprietary file formats and its misuse of its dominance in the desktop computer environment. For Facebook, the criticisms have focussed on Facebook being a “walled garden” and its misuse of personal data.

Facebook Was a Walled Garden

It was back in 1993 when Novell claimed that Microsoft was blocking its competitors out of the market through anti-competitive practices. However as described in Wikipedia the European Union Microsoft competition case resulted in the EU ordering Microsoft to divulge certain information about its server products and release a version of Microsoft Windows without Windows Media Player, in addition to paying a fine of £381 million. Microsoft also eventually migrated its proprietary file format to XML and the Open Office XML format which became an ISO standard in December 2006.

Might we see similar changes happening with Facebook? Back in December 2008 I asked Just What Is A “Walled Garden”? – a post which generated interesting discussion on the pros and cons of walled gardens, with Ben Toth commenting:

I don’t like the phrase at all. Firstly it’s one of those phrases which gives the impression of being meaningful but in practice doesn’t bear too much analysis. Secondly, walled gardens were a pretty clever Victorian technology for creating micro-climates in order to boost food production (http://www.walledgardens.net/intro/intro.htm), so it seems a shame to use the term in a negative way. Finally, all gardens have walls of one sort or another – an un-walled garden wouldn’t be a garden. So the phrase is a tautology.

Max Norton concluded the discussion by observing that:

to leap to judgement just because something can be described as a walled garden is hasty. While my instinct is towards openness I try to be pragmatic about these things and where I feel there are gains to be had in using “walled garden” solutions I’ll use them.

A willingness to accept the benefits that can be provided by walled gardens can clearly be seen by fans of Apple products, with, as described by the Wikipedia entry for Walled Garden (technology) Apple’s iOS devices are “restricted to running pre-approved applications from a digital distribution service“.

In October 2010 I pointed out that Planet Facebook Becomes Less of a Walled Garden following the announcement that ”Facebook lets users download data, create groups“; news that was welcomed as “A step in the right direction, by the vice-chair of the DataPortability Project“.

Back in September 2011 ZDNet published an article which provided an update on Facebook’s export options and argued that Facebook finally makes your exported data useful. Since there are also tools such as SafeGuard which enable you to export data from Facebook and other social networking services it seems that we can say that not only can a walled garden provide a safe managed environment, but that it would be wrong to describe Facebook as a walled environment.

Accessing Facebook Activity Data

There are now a number of ways of migrating one’s personal data from Facebook. Facebook provide advice on how to do this, and this approach has been described in an article published in C|net. Meanwhile applications such as Social Safe provide alternative ways of accessing one’s Facebook data – and I learnt that I updated my Facebook profile picture on 13 December 2007.

But it was Tony Hirst’s tweet which interested me that most, since the Wolfram|Alpha service goes beyond the simple exporting of one’s content (status updates and images and videos which have been uploaded) and provides information and visualisations of one’s activity data.

Figure 1: Facebook activities, by time and day of week

Once you have given permission to the Wolfram|Alpha app to access your Facebook data visualisations of how you use Facebook are provided, such as the day of the week and time of posting status updates, posting links or uploading images. As shown in Figure 1 it seems that I tend to use Facebook mostly between 6pm and 9pm, which is not unexpected as I use it primarily for social purposes.

Figure 2: Facebook apps used

Figure 2 shows the Facebook apps which I use. It seems that the one I use most is the WordPress.com app which provides an automated status update when I publish a new post on this blog.

This information simply gives me a better understanding of my use of Facebook. This personal understanding of one’s Twitter use was the angle taken in a post on the Mashable tech blog which described how This App Knows More About Your Facebook Account Than You Do.

Figure 3: Visualisation of my Facebook community

However of greater interest to me is the way in which the Wolfram|Alpha app provides a visualisation of my Facebook community and the connections between the members of the community.

In Figure 3 you can see the various communities, which includes my sword dancing and folk communities and my profession contacts. I can also see the various outliers, of people who have few connections with others, which includes the landlady of a pub I often visit.

Such visualisation of one’s connections will be familiar to anyone who keeps an eye on Tony Hirst’s work in this area. In the past Tony has made use of Twitter APIs in order to visualise the growth and development of Twitter connections, including connections based around an event hashtag.

Facebook and Twitter Social Graphs

Assuming that you are willing to trust Wolfram|Alpha, their Facebook app may be of interest to anyone who would like to gain a better understanding of their own use of Facebook – as well as understanding what Facebook may know about you. Apart from the automated updates when I publish a new blog post, I update my Facebook status in the evening, often when I’m listening to live music in a local pub. Being able to process such information in an automated and global way will be of interest to the service providers who are looking to optimise targetted advertising.

Beyond the individual’s interest in such tools, clearly of greater interest will be developments around the global social graphs provided by Facebook, Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Google+

Tony Hirst has addressed this issue recently when he asked Is Twitter Starting to Make a Grab for the Interest Graph? As Tony pointed out:

If targeted advertising is Twitter’s money play, then it’s obviously in their interest to keep hold of the data juice that lets them define audiences by interest. Which is to say, they need to keep the structure of the graph as closed as possible.

Will Twitter’s increased control over their APIs mean that there will be less opportunity for developers such as Tony Hirst (and Martin Hawksey with his developments based on processing the Twitter data stream) to continue their work which helps to provide a better understanding of how social networks are being used to enhance teaching and learning and research activities? And will, ironically, we find that Facebook provides a more open environment for such work?

NOTE: Following publication of this post Tony Hirst informed me of his posts on Getting Started With The Gephi Network Visualisation App – My Facebook Network, Part I and Social Interest Positioning – Visualising Facebook Friends’ Likes With Data Grabbed Using Google Refine which described his experiments in analysing and visualising Facebook data.

It was, however, when I spotted the post when it appeared in one of the personalised newspapers I used that I appreciated the skill of Talat’s opening paragraph and the image he used to accompany the post.

The opening paragraph began:

Imagine that you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK Higher Education sector with responsibilities for research: you have read some basic details about unique researcher identifiers and perhaps institutional identifiers. However, it may not be immediately apparent just how important these issues are, which may seem on the face of it to be a relatively superficial and/or trivial organisational matter.

This, I felt, encouraged the reader to read more, and click on the link to the full article. In addition, as can be seen from the accompanying image, an attractive image accompanied the post, which helped to differentiate it from the many other posts on the page.

Sometimes I hear people talk about the importance of attractive PDF designs which aim to encourage reading. A problem with that approach is that there is only one view of the report. As described in a previous post images in blog posts can enhance the user’s experience across a wide range of personalised newspaper services such as Pulse, Flipboard and Zite. This can provide a greater range of dissemination channels to reach the intended audiences, as well as providing the audiences with the flexibility to choose their preferred environment for reading such reports.

But as suggested in the title of this post, blog authors will need to give thought to the opening paragraph for a blog post, and images which can be used to complement the post. In addition, it will probably be useful to summarise a post or a report in a Twitter-friendly fashion. For this report you could use the opening line (which may happen if you use an auto-tweeting service):

Imagine you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK HE sector with responsibilities for research: bit.ly/OAg4VT

Although my preference is for a human-crafted summary, such as the one Talat used to announce the report:

Why should universities care about identifiers? Review on UKOLN’s Technical Foundations blog: bit.ly/OAg4VT

It seems blogs and Twitter are turning us into headline writers as well as picture editors. And if you don’t feel you have the expertise to make your make use of visual imagery the Hubspot Inbound Internet Marketing blog provides some suggestions on six creative ways to make your content more visual.

JISC Celebrates 10,000 Followers

Yesterday a tweet from @jisc announced that their Twitter account had reached 10,000 followers:

NEWS: Celebrating 10,000 followers… and our resources to help engage students through social media: … http://bit.ly/RVLMMv 

This news provided a useful opportunity for JISC to “showcase some resources that can help you blog, tweet and interact your way to better student retention, marketing and teaching online“. The news item highlighted seven resources which were felt to help institutions in using social media to support their students:

1. Listen to a podcast (MP3 format) on developing your social media strategy with Steph Gray of Helpful Technology.
2. Read JISC CETIS’ ideas about using Twitter in the classroom.
3. Learn how Cardiff , Northumbria and Bristol universities use Twitter and Facebook to support international students.
4. Reflect on how your PhD students are using social media and other new technologies to collaborate and stay up to date using the biggest ever survey of PhD students.
5. Read a case study on engaging students through blogging.
6. Download the LSE’s guide to Tweeting for academics.
7. Compare your university to other universities. Find out which social media networks others are using on the UK Web Focus blog post.

And whilst the @JISC Twitter account provides a valuable channel for JISC to disseminate JISC activities and innovative uses of IT across the higher and further education sector, this is complemented by the work of JISC Programme Managers and other JISC staff who use social media technologies for engaging with the sector in the support of development activities. Remember that the solution which may be described in a glossy PDF report or a polished podcast will be the result of rich interactions, discussions and even disagreements; social media provides an environment for supporting such engagement which, ten years ago, tended to be restricted to mailing lists, meetings and trips to workshops and conferences.

It probably goes without saying that the benefits of social media aren’t restricted to supporting students; LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog, for example, regularly provides examples of how social media can support research activities. A good example is Mellisa Terras’s post which asked The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? and described how “Melissa Terras took all of her academic research, including papers that have been available online for years, to the web and found that her audience responded with a huge leap in interest in her work“.

Nodes and Connections

In a recent post I described how Social Media? It’s About The Numbers! The post reflected on how the popularity of Twitter for talking about the Olympics indicated a mass take-up of the channel which appears to becoming an ‘embedded technology’ – a technology which large numbers of familiar with and comfortable in using for a range of activities. The post went on to explain how for many communication channels achieving a critical mass is important in order to maximise awareness, engagement discussion, feedback and marketing opportunities. JISC clearly appreciate the importance of such numbers, and it is very pleasing to see the significant growth in their followers since the account was established on 10 January 2009.

Yesterday Steve Wheeler in a post on Separation and connection reinforced this view when he described how “We are witnessing a time where a mobile world wide web of connections is proliferating, and in which social mores, human relationships and communication conventions have been irrevocably changed“, supporting this view with the evidence that “Facebook boasts over 845 million subscriptions and this statistics grows each month. What is even more remarkable is that these 845 million user accounts have so far generated over 100 billion connections“. Steve concluded with an optimistic view of the role of social media in education: “I believe we have not even started to scratch the surface of the massive potential of social media and mobile technology to disrupt and transform learning. That’s why it’s so exciting to be an educator in the digital age.“

But not everyone, I feel, appreciates the importance of ‘nodes’ and ‘connections’ which are at the heart of successful social web services. As I described in a post entitled It’s About Links; It’s About Connectedness! Cameron Neylon’s opening plenary talk at the Open Repositories OR 2012 conference addressed the importance of such connectivity. As reported in the live blog of Cameron’s talk:

Most of you can remember a time without mobile phones. 20 years ago if I’d shown up and wanted to meet for a drink it would have been difficult or impossible. Email wasn’t useful back then either as so few people had it. When you start with nodes and start joining up the network… for a long time little changes. You just let people communicate in the same way you did before… right up until everyone has access to a mobile phone. or everyone has email. You move from a network that is better connected network to a network that can be traversed in new ways. for chemists THIS IS A Cooperative phase transition. Where the network crystalises out from a solution.

Cameron has kindly shared his slides with me (prior to making a more generic version of the slides publicly available) which has helped me to refresh my memories of his talk and reuse some of the images he provided.

Cameron argued that “Networks qualitatively change our capacity” and depicted this ‘phase transition’ as shown: with only 20% of a community being connected only a limited amount of interaction can take place, but this increases drastically as the numbers of connected nodes grows – and imagine the possibilities as the numbers approach 100%!

Cameron provided some examples of such approaches in scientific research including Galaxy Zoo and the Timothy Gower’s experiment in which Professor Gower asked “is massively collaborative mathematics possible?“. The answer was “yes” with a new combinatorial proof to the density version of the Hales–Jewett theorem being found using “blogs and a wiki to organize an open mathematical collaboration attempting to find a new proof “ after only 7 weeks.

The importance is the network effect, with a growth in the number of nodes (the bloggers, the contributors, the Twitter users) leading to a growth in the number of connections (the posts, the comments, the tweets, the retweets) which help in the development of new insights and new ideas.

Let’s Not Kill The Golden Goose!

A concern which needs to be recognised is that the evidence of the benefits of use of social media will lead to organisations seeking to use the social web in inappropriate ways, leading to a failure to provide the benefits based on the network effect. There are dangers that the benefits of the social web are felt to be its ease-of-use and its virality, but that the tools should be used in a corporate way. Seeking to take the individuality away from use of such tools could lead a reduction in the number of nodes and in the connections which often take place between individuals rather than organisations. Such approaches could kill the golden goose and lead to social networks which people abandon due to the lack of openness and transparency and effectiveness.

One barrier which people sometimes mention are concerns of information overload – and this may have been the reaction when I suggested that people should “imagine the possibilities as the numbers approach 100%!“.

Cameron Neylon addressed this as one of the three key issues in his plenary talk at OR 2012. “Filters block” argued Cameron, “Filters cause friction“. And as there’s not a single right filter for everyone (as we all have different needs, with your rubbish being my valuable resources) we should reject inappropriate supply-side filters and focus, instead, on developing and using client-side filters.

Let’s therefore keep on encouraging new nodes to spring up – new Twitter users (many of whom may have started tweeting during the Olympics) and new bloggers – and avoid developing barriers on the creation of new connections – the tweets, the comments and the posts.

But we need to appreciate that those who may be considering the development of top-down approaches to use of social media are probably doing so because they have legitimate concerns. As described in a paper on Moving From Personal to Organisational Use of the Social Web there is a need for ”a policy framework which seeks to ensure that authors can exploit Cloud Services to engage with their audiences in a professional and authentic manner whilst addressing the concerns of their host institution“. And note that such policies need not be difficult to write.

According to the Twitter blog there were “more than 150 million Tweets about the Olympics over the past 16 days“. The post on went on to inform us that “it was the Spice Girls who stole the night, inspiring more than 116,000 Tweets per minute“. Meanwhile an article on “London 2012, a social media Olympics to remember” posted on the BBC Web site provided a visualisation of how UK-based fans tweeted the Games which is shown below. From this we can see that over there were over 40,000 tweets per hour during the opening ceremony. The web page explained how:

The data was collated by social media sentiment analysts at SoSoLimited in a project commissioned by EDF Energy. They collected tweets from Twitter users who had identified themselves as being from the UK, and monitored posts which mentioned a set of 29 TeamGB-related keywords such as “ennis”, “wiggins” and “London 2012″. The total number of tweets about the Games is far greater than the graph above represents, but SoSoLimited’s data gives a clear picture of Britain’s most exciting Games moments so far.

This doesn’t, however, tell us how many individuals tweeted and how many have started using Twitter during the Olympic Games. It would also be interesting to have a better understanding of the locations used: what proportion were tweeting from the Olympic venues or while watching the games on TV?

It is clear that Twitter has reached the mass market. It should also be clear that the numbers of tweets and of Twitter users are important. This is something to remember when you hear people say “The content is the important thing” or “Content is king“. Clearly the content of the 150 million tweets isn’t the important thing – “Oh no, it’s the Spice Girls :-(” – it is the scale of the communications which is significant.

Of course, we might say that the content is the important thing – and in this case the content is the Olympic Games: the 100 metres sprint, the 5,000 and 1o,000 metres and the Opening and Closing Ceremonies and, yes, even the Spice Girls. But if we are talking about communications channels, it tends to be the numbers which are a key feature, rather than the content of the channel.

Many Eyes Make All Bugs Shallow

This sentiment has been articulated by the open source community in Linus’s Law which is summarised as “Many Eyes Make All Bugs Shallow“. As described in a RedHat paper on OPEN SOURCE SECURITY: A LOOK AT THE SECURITY BENEFITS OF SOURCE CODE ACCESS (PDF format) a entire section addresses “Strength in Numbers: The Security of “Many Eyeballs” and says:

The security benefits of open source software stem directly from its openness. Known as the “many eyeballs”theory,it explains what we instinctively know to be true – that an operating system or application will be more secure when you can inspect the code, share it with experts and other members of your user community,identify potential problems and create fixes quickly.

In this case the openness arises from open source licences. Similar arguments also apply to research papers and research data which are published under Creative Commons licences, with the argument being that such liberal licence conditions will make it easier for interested parties to read and cite or reuse content of interest.

In the case of social media, the benefits arise from the popularity of the service itself, rather than the openness of the technology delivering the service, as can be seen from the little use which is made of the identi.ca service which is positioned as an open alternative to Twitter. If you visit my profile you’ll see little activity since I joined in 2008. I suspect this is also true for others who bothered to sign up to the service – but I would like to be proven wrong.

Meanwhile, At Bath Folk Festival

The importance of numbers and metrics for social media extends beyond global events such as the Olympic Games. Last year in a post which argued that We Can’t Ignore Facebook I described use of Facebook and Twitter to promote the Bath Folk Festival. Facebook, it turned out, was much more popular than Twitter and so became the service which was used to promote events and to encourage discussion about the concerts and other events.

The post included a graph showing the growth in use of the Bath Folk Festival Facebook page. Unfortunately at first glance the findings do not appear to be comparable with those obtained last year. I am not yet in a position to answer questions such as:

• Has Facebook usage grown since last year?
• There are now 528 Followers of the @bathfolkfest Twitter account. How have the numbers grown since last year? Would it be more effective to use Twitter to promote events for this year’s Bathe Folk Festival and to encourage discussions to take place on Twitter?

I suspect that if I spend sometime looking at the Facebook Insights data for the page and Twitter analytics tools I’d be able to provide a better answer to such questions.

My conclusions from this post:

• For social networks, numbers do matter
• There is a need to continually monitor the numbers in order to detect trends which may inform policy decisions.

If you’ve also an interest in the content, I’d recommend the concert featuring Spiers & Boden, Bob & Gill Berry and Jon Hick – which should also feature a surprise rapper sword dancing team.

On 1 August the 20 Russell Group universities was enlarged from 20 to 24, following the incorporation of Durham and Exeter University, Queen Mary, University of London and the University of York. As described on the Russell Group University Web site ”[the] universities are to be found in all four nations and in every major city of the UK. They operate globally, attracting international students and academic staff from many different countries, but also have a strong role and influence within their regional and local community.” But how effective are they in using popular social media services to attract potential students, engage with existing students and staff and with the wider community? In order to provide a benchmark of use of the most popular social networking service a survey of the number of likes for the official institutional Facebook presence has been carried out.

Facebook Usage for Russell Group Universities

In order to gather evidence of use of Facebook in the higher education sector a survey of Facebook usage, determined by links for institutional pages, have been carried out for the Russell Group universities. This survey follows on from previous surveys carried out in January and September 2011 and May 2012 for the 20 Russell group universities which enabled trends to be detected which can inform discussions and policy decisions on institutional use of Facebook. Note that the data provided in the following table is also available as a Google Spreadsheet.

Note

• On 10 August 2012 it was brought to my attention that the official Facebook page for the University of Exeter was not being analysed. The table was updated with the correct Facebook entry.
• Following publication of this post information was received on changes for the official Facebook page for the University of Liverpool. The table has been updated using the new Facebook page.
• The data for the surveys was collected on 11 January 2011, 25 September  2011 (estimate),  16 May 2012 and 2 August 2012.
• The URL of the Facebook pages for LSE (from http://www.facebook.com/pages/LSE/6127898346 to http://www.facebook.com/lseps) and Queen’s University Belfast (from http://www.facebook.com/pages/Queens-University-Belfast/108518389172588 to http://www.facebook.com/QueensUniversityBelfast) have changed since the last survey.
• The URL change for LSE appears to be transparent. However the change for Queen’s University Belfast appears to be the result of a merger with another page: “You were automatically redirected from Queen’s University Belfast to this Page because we detected it as a duplicate. If we’re wrong, please let us know so that we can improve our results.” This merger initially appeared to have resulted in a loss of likes from the previous survey, but this no longer appears to be the case.

Summary

Facebook ‘Likes’ for Russell Group Universities in August 2012

There are now over a million ‘likes’ for the institutional presence on Facebook of the 24 Russell Group universities.

A post on this blog previously described a significant increase over  a period of eight months in the number of ‘likes’ for the twenty UK Russell Group Universities, which totalled about 999K in May. The current increase over a period of about ten weeks is primarily due to the additional numbers provided by the four new Russell group universities, which come to a total of over 37K likes.

It should be noted that, as illustrated 67% of the likes are provided by just two institutions: the Facebook pages for the University of Oxford (with 628K likes) and the University of Cambridge (168K likes).

Note that a Google Spreadsheet of these figures, together with the accompanying charts, is available.

Discussion

In some circles providing evidence of Facebook usage is an activity which  people feel should be avoided, since Facebook is a ‘walled garden’ and has a blatant disregard for individual’s privacy.

In the higher education sector I would argue that we have a need for policy decisions to be informed by evidence. There is therefore a need to gather evidence of use of such services in order to inform decisions on their use and also to learn from their strengths and weaknesses and their popularity, so that such lessons can be used in order to make more effective use of existing services and also to be prepared to use new social media service which could replace or complement today’s popular services. Anyone who would like to see Facebook replaced by Diaspora, say (described in Wikipedia as “a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network that is based upon the free Diaspora software … is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it safe from corporate take-overs, advertising, and other threats“)  would surely benefit from gaining an understanding of Facebook’s popularity.

From looking at the names of institutional Facebook accounts and the corresponding URLs and the popularity of the accounts it would appear beneficial to have an easily remembered name, to avoid fragmentation of official accounts and  to avoid the need to rename an accounts address.

This might suggest that it would be useful for institutions to claim a meaningful name on social networks which may gain in popularity in the future. As suggested in a post on Institutional Use of Social Media in China this has been an approach which has been adopted by 19 of the first 20 institutions with an official presence on China’s Sina Wēibó social media service.

But at a time in which it is increasingly important to be able to justify the return on investment in using new services, it will be important to document the intended purposes of such new services and the benefits which may be gained. Back in May 2007 in a post entitled Something IS Going On With Facebook! I commented on early signals of growth in interest in Facebook following the launch of the Facebook Platform. A few months later, in November 2007 a post entitled UK Universities On Facebook reported that “a Facebook search for organisations containing the word ‘university’ revealed ) a total of 76 hits which included, in alphabetical order, the following UK Universities: Aston, Cardiff, Kent and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan)” – and it is interesting to note that the links to the Facebook pages for these early adopters still work even though the URLs have changed.

The post generated a large number of comments with Patrick Lauke asking:

so, for those unis who have a “page” (with new revised Ts&Cs) on facebook…what are your strategic objectives? key performance indicators? external target audience, or a mix of internal and external?

Looking back it would be interesting to see if an institutional Facebook presence has supported strategic objectives. Would the 24 Russell Group Universities  have regarded having a total of over a million as providing a proxy measure of some objective? On the other hand, might this be regarded as a failure?  We have five years of experience of institutional use of Facebook, which includes a number of snapshots of quantitative evidence. It will be interesting to see how this evidence of the recent past can shape and inform discussions and decisions on use of social media over the next five years.

I should add that following the survey in May  2012 Tom Wright, Digital Engagement Manager at the University of Nottingham, commented:

Interesting to see these stats, but to gauge how successful universities are with Facebook you really need to look at other metrics around engagement, reach, influence, etc. You can have plenty of likes but very little engagement and measuring likes is very much like judging a web page’s success based on simple page view numbers – a very raw measure that doesn’t tell you an awful lot. 

I would agree with these comments, although I should add that since such information is restricted to Facebook page administrators it is not possible to get a picture across a community.  However a follow-up post which provided a Survey of Institutional Use of Facebook was also published in May which contained information about a survey in which Tom and I invited those involved in using Facebook to support institutional activities to provide details of their work. In order to gain a broad picture of Facebook use across the sector this survey is still open.

Most of you can remember a time without mobile phones. 20 years ago if I’d shown up and wanted to meet for a drink it would have been difficult or impossible. Email wasn’t useful back then either as so few people had it. When you start with nodes and start joining up the network… for a long time little changes. You just let people communicate in the same way you did before… right up until everyone has access to a mobile phone. or everyone has email. You move from a network that is better connected network to a network that can be traversed in new ways. for chemists THIS IS A Cooperative phase transition. Where the network crystalises out from a solution.

But how can the benefits of such connected approaches to work activities be applied more widely?  Cameron argued that we need:

1. Connectivity
2. Low friction
3. Demand on side filters

The connectivity is now widely available: we have a wide spectrum of social media services which can be used to connect with one’s peers and one’s user communities in additional to one’s friends and families.  The global social media service also need to be easy to use in order to survive and so provide ‘low friction’ for their use.  The challenge is the filtering by the user in order to enable the user to identify the content, the discussions, the communities of relevance to them at the time of engagement with the tools.

“It’s about links; it’s about connectedness” was the point I made when in the one-minute summaries of the posters in the session which followed Cameron’s opening plenary. I highlighted the relevance of Cameron’s point when I described my paper which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?. These widely used services provide low friction, as can be seen from the survey of their usage across the Russell Group universities. But repository managers do not appear to encouraging their use in a systematic way. Ironically although  repository managers many not be explaining the benefits which can be gained, both to the individual researcher and the institutional repository itself, by links to papers hosted on the repository, as we described in the paper, commercial publishers are promoting use of services such as LinkedIn to  link from to papers hosted behind the publishers’ paywalls!

Learning is a collaborative process: social media can enrich the opportunities for learning

“It’s about links; it’s about connectedness” is the point I’ll be making in two hours’ time in my talk on “Social Media: For Ourselves and For Our Customers” at the UCISA Support Services Conference 2012.  The importance of social media for engaging with students is widely appreciated although, as Helen Keegan will explain later today in a talk on “Into the wild:  embracing the anarchy“, while web enabled mobile devices can allow our learners to connect any place, at any time, this shift towards personalisation, ownership and autonomy poses significant challenges for IT services and information systems.

However the main point of my talk will be the importance of social media for engaging with one’s peers:  IT services staff working at other institutions. We need to remember that senior managers in our institutions are capable of using Google to search for “outsource IT in universities”  and might find the article published on The Guardian in December 2010 which suggested that “Universities could save £3bn by outsourcing, says thinktank“. But the IT Services community represented by UCISA do have an ace up their sleeve: the strength of the community.  The question is whether IT Services staff are aware of the value of such collaborative and connected approaches.

In my talk I’ll recommend that the delegates at the UCISA User Support Service Conference watch the video recording of Cameron’s talk on “Network Enabled Research: The possibilities, the path and the role of repositories”  when it becomes available.  I’ll also suggest that UCISA consider making use of social services to support their conferences – in particular I’ll highlight the Lanyrd entry for the USSC12 conference  and suggest that tools such as this can be used to help build one’s professional network.

The slides I’ll be using are available on Slideshare and embedded below.

On Monday 18 June I will be co-facilitating a session on “New to the Sector? New to Web Management? New to IWMW?” at UKOLN’s annual IWMW 2012 event. Mike Nolan, Head of the Web Services team at Edge Hill University and Amber Thomas, programme manager at the JISC, will also be contributing to the session, with Mike giving his thoughts from the perspective of a Web manager who has had both technical and managerial responsibilities and Amber describing the ways in which JISC supports the needs of those working in institutional Web management teams.

In my talk on the role of the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN I will focus on our involvement in the development of the Web management Community of Practice (CoP) through 16 years of the IWMW event and, in the early years, engagement on mailing lists. As described previously the two main lists used by this community have declined significantly since 2002, and now are used primarily for announcements of events, calls for papers and job advertisements. This decline is not surprising in light of the growth of a wide range of communications and collaborative tools during that time.  The challenge, however, is identifying the tools which can support the community and understanding how they can be used.  Or to put in in more concrete terms:

Engaging with the Web Management Community on Twitter

Sceptics will point out that Twitter is full of trivia, and use of Twitter can be time-consuming. Established Twitter users will agree that Twitter is full of trivia – and James Clay’s regular #thisiswhattwitterwascreatedfor tweets seem to confirm such views. But we should also remember that mailing lists and the Web itself are also full of information which are of no interest and are time-consuming to read – indeed it is also worth pointing out that libraries are full of books which are of no interest to individual readers!  The issue is not the tool itself, but the way in which the tool (or the library) is used. And surprisingly for some, Twitter’s apparent simplicity provides a diverse way in which it can be used, beyond telling people what you had for breakfast.

Twitter lists

When Twitter lists first came out it was unclear as to what benefits they would provide. However a number of applications now make use of Twitter lists. I have created a list for IWMW 2012 attendees who have provided a Twitter ID on their registration form. Viewing the  Twitter stream doesn’t provide much value (at the time of writing people are tweeting about a Euro12 football match and what they’re having for tea). However this list can be used in application such as Flipboard enable a personalised newspaper to be created based on content from a variety of sources including RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter. Further examples can be seen in the post on  Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper! – although the Smartr app is no longer available the post illustrates the concept of how a Twitter list can be used as a filter for links to resources posted in Twitter.

Bottlenose

A post entitled How Bottlenose Can Help Turn Twitter into a High Signal Channel illustrated how various tools developed around the Twitter environment can provide ease of access to quality content.

The accompanying screenshot shows a search for the hashtag #eucookielaw.  As can be seen, this enables you to focus in on tweets with other hashtags (such as #iwmw12) or keywords (such as ICO).

The point of these two examples is to illustrate how Twitter can be useful in finding content of interest. However the main purpose of this post is to illustrate how Twitter can be used in the support of a community. We will now explore examples of such uses.

Twitter as an Identity Provider

You do not have to post tweets in order to gain benefits from having a Twitter account.  If you are a speaker at events you can include your Twitter ID on your title slide, along with your email address. This can help you find what people were saying about your talk afterwards e.g. a tweet saying “Great talk by @johnsmith” will arrive in @johnsmith’s incoming messages whereas “Great talk by john smith” will be more difficult to find.

Lanyrd

The Lanyrd service enables a user with a Twitter account to link their attendance at an event (as a speaker, delegate or organiser)  with your Twitter account.  As can be seen for the Lanyrd entry for the IWMW 2012 event you can see the 56 people who have currently associated their Twitter ID with the event.  Selecting a user, such as my colleague @MariekeGuy, you can view the other events she has been involved with, as well as the other users she has appeared with at other events.

Social Ties

The Social Ties app, available for the iPhone and Android platforms:

…  shows you which friends are present and list everyone else by our ‘shared interests index’. Anyone you don’t know becomes a ‘discovery’, the highest ranked are those who talk about the same things as you.

This is an example which seems to provide the ability to help develop one’s community of people with shared interests, based on attendance at forthcoming events. As described by the developers:

Social Ties is an iPhone app that utilises advanced AI algorithms to mine Social Network data to provide you with detailed profiles of people at the conference or event that you are attending, and orders the results according to how interesting we think you will find them.

It should be noted that Social Ties gets its event data from Lanyrd.

Shhmooze

Unlike the other examples given so far, Shhmooze is not part of the Twitter infrastructure. Rather, as I described last year, Shhmooze  is designed to facilitate networking at an event. We have set up a Shhmooze entry for the IWMW 2012 event and will be inviting delegates to try out the tool during the three day event.

Conclusions

The session on New to the Sector? New to Web Management? New to IWMW? which will be held next Monday “will provide orientation for those who have not attended the event previously or are new to the sector or the community“.  I will give an overview of the IWMW event and suggest that it is not the skills of members of institutional Web teams or the services provided by the teams which have the potential to be the key aspect of a sustainable institutional Web team.  After all, policy makers within the institution are capable of carrying out this search query and looking for alternative providers of Web services. But what members of web teams within the institutions should have is the strength of their community.  Let’s continue to build and develop this community!

Total nos. of Facebook Likes for Russell Group universities.

A recent post entitled  What Next, As Facebook Use in UK Universities Continues to Grow? summarised growth in institutional use of Facebook in the 20 Russell Group universities in the UK, based on the number of ‘likes’ for the official institutional Facebook page. As can be seen in the accompanying histogram, there has been significant growth since the surveys in January and September 2011.  However as Tom Wright, the Digital Engagement Manager at the University of Nottingham commented “to gauge how successful universities are with Facebook you really need to look at other metrics around engagement, reach, influence, etc.“

This is certainly true, but such metrics are not always publicly available and so in order to be able to answer the question “Are universities successful in their use of Facebook?” it will clearly be advantageous to be able to see a greater range of metrics. But in addition, the metrics themselves need to relate to the intended purpose(s) of the services and institutions may be using Facebook for a range of different purposes.

In order to help gain a better understand of how Facebook is being used across the sector, Tom and I have set up a SurveyMonkey form on institutional use of Facebook which invites respondents to summarise the purposes of institutional Facebook pages and the metrics they use to monitor the effectiveness of Facebook to achieve these purposes.  As Tom describes:

Understanding the roles which social networks such as Facebook can have in supporting business requirements is important for universities such as Nottingham with campuses in China and Malaysia and students from around the world. Facebook, with its international audience, has huge potential for today’s higher education institutions with their increasingly global reach, in the areas of student recruitment, marketing, internal communications and alumni support.

The survey is intended primarily for those working in institutional Web management or marketing teams in UK universities or FE colleges.  However we appreciate that universities around the world will have similar interests in the role of Facebook, together with concerns regarding the sustainability of the service, privacy issues and its relevance in supporting educational needs.

Such issues have been described in a paper on ”Social Networking and Education: Using Facebook As An Edusocial Space“ published in the Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (pp. 3330-3338). This paper is also available on Scribd. The abstract for the paper states that:

The acceptance of Facebook by school-aged users is evident, but the potential of using social networking sites for educational purposes is still being debated. This paper explores the use of Facebook within a high school science-mentoring program. Results indicate that the use of Facebook positively affected the relationships between mentors and mentees. In addition, students believed that they learned more by using Facebook and would like to use Facebook for other educational purposes.

and concludes:

Social networking is already one of the most common ways that communication occurs virtually. While the majority of users spend time communicating with those who they have already built relationships with in reality, it may also have the potential to build relationships virtually.

Participation of a mentor and mentee on the Facebook group page was seen to positively affect their relationship both online and offline. Students and mentors that interacted regularly, posting questions and receiving feedback through the page, were observed as having a stronger relationship than other mentor-mentee pairs.

Might this suggest that there is a role to play in the development of Facebook apps which can support such collaborative activities? Back in March 2010 in a post entitled OU Facebook Apps, Reprise Tony Hirst mentioned work at the Open University which was “looking at rebooting the OU’s Facebook strategy. With a bit of luck, this means that we’ll be doing another push on the OU Facebook apps that were developed several years ago now and which I still believe provide a sound basis for a range of community building and social learning support services“.

But although the Open University might be working in this area, what is happening in the wider sector?  The concluding section on “Recommendations for future research” in the paper mentioned above described how:

Additional research is needed to explore the most beneficial design for an edusocial space. Though Facebook has been used for some educational purposes, research could explore the specific kinds of activities that are most beneficial to learners. Using social networking sites, however, is still a controversial issue with most schools blocking the site from students and faculty. Thus, it must also be understood if students can view sites like Facebook as educational spaces and be able to engage in learning activities at appropriate times.

The survey on institutional use of Facebook aims to gather information on such development activities.  We intend to present the findings at UKOLN’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2012, in Edinburgh on 18-20 June.  We hope that people within the sector will respond to this survey in order that we can gain a comprehensive picture of use of Facebook across the higher and further educational sectors.

On Tuesday a headline in the Guardian announced Facebook raises price range ahead of IPO with the article describing how “Facebook has increased the price range of its stock in what will be Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever initial public offering to raise more than $12bn (£7.4bn), giving the social network a valuation that could exceed $100bn“.

What will the reaction be after today’s IPO launch? I suspect that my Twitter network will be talking about a bubble which is about to burst (if the shares go up in price) or will gloat if the price goes down. I don’t expect people to say “the financial injection can support developments which will be beneficial to use of Facebook within higher education“!

But how widely used is Facebook within higher education? And are the trends suggesting that usage has peaked, with users becoming disillusioned with social networks such as Facebook or, perhaps, moving to other services, such as Twitter – as the recent announcement in the Guardian that “Twitter now has 10m users in UK” with the “UK [being] the fourth-largest country for Twitter users in the world, with 80% accessing it with mobile phones” may suggest?

Facebook Usage for Russell Group Universities

In order to gather evidence to support discussions on the relevance of use of Facebook in the higher education sector a survey of Facebook usage, determined by links for institutional pages, has been carried out for the 20 Russell Group universities. This survey follows on from previous surveys carried in in January and September 2011 which will enable trends to be detected. Note that the data provided in the following table is also available as a Google Spreadsheet.

Note

• The data for the surveys was collected on 11 January 2011, 25 September  2011 (estimate) and 16 May 2012.
• The Facebook page for the University of Edinburgh has changed since the last survey.

Summary

Figure 1: Growth in total nos. of Facebook ‘Likes’ for Russell Group universities.

In brief in a period of eight months we have seen an increase in the number of ‘likes’ for the twenty UK Russell Group Universities of over 432,300 users with the largest increase, of almost 248,000 occurring at the University of Oxford. The largest percentage increase in that time has taken place at University of Glasgow, which has seen a growth of 1,346% from 1,860 to 27,149 and UCL which has seen a growth of 679% from 4,346 to 33,493.

The overall trends are illustrated in the accompanying histogram. As can be seen this shows a significant growth in the overall number of Facebook likes across the Russell Group universities.

It should also be noted that according to Russell Group University Web site “half a million students are enrolled at Russell Group universities – one in five of all higher education students in the UK“. Although the numbers of Facebook likes will include members of staff and other interested parties, the data does seem to suggest that a significant proportion of students are using Facebook.

Discussion

I suspect that social media consultants who advise the higher education sector will find the evidence presented in this post useful in demonstrating the importance of Facebook. However some caveats need to be pointed out:

• There may be significant growth when six formers are deciding which universities to apply to. The ‘liking’ of a university may provide a bookmark which is not an indication of engagement with the institution.
• New students may like their new institution’s Facebook page when they arrive, but may not use the service during their time at the institution.
• Students may not unlike their institution’s Facebook page when they graduate, meaning that the number of Facebook likes will include people who have left the institution and may no longer use the service or have an interest in the information provided.

In addition to the need to the interpretation of the data there will also be a need to make policy decisions which should be informed by such evidence, but may not need to be determined by the evidence. It may be that Facebook can be regarded in a similar way to mailing lists: people use them and gain some value from them but development work is likely to take place using other technologies. Alternatively the popularity of Facebook may mean that that it has a role to play as a platform for development of new services. As described in a post on Facebook and Twitter as Infrastructure for Dissemination of Research Papers (and More) publishers such as Spring are providing mechanisms for researchers to share peer-reviewed papers using Facebook and Twitter, so perhaps Facebook could have a role to play as a sharing tool which is embedded within institutional tools.

Alternatively might Facebook have a role to play in more significant development work. The initial popularity of the Guardian’s Facebook app suggested that Facebook could have a role to play in sharing one’s reading activities across one’s networks, although more recent evidence, as described in a post on “Facebook Social Readers Are All Collapsing” suggests that Facebook apps which provide ‘frictionless sharing’ are declining in popularity. A more recent post TechCrunch post which described how Decline Of Reader Apps Likely Due To News Feed Changes, Shows Facebook Controls The Traffic Faucet provided a more thoughtful analysis of the reasons for the decline in usage, but also highlighted the dependencies which organisations will have in reliance on commercial companies whose business decisions may adversely effect organisations which rely on their services.

Figure 2: Facebook ‘Likes’ for Russell Group universities
(see Table for institution names)

The question “What next for Facebook use in UK Universities?” will be an interesting one. And with over half a million ‘likes’ will Oxford University be thinking about benefits which can be gained from such a large network? Alternatively will institutions such as Newcastle University with small Facebook networks shrug their metaphorical shoulders at such suggestions and argue that Facebook has no value to their teaching and learning and research activities? Or might the popularity of Facebook at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which, as can be seen from the histogram, has a significant effect on the overall totals for Russell Group universities, simply reflect the brand awareness for these two institutions?

What are your thoughts? And what evidence will you need to gather if you feel that alternatives to Facebook will have a significant role to play?

Footnote: A follow-up post about a Survey of Institutional Use of Facebook has been published. This contains information about a survey in which we invite those involved in using Facebook to support institutional activities to provide details of their work. We invite people to complete this survey in order to provide a better understanding of Facebook use within the sector.

A number of recent posts have described institutional use of social media by UK universities, including surveys of use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and links to social media services. These surveys were followed by a post on Institutional Use of Social Media In Europe. Such evidence-gathering can be helpful in identifying patterns of usage and informing policy-making.

But what about institutional use of social media by UK universities hosted in other countries?

Following my post on Links to Social Media Sites on Russell Group University Home Pages André Shappo, who teaches IT Internationalisation at Loughborough University and who has written about his interests in Chinese social networking services on his blog, sent me an email in which he informed me that:

There are also a small number of UK universities using China’s Sina Wēibó social media. So far I have found 20 UK universities using Sina Wēibó, two of which are Russell Group universities. My list is at http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6fab54120100vhyh.html

André went on to add that:

Much more impressive is the number of western companies/brands using Sina Wēibó. So far I have found over 300 of them. My list is at http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6fab54120100wohn.html There are also other regional social media systems that could be used. It seems to me that UK universities are, in general, slow to take advantage of regional social media.

Are the twenty UK universities which André has identified leading the way? Are they established practices which could be adopted by others? A brief survey is described below which aims to provide evidence of the ways in which UK universities are using the Weibo social networking service. Note that as described in Wikipedia:

Sina Weibo (Chinese: 新浪微博; pinyin: Xīnlàng Wēibó; literally “Sina Microblog”) is a Chinese microblogging (weibo) website. Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is one of the most popular sites in China, in use by well over 30% of Internet users, with a similar market penetration that Twitter has established in the USA. It was launched by SINA Corporation on 14 August 2009 and has more than 250 million registered users as of October 2011.

The Survey

The survey was carried out on Wednesday 29 February 2012. The findings are given in the following table, which includes links to the institutional entry on the Weibo service. Note that the survey is based on the twenty verified UK University accounts mentioned in André Shappo ‘s list. André has informed that there this is at least one additional institutional account, but this has not yet been verified.

Discussion

We can see that nineteen of the twenty organisations have a branded URL for their presence on the Weibo service. However it was interesting to note that whilst some institutions make use of the institutional name (coventryuniversity, leedsmetropolitan and universityofessex) others provide a Chinese context (derbychina, hudchina and westminsterchina).

The University of Huddersfield has the largest number of followers by a significant amount, with over twice as many followers as the next largest (Kingston University).

The University of Huddersfield’s site is illustrated. Since the site was viewed using the Chrome browser it was possible to use Google’s translate feature to read some of the posts. It was interesting to spot one post which illustrated how the University is making use of the service:

Revisiting Andre Shappo’s suggestion that:

It seems to me that UK universities are, in general, slow to take advantage of regional social media.

it does seem to me that, in light of changes to UK University funding models, we will see a greater emphasis on ways of marketing to and engaging with potential students from overseas. Clearly use of social media should provide a more cost-effective mechanisms for such engagement than physically transporting people and publications to countries such as China. However in order to maximise the benefits to the UK higher educational institutional as a whole we should be looking to identify and share best practices across the sector. This initial survey aims to provide an initial summary of use of Weibo by the early institutional adopters.

Paradata: The data published in the table was collected on Wednesday 29 February 2012.

A recent post outlined My Predictions for 2012. However rather than just posting some idle speculations on technological developments which I feel will have an impact across the higher education sector this year, I also pointed out that there was a need  at a later date to be able to identify ways of gauging whether the predictions were accurate or not.

This suggestion followed on from a recent post in which I described “The Need for an Evidence-based Approach to Demonstrating Value“.  This post was highlighted by Stephen Downes who introduced me to “people like Rudolf Carnap [who] used to talk about ’the requirement of total evidence’ and the ‘principle of indifference’” and went on to add that “These are as valid today as when they wrote it“. These two post inspired further discussion by Keith Lyons in a post on Probability and Sensemaking on the Clyde Street blog who cited a post on massively scalable sensemaking analytics which has links to other posts in this area including:

Sensemaking Systems Must be Expert Counting Systems, Data Finds Data, Context Accumulation, Sequence Neutrality and Information Colocation to new techniques to harness the Big Data/New Physics phenomenon.

This provides another take on my suggestion of the importance of Collective Intelligence. I’m therefore pleased to have been alerted to further relevant posts in this area. Indeed I can repeat the final two paragraphs in Keith’s posts as they are equally applicable to me:

It is fascinating that two early morning links can open up such a rich vein of discovery. At the moment I am particularly interested in how records can be used to inform decision making and what constitutes necessary and sufficient evidence to transform performance.

I have a lot of New Year reading to do!

But in addition to the analysis of big data in order to help make sense of future trends, it can also be useful to explore what other experts are predicting.

16 Predictions for Mobile in 2012

In my list of predictions I made uncontroversial comments regarding the growth in ownership of tablet computers. My interest was  not in tablet computers per se but in the implications of increased opportunities for content creation and curation, as well as content consumption which such devices would seem to provide.

On the GigaOm blog Kevin C. Tofel provides his more detailed predictions on development in mobile computing. Here are my thoughts on the implications of some of Kevin’s predictions:

Wearable computing becomes the next mobile frontier: Even more opportunities for content consumption, creation and curation. And, as explained in a post which described how “It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Fact That You Did It” favouriting a tweet or +1ing a post can be useful and valuable activities.

A jump in wireless home broadband adoption: More opportunities for online access in the home environment.

Windows Phone usage grows, but slower than expected: There will continue to be a diversity in devices, operating systems and applications, so it will be important to provide device- and application-specific services.

Windows tablets in 2012 will sell like Android tablets did in 2011. There will continue to be a diversity in devices, operating systems and applications, so it will be important to provide device- and application-specific services.

Research In Motion will no longer exist as we know it today: Some platforms will fail, so it can help to minimise the risks by minimising developments of platform-specific services.

Nokia uses Symbian as a backup plan (but doesn’t call it Symbian): See above.

The patent wars worsen: Sigh :-( The W3C will seek to avoid standards which are encumbered by patents, but the devices themselves, their networking connective, etc. may be covered by patents which could, as we have seen recently in the case in which Dutch court blocks Galaxy phones in parts of Europe | ZDNet UK, can lead to devices not being allowed to be sold. Best avoid developing device specific services, then!

Apple’s next iPhone will be the iPhone 4GS: When will 4G arrive in the UK, I wonder?

There will be an iPad Pro available in 2012: Ooh, so we should develop apps for the iPad, should we?

Android’s momentum will continue thanks to Android 4.0: Oh, and the Android?

Hybrid apps with HTML5 will be the norm: Maybe not!

Predictions from the BBC

The BBC News blog has a post entitled Mind-reading, tablets and TV are tech picks for 2012 in which a panel of experts “look ahead to the technologies that will change the way we live and work in 2012 and beyond“.

Mt predictions of the continuing growth in importance of tablet computers and social networks, including Facebook, are echoed by Robert Scoble who points out “in terms of the businesses I follow – start-ups – they’re all building into Facebook’s Open Graph technology” and adds “I think business is going to have to have a Facebook Open Graph strategy next year. Even if we’re ignoring it because it’s too freaky on the privacy side, they’re going to have to at least consider it.“.

I suspect that universities will be amongst those businesses which will be exploring how to make greater use of Facebook. As Scoble pointed out “I visited Yahoo recently and they said they’re seeing 600% more visits from Facebook because of it” – with an increasingly competitive market place across higher education I suspect we will be seeing even greater use being made of Facebook during 2012 and, as mentioned above, there will be a need to consider “the requirement of total evidence” and the “principle of indifference“.

But in addition to Facebook as an application environment, Scoble’s comment reminded me of the importance of Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol.  I wonder whether it will be possible to gather evidence of Facebook’s success by monitoring the growth of the social graph rather than simply the numbers of Facebook users.

The continuing importance of social networks was also the key message given by Tim Barker of Salesforce.com. Barker felt that:

The big one is the social enterprise revolution.

It’s the idea that you can see the power shifting from companies to consumers. There are more than 1.7 billion people on social networks now; Facebook is the size the entire internet was in 2004.

It’s really defining the way that consumers and customers interact with companies and what they expect from them.

Such issues are equally relevant for the university sector, in part because the increasing costs of going to university will mean that future intakes of students will see themselves regarding themselves as customers who are paying a lot of money for the ‘product’ they are buying. In addition something that both staff and students have in common is that we are all consumers when we leave our ivory towers and go into town for the January sales!

We may not like such terminology and be concerned about how the future seems to be arriving, but remember ”the requirement of total evidence” and the ”principle of indifference“.  On the other hand, perhaps we shouldn’t be so fatalistic about the future.  But if we do wish to build an alternative reality we will still need to gather the evidence.

I recently described developments which suggest the potential for Facebook and Twitter as Infrastructure for Dissemination of Research Papers (and More). The post pointed out that links Facebook and Twitter seem to becoming more embedded within services, such as bibliographic services, in order to make it easier for researchers to share papers of interest across their professional network. Recently Martin Belam (@currybet) tweeted “Frictionless sharing – exploring the changes to Facebook” – a piece I’ve written for FUMSI magazine http://bit.ly/z930Wc and his article explored other developments we are seeing which can make sharing of resources even easier than clicking on a Like or Tweet button. Martin is the Lead User Experience & Information Architect for the Guardian Web site and blogs about UX/IA, digital media & journalism on currybet.net. He is also a contributing editor for the FUMSI online magazine. His opening paragraph, in an article aimed at information professionals, suggests that he feels that Facebook can bring benefits to this sector:

As 2012 begins, Facebook remains one of the amazing growth stories of the internet. Some argue that an eventual flotation will mark the high tide of a second internet bubble, whilst others are awe of the fact that a website that started in a college dorm has grown to have nearly one billion members

The main focus of his article are the recent technical developments which make sharing of resources transparent:

One of the biggest changes for content providers is “frictionless sharing”. In the past, users had to actively share content by pressing a “Like” button on a website, or “Like”-ing a Facebook page, or including a URL in their status update. Facebook is changing this. They have opened up what they call their “Open Graph”, which allows apps and publishers to automatically insert “actions” into a user’s Facebook timeline. And, in plain English, that means that for some sites or apps, simply listening to a song or reading an article is enough to see it posted to your Facebook activity stream without you lifting so much as a mouse-finger.

At the time of writing only a handful of applications have been launched which take advantage of the feature, including those by Yahoo!, Spotify, the Guardian, Independent and the Washington Post’s “Social Reader” app. That is sure to change in 2012, but the roll-out of further apps seems tied into Facebook launching “Timeline” – a new way for users to view their profile pages.

As an example of what is meant by frictionless sharing a screenshot of my Facebook news updates showing the Guardian articles I read using the Guardian’s Facebook app is shown. As can be seen the articles I read included ones on “Sherlock: BBC will no remove nude scenes” and “A Thatcher state funeral would be bound to lead to protests“. Note that the links I have provided go directly to the Guardian Web site so you can follow the links in the knowledge that your interest in nudity and right wing politicians will not be disclosed to your liberal colleagues :-)

This provides an interesting example of the risks of sharing the articles you read, without having to manually select an article of interest and consciously share it, whether on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious or whatever, across your network. And this is a reason why some people, including people in my network whose opinions I respect, have concerns over this development. On the other hand, the Guardian Facebook app does seem to be popular. It seems I was not alone in reading the article on how “Footage of nude dominatrix shown before 9pm watershed have prompted more than 100 complaints” and the hypocrisy of the Daily Mail in expressing their outrage whilst including the ‘shocking’ images in their web site.

But the 8,995 people who viewed the article shortly after it had been published was beaten by the 11,686 people who read the article on how Pale octopus, hairy-chested yeti crab and other new species found (warning the first link is to the Guardian Facebook app).

So how popular is the Guardian Facebook app? A post which suggested that We Can’t Ignore Facebook described how the Guardian Facebook app was launched on 22 September 2011. Statistics for a number of the Guardian sections collated on 14 January 2012, just over three months after the app’s launch, are given below.

These figures seem to suggest the popularity of the Guardian Facebook app although, as ever, care must be taken in interpretting figures. In particular I do not know if these figures may include use of a pre-frictionless sharing app. In addition this single set of figures doesn’t provide any comparisons with views of the Guardian Web site or shown trends.

But returning to the recent FUMSI article Martin Belam provided some suggestions aimed at information professionals

Think again about Facebook metadata
Facebook’s Open Graph is a metadata standard for marking up your web content. It sits quietly in the HEAD of your HTML, and replicates many fields that you might be familiar with from metadata standards like Dublin Core. The fact that anyone can access it via a web request allows Facebook to say the standard is “open”, although they tightly control the spec themselves. To take advantage of the new frictionless sharing, even if you don’t build an app yourself, making that metadata available is going to be a requirement to have your content display properly within the many social reading experiences that are sure to be developed.

Think again about audit trails
“Frictionless sharing” changes the nature of our digital audit trails on Facebook. From a competitive intelligence point of view, it is great news, because potentially seeing what someone from a particular company is reading about and watching can give you clues as to where their work may be heading. It also means being careful not to leave audit trails yourself if you want the research you are doing to be kept “under the radar”.

Discussion

The ‘Frictionless Sharing’ Term

Martin Belam’s article generated some interesting Twitter debate on the day it was published. I spotted the initial tweet from @currybet and shortly afterwards read @ppetej’s comment that:

Much as I loathe the whole ghastly “frictionless sharing” thing, some useful thoughts/pointers by @currybettinyurl.com/6rvnqx7

and @mweller’s response:

@ppetej frictionless sharing is interesting I think for academics – it certainly shaped the way I wrote my last book

I curated the discussion on Storify since I felt it raised several interesting issues, in particular in taking the discussion about frictionless sharing beyond one particular instance (Facebook, which tends to focus concerns on other aspects of Facebook’s activities) into the more general issues of frictionless sharing in an educational context. Indeed, as Pete Johnston pointed out, a post on Martin Weller’s The Ed Techie blog published back in 2008 described The cost of sharing in which Martin made the point that “The ‘cost’ of sharing has collapsed, but institutions don’t know this“. Martin went on to point out that:

Clay Shirky argues that the cost of organisation has disappeared, and I believe this is because sharing is easy, frictionless. If I come across something I share it via Google shared items, Twitter, my blog, etc. If I want to share I stick it up on Slideshare, my blog, YouTube. There is a small cost in terms of effort to me to do the sharing, and zero cost in anyone wanting to know what I share. Sharing is just an RSS feed away.

Hmm, so back in November 2008 Martin Weller stated that “sharing is easy, frictionless“. Can anyone find an early reference to use of this term in this context? In a post on Sharing Learning Resources: shifting perspectives on process and product Amber Thomas used the term to describe activities taking place in the 1990s: “For example, the late 90s to early 2000s emphasised the benefits of collaborative resource development. Later on, some advocates of Open Educational Resources (OER) brought to the fore the concept of content as by-product, exhaust, frictionless sharing” but was not using the term at the time. I wonder if the Sharing article in Wikipedia should include a reference to ‘frictionless sharing’ and whether Martins’ blog post would be an appropriate reference for an early citing of the term in the context of sharing resources on social networking services?

Whenever the term first originated (and on Twitter Martin Weller suggested that “around the time of the dot com bubble ppl talked about the frictionless economy“) by December 2011 the ReadWriteWeb was predicting a Top Trends of 2011: Frictionless Sharing. This article illustrated frictionless sharing initially by Facebook are doing but also sharing music and news items.

But what of the potential for frictionless sharing in higher education?

Martin Weller feels that such approaches are already becoming embedded in some of his working practices, in particular: “frictionless sharing is interesting I think for academics – it certainly shaped the way I wrote my last book“. In My Predictions for 2012 I suggested that we will see an increase in the amount and types of ‘open practices’ including not only the well-established areas of open access and open educational resources, but also open approaches to being recorded and videoed. But such areas are still related to the creation of content. Frictionless sharing is interesting as it relates to openness in a more passive content: openness about what you may be reading (and as well as Faceboook, apps such as GoodReads allow one to share information on what you are reading).

Tony Hirst explored these ideas in a post published in October 2010 entitled in which he asked Could Librarians Be Influential Friends? And Who Owns Your Search Persona? when he asked “: if librarians become Facebook friends of their patrons, and start “Liking” high quality resources they find on the web, might they start influencing the results that are presented to their patrons on particular searches?“. Tony referred to this post last week when he revisited the potential role of librarians in supporting sharing of resources in a post in which he asked Invisible Library Support – Now You Can’t Afford Not to be Socials? His comment that:

The idea here was that you could start to make invisible frictionless recommendations by influencing the search engine results returned to your patrons (the results aren’t invisible because your profile picture may appear by the result showing that you recommend it. They’re frictionless in the sense that having made the original recommendation, you no longer have to do any work in trying to bring it to the attention of your patron – the search engines take care of that for you (okay, I know that’s a simplistic view;-). [Hmm.. how about referring to it as recommendation mode support?]

was particularly interesting in that Tony seems to have changed from using ‘invisible’ to ‘frictionless’ during the course of writing the post.

The Challenges

In some respects pragmatic advice regarding privacy issues and uncertainties as to how such data could subsequently be used would suggest that you should avoid the risks associated with frictionless sharing. Indeed, I made this point in a post in which I asked Is Smartr Getting Smarter or Am I Getting Dumber? following the Smartr app’s unannounced release of frictionless sharing for reading Twitter links read by members of one’s Smartr network.

But as the evidence of the Guardian app seems to suggest, people may be willing to share their interests in a passive fashion, and benefit from ways in which members of their networks reciprocate.

I guess the questions to be answered are:

• What other types of frictionless sharing are there?
• What benefits can frictionless sharing provide?
• What are the risks in frictionless sharing?
• Will the benefits outweigh the risks?

But before we can start to discuss these questions we perhaps need to define the terms. So what is ‘frictionless sharing‘? On this occasion Google currently seems to suggest that the term relates primarily to a recent Facebook developments, but I’m interested in the generic meaning of this term.  And perhaps we can use the Wikipedia entry for Frictionless sharing to agree on a definition.

A tweet from @Wowter (blogger, information specialist and bibliometrician at the Wageningen UR Library) alerted me to the news of the “Free new #SpringerLink mobile app: Access 2,000+ peer-rev. journals, 49,000 books,127,000 #OA articles.http://ow.ly/8gv9W“.

I installed the app on my iPod Touch and was interested to note that there were just three ways of sending information about the 2,000+ peer-reviewed journals, 49,000 books and 127,000 open access articles: as illustrated the three dissemination tools are email, Facebook and Twitter.

Via @Wowter’s Twitter timeline I also found the news, initially announced by @MFenner, of the “New blog post: CrowdoMeter goes Mobile http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2012/01/04/crowdometer-goes-mobile/“.

The blog post describes how “Two weeks ago Euan Adie from altmetric.com and myself launched the website CrowdoMeter, a crowdsourcing project that tries to classify tweets about scholarly articles using the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO) … This project is far from over, ideally we want 3-5 classifications per tweet or an additional 1,000 classifications“. In order to “make the classifications as simple as possible, and to help further with this we today [4 January 2012] launched a mobile version of CrowdoMeter. Simply browse to http://crowdometer.org with your iPhone or Android phone [and] sign in via your Twitter account“.

I did this and captured the following screenshots:

Initially in this post I intended to highlight how the Springlink app suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be becoming part of the dissemination infrastructure for research papers, especially on mobile devices. However when I read Martin Fenner’s blog post I realised that Twitter, in particular, may have a role to play in the curation of information about research papers and scientific data.

Hmm, I wonder if Twitter will catch on outside this niche area?

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

Are you pleased, angry or indifferent to Facebook developments (photograph taken at Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow)

Looking at the Evidence

What is your take on recent Facebook developments? Are you feeling angry and have perhaps already deleted your Facebook account as have one or two of my Facebook followers? Or perhaps you are indifferent or even unaware of recent Facebook developments. In which case you are probably just using Facebook as a tool and aren’t taking part in the discussions about Facebook and privacy.

Shortly before a trip to Glasgow this weekend I asked for suggestions on places to visit and things to do. I decided to use my three main social networks in order to gain some anecdotal evidence on current usage of Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

In response to my query I received three responses from four people on Twitter (including one who suggested that I should visit Edinburgh!), 16 comments from fifteen people on Facebook and four comments on Google+.

Whilst that would suggest that Facebook is the most effective social networking environment for me, there is a need to related the numbers of responses to the size of the social network.   But since I have 2,583 followers on Twitter, 625 friends on Facebook and 417 followers on Google+ this seems to confirm the personal value of Facebook to me.

But what about the bigger picture? In a post entitled “Why Facebook’s new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass” by Adrian Smart and published recently on the Guardian Web site Adrian argued that “If you’re not paying for your presence on the web, then you’re just a product being used by an organisation bigger than you“. This was, I felt, a very elitist article, with the suggestion that:

When you own a domain you’re a first class citizen of the web. A householder and landowner. What you can do on your own website is only very broadly constrained by law and convention. You can post the content you like. You can run the software you want, including software you’ve written or customised yourself. And you can design it to look the way you want.

suggesting that you are a second class citizen if you primarily use your institutional Web site or, as I do. on the WordPress.com site which constrains the plugins used and look-and-feel for this blog. Actually, you’re worse than a second class citizen:

When you use a free web service you’re the underclass. At best you’re a guest. At worst you’re a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It’s a cliché but worth repeating: if you’re not paying for it, you’re aren’t the customer, you’re the product. 

In this elitist view, it seems that unless you control your own domain you’re a member of the underclass. The article goes on to take a sideswipe at Facebook, in particular. But it was amusing when I saw the tweet from the Guardian’s @currybet (Martin Belam) which pointed out that:

That “peril of Facebook” post by @adrianshort has 2,000 Likes and has been read nearly 3,000 times in our Facebook apphttp://bit.ly/pUKVXP

Yes, it seems that the “Web underclass” is willing to share their engagement with their peers  using a Facebook  Like or the walled garden provided by the Guardian Facebook app – and in quite large numbers.

Avoiding The Echo Chamber

I have described a polarised situation in which posts describing the various problems with Facebook such as the reasons series of articles which have described how Facebook tracks you online even after you log out, Facebook denies cookie tracking allegations, Facebook fixes cookie behavior after logging out and US congressmen ask FTC to investigate Facebook cookies.

But whilst Nik Cubrilovic, author of the post in which he accused Facebook of tracking its users even if they log out of the social network has subsequently written a post on how Facebook made changes to the logout process in which he describes how the cookies in question now behave as they should (they still exist, but they no longer send back personally-identifiable information after you log out) we are still seeing tweets in which the initial findings are being repeated.  We also seem to fail to hear other perspectives including the comment from Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik:

I’m an engineer who works on these systems. I want to make it clear that there was no security or privacy breach. Facebook did not store or use any information it should not have. Like every site on the internet that personalizes content and tries to provide a secure experience for users, we place cookies on the computer of the user. Three of these cookies on some users’ computers included unique identifiers when the user had logged out of Facebook. However, we did not store these identifiers for logged out users. Therefore, we could not have used this information for tracking or any other purpose. In addition, we fixed the cookies so that they won’t include unique information in the future when people log out.

I feel there is a need to have a better understanding of the complexities of the issues and  be willing to listen to the views of others and not just respond to views expressed on ’echo chambers‘ such as Twitter.

What Can We Learn From Facebook?

In order to move the discussion on from the Twitter echo chamber I’d like to summarise some aspects of Facebook which should be considered in more depth.

“Seamless sharing” could be an appealing concept: A recent post on the Bashki blog announced “Facebook Wants to Change the Way You Share” and described how “Facebook wants to remove as much friction from sharing as possible so that it’s seamlessly integrated with a user’s online activity“. When I heard the term ‘seamless sharing’ it reminded me of the JISC’s vision, over 10 years ago, for the Distributed National Electronic Resource (the DNER as it was initially referred to).   As I described in a poster entitled “Approaches To Indexing In The UK Higher Education Community” presented at the WWW 9 conference in May 2000: “The DNER aims to provide seamless access to electronic resources provided by JISC service providers“. The ideas in the paper were a reflection of the vision for the DNER described by Reg Carr, Director of the Oxford University Library Services who, in a paper on “Creating the Distributed National Electronic Resource, argued that “if the DNER is to deliver the goods in the way envisaged, it will have to do so in a carefully integrated, flexible and seamless way“.

Let’s be honest and admit that in higher education we too are looking to provide a seamless sharing environment.  This is a positive term and we should avoid misinterpretting this term.

We want to understand and respond to user interactions: I recently attended a meeting on learning analytics which Wikipedia describes as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs“.

Back in 2008 Dave Pattern in a post on “Free Book Usage Data Available from the University of Huddersfield” described how the Library Service had “released a major portion of our book circulation and recommendation data“. Eighteen months later in a post on “Non/low library usage and final grades” Dave described how analysis of the library usage data had showed that “it’s those students who graduate with a third-class honour who are the most likely to be non or low-users of e-resources“. In this case analysis of user interactions (and non-interactions) can lead to an institution taking actions, which could include promotion of appropriate Library resources, training, etc.

Facebook  also analyses its user attention data.  If it notices that I am following England’s rugby team’s exploits in the Rugby World Cup it might also respond to failings, but rather than providing an advert for a Library training course, it might suggest I console myself with a pint of Carling!

Walled gardens can provide a nurturing environment: The term ‘walled garden’ is widely used to dismiss Facebook as a closed environment. Facebook clearly was a closed environment when it was launched, with access restricted to those working in approved academic institutions. However now anyone can have a Facebook account (including organisations) and content can be made public too all or access restricted (in ways not easily achieved on conventional Web sites).  Facebook can be used as a platform for walled garden application, with users needing to install the app in order to access the content – but since standard Facebook content can be published openly it would probably be incorrect to describe Facebook as a walled garden, unless we wish to use the term to describe Intranets.  However a mobile phone app which can only be deployed on a singly platform could, possibly, be described as a walled garden – and as several institutions are developing such apps we need to avoid inconsistencies in the terminology we are using.

In addition to the need to be more rigourous in defining the term there is also a need to reflect on the potential benefits of walled gardens.  I have heard a walled garden being described a providing a ‘managed’ or ‘nurturing’ environment. The institutional VLE may be regarded as a walled garden, but this point is very rarely heard when the term is being used to dismiss technologies one doesn’t approve of.

Users understand the need for sustainable business models: I have always been rather bemused by the statement: “if you’re not paying for a service you’re the product“. When I watch the Rugby World Cup matches on ITV I can also be described as ‘the product’.  ITV isn’t broadcasting the matches as a favour to me and other sports’ fans: it’s doing so in order to make money from the associated advertising.  And just as TV viewers understand the business models so too will users of social networking services understand that the service providers need to make money, both to fund the service and to provide a profit for the owners.

Let’s be honest and admit that faced with a choice of business models based on subscription services, advertising or even nationalised services, the evidence suggests that many users are willing to use services which provide adverts.

Isn’t there a lot which we can learn if we avoid the simple slogans and reflect on the Facebook experiences and successes which users seem to find beneficial?

The changes to Facebook announced at Facebook’s F8 Developers conference last week haven’t gone down well in some circles with a number of the people I follow on Twitter expressing their concerns at the privacy implications of recent changes and one or two having gone as far as to delete their Facebook accounts.

Might those technically-savvy people be setting a trend which will become more widespread as the privacy concerns become more widely known beyond those who read blog posts which describe in detail how Facebook can monitor your interactions, even when you are logged out of the service? Or are these people in a minority and will we see that once the changes have been fully deployed and problems fixed in light of user feedback could be see an increase in Facebook usage?

Gathering Evidence of Institutional Use of Facebook

In order to be able to gather evidence of possible changes in usage patterns within the UK HE sector I have updated a survey of Use of Facebook by Russell Group Universities which was carried out in January 2011. A summary of the numbers of people who have ‘liked’ the pages, together with details of the changes from the previous survey are given in the following table.

Summary

In brief in a period of nine months we have seen an increase in the number of ‘likes’ for the twenty UK Russell Group Universities of over 274,000 users or almost 100% with the largest increase, of over 155,000 occurring at the University of Oxford.

Discussion

The previous survey highlighted emerging patterns of institutional use of Facebook and provided some suggestions on best practices (such as providing a Facebook page rather than a group and having a short and branded URL).  It seems that institutions are implementing such best practices more widely.  We are also seeing a huge increase in the number of Facebook ‘likes’ with apart from Nottingham’s 7% increase, all of the other institutions seeing a growth of between 33% and 345%.

But might this represent a peak for institutional use of Facebook?   Since we have over half a million users, many of whom will be staff or students at Russell Group Universities we might expect this particular demographic to have a better understanding of the dangers of misuse of Facebook than the general public.  It will be interesting to see how these figures change over the next academic year.

Beyond the Evidence of Usage – Is Facebook a Walled Garden?

This post has focussed on institutional use of Facebook to provide services to end users (a business-to-consumer relationship).  Of course there are privacy implications associated with use of Facebook and it might be argued that Universities shouldn’t be using unethical network providers – just as there were pressures on universities not to support businesses which had links with South Africa during the apartheid era.

I’ve not heard people seriously suggesting that Universities should stop their institutional use of Facebook, but there is a need to have a better understanding of the concerns people have regarding Facebook, in part so that we can ensure that possible alternatives to Facebook don’t repeat such concerns. The one particular areas of concerns I’d like to address in this post is that Facebook is a ‘walled garden.’

This morning I was involved in a brief Twitter discussion in which Twitter was dismissed as a ‘walled garden’. It was suggested that, just like AOL, you need to sign up to access content hosted on Facebook. Surely not? So I logged out of Facebook and visited the University of Warwick page and, as can be seen, I can view the page.

But rather than restrictions on accessing public information, perhaps Facebook is described as a walled garden because you can put information in, but not get it out again?

This was the case at one point, but know there is a Facebook Export service which “uses the Facebook Open Graph protocol to export your Facebook data to an xml file. Facebook Export does not store any data about you. You can then use this xml file to import your data to other services and websites that support the Facebook Export (FBE) format.“

Or perhaps the concern is that use of Facebook apps locks information into a particular application? I feel there may be an element of truth to this concern – you can develop Facebook apps which do trap the data into the app.  But the Russell Group University Facebook pages seem to be using the default Facebook features, so this isn’t really a current concern. And even apps such as the Guardian Facebook app shouldn’t be regarded as acting as a walled garden since the same data can be accessed in several other ways, such as via RSS feeds, Android and iPhone apps and on the Web itself.

I, therefore, am unconvinced that current institutional use of Facebook can be regarded as using a Walled Garden and that Universities are promoting a propriety service.  Of much greater relevance will be how people react to the recent changes in Facebook. If people start to leave, there will be a need to reconsider Universities’ uses of Facebook as a marketing and engagement service.

During the summer I was involved in using Social Media to promote the Bath Folk Festival. Although I set up a Bathfolkfest Twitter account, I discovered that, apart from a small number of the performers, folkies don’t appear to make significant use of Twitter. The Bath Folk Facebook page, in ccontrast, was very popular, and currently has 124 ‘likes’ in contrast with the 27 people who are following the Twitter account. But how, specifically, widely used was it?

From viewing the Insight statistics for the page it seems that during the week of the festival there were no fewer than 10,854 views of the status updates with 166 people interacting with the page during the week.  As might be expected views of the page peaked during the festival, as is illustrated below.  But since those people are still connected with the page we will be able to reuse the connections which have been established for next year’s festival, as well as providing updates of folk events held in Bath throughout the year.

I haven’t posted about this previously, in part because my involvement with the folk festival was a personal interest. But in addition I suspect that many readers of this blog will regard Facebook as many Microsoft products: they both tend to be disliked for a variety of reasons but they are also very successful.

However in light of yesterday’s Facebook’s F8 conference I feel those involved in development activities, as well as those involved in mainstream marketing and student engagement activities, can’t afford to continue to disregard the potential relevance of Facebook.

Areas of Interest

Looking at the various articles and blog posts about yesterday’s news it seems that much of the focus focussed around links with Spotify, with the BBC News having the headline “Facebook focuses on media sharing and adds timeline“. However I would like to highlight two specific areas: the implications of the decisions by the Guardian to release a Guardian Facebook app and how, behind the scenes, Facebook seem to be endorsing use of RDFa and how this could help growth in use of Linked Data.

Guardian Facebook App

I was surprised when I saw yesterday’s announcement of the launch of a Facebook app for the Guardian newspaper. I currently have access to articles published in the Guardian provided as RSS feeds or via the Guardian app on my iPod Touch and Android phone. In addition I recently made use of the Kindle app on my Android phone to read the Guardian for about  a number before I decided that, although the experience was better than using the Guardian app or an RSS reader (to view articles not included in the view provided by the app). It was very interesting, therefore, to discover that the Guardian had chosen to invest resources to develop yet another app which allowed the content to be viewed within the Facebook environment.

I have installed the app. As can be  seen one can choose to view a variety of sections including the main Guardian section, Guardian Technology, Guardian Football and Guardian Data all of which I have ‘liked’.

In the accompanying image (of the Guardian data section) I have removed details of my Facebook friends who have also liked the page (and the NPR page). Clearly there are privacy issues in allowing one’s Facebook friends to not only see the games you may be playing but also the content you may be reading.

But in addition to being able to see the sections of the Guardian which one’s friends have liked I was surprised to spot in the app’s activity stream that using the app will disclose the sections you are reading.  As illustrated, a friend of mine has been reading an article on “Why we need a debate on the British way of death”. As I described in a recent post which asked “Is Smartr Getting Smarter or Am I Getting Dumber?” sharing, perhaps unknowingly,  details of what one has been reading whether, as in the case on Smartr, links to pages posted on Twitter or, in this case, Guardian articles, does raise interesting tensions related to sharing, openness and privacy.   It is perhaps surprising that the Guardian newspaper doesn’t seem to be unduely concerned about such issues, with the Guardian Facebook App FAQ simply stating:

Can everybody see what I “Read”?
The Guardian Facebook app is a “social reading” environment. Your Facebook friends will be able to see links to articles you have read within the Guardian app environment, and you will be able to see what they have been reading. We think this will help people discover content that they might be interested in.

Facebook’s Social Graph

I have recollections of attending a Linked Data session at the WWW  2010 conference and hearing from a senior Facebook developer about the technologies used in Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol. The response to the question “Why are you developing your own approach? Why aren’t you using RDFa?” was (I paraphrase) “We were unaware of RDFa until this conference. It seems cool – we’ll use it!“.

Last night on Twitter two Linked Data experts whom I follow seemed to be pleased with the news announced at thre Facebook F8 developer conference.  Manu Sporny, “Founder/CEO of Digital Bazaar. RDFa/RDF WebApps Chair @ W3C. Champion for art/science, distributed banking/commerce, @PaySwarm, JSON-LD, semantics and puppies.” tweeted:

Facebook’s new OGP launch today uses RDFa 1.1 (developer docs): http://ow.ly/6CafT #rdfa #w3c

whilst Kingsley Idehen, “Founder & CEO, OpenLink Software, An Open Linked Data Enthusiast”, provided an interesting reweeet:

RT @aliriop: #Facebook #OpenGraph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity on.mash.to/qKEoBg . #SDQ #LinkedData

The Linked Open Data Graph has been used to demonstrate the growth and size of the Linked Data environment. However critics have argued that it shows that Linked data seems to be over-reliant on content provided by DBpedia. It will be interesting to see if the large-scale use of RDFa across Facebook will demonstrate the value of Linked Data and help to encourage take-up in other areas.

Implications for the Sector

On Twitter Linda Bewley commented last night:

My Facebook cynicism is balanced out by respect for their ability to innovate. Direct access to phone’s native app data = result!

Although the issues of privacy are still very relevant, as I highlighted in the case of the Guardian app, it does seem to me that there will be a need to reflect  on the potential for greater business uses of Facebook. I’ll be interested to if, over time, Facebook’s Timeline oculd have a role to play in enhancing the Bath Folk page.  And whilst this is a trivial example, Universities will no doubt be considering the implications of yesterday’s announcements in the support of their marketing activities. But who, I wonder, will be in a position to take advantage of the Collective Intelligence which Facebook will be gathering?

Is Google+ dead?  Dan Reimold certainly thinks so. In a post entitled “Google+: Social Media Upstart ‘Worse Than a Ghost Town‘” he suggest that Google+ may “simply [be ] a social media step too far” and is now “worse than a ghost town“.  In his conclusions he reflects on his personal experiences as a Google+ user:

As it stands, my Circles are sparse. The stream of updates has basically run dry — reduced to one buddy who regularly writes. My initial excitement about signing on and inviting people to join me has waned. Nowadays, I apparently get tired just thinking about it. 

A similar discussion about the relevance – and perhaps sustainability – took place amongst some of my Twitter followers recently. It seems that some feel Google+ is irrelevant and others are pleased with what they claim is a failed Google service and are waiting for the Diaspora service to be launched. However, as I said in the Twitter discussion, I am not convinced by this argument.

Why Google+ May be a Slow-Burner

Lessons from Growth of Twitter

In January 2011 in a post on Evidence of Personal Usage Of Social Web Services I described how use of the Tweetstats service provided me with evidence of growth of my Twitter usage which contradicted the understanding I had at the time. I had thought that I was an early adopter of Twitter and had used if fairly consistently since my first tweet in January 2007. But the Tweetstats graph (illustrated) shows little use in 2007. It wasn’t until early 2008 that I started to use Twitter on a regular basis.  The gaps in graph in the early part of 12008 puzzled me initially until I came across a blog post in which I described how I had made intensive use of Twitter whilst attending the Museums and the Web 2008 conference.  It seems that, perhaps due to a glitch in Twitter or Tweetstats, no usage had been detected for a period of a couple of months, which included the time when I first start to use Twitter on a regular basis.

Looking back it seems that attending a conference abroad made me aware of the benefits which Twitter can provide during a conference and that I soon became aware of the additional benefits which can be gained by developing links with one’s professional network.

A few days ago Aaron Tay pointed out that:

Some technology rewards getting in early e.g Twitter (early accs get more followers) & some don’t e.g qrcode http://j.mp/mUncdt

The post he cited (on the Seth Godin blog) made the observation that:

Worth considering: The difference between a technology where getting in early pays dividends, and those that don’t. For example, having a website or a blog or a Twitter account early can help, because each day you add new users and fans.

QR codes, on the other hand, don’t reward those that get in the ground floor. You can always start tomorrow.

Seth pointed out a important advantage that early adopters of social networks can have – the ease of gaining the critical mass which may be needed in order for the service to provide value.  There is a danger that this may be construed as a suggestion that the numbers of followers alone is a key factor in having an effective social networking service – and seeking new followers simply to enhance one’s Klout or Peerindex ranking is an example of misunderstanding of the relevance of a critical mass. Rather than simply indiscriminately seeking to grow large numbers of followers it you are looking to use a social network for professional purposes there is a need for to be reach the critical mass across one’s peers.

I recently installed the Social Bros application which provides evidence of personal use of Twitter.  I used this recently to investigate the number of followers the people I follow on Twitter have.  As can be seem most of the people I follow have 100-500 followers, with significant numbers having 1,000-5,000 and 500-1,000 followers. In order to develop a community of this size it can be useful to be an early adopter so that one can stake a claim. The following influx of users will have to search for contacts, and, having spotted and made contact with you, you will be able to reciprocate, if  you so choose.

As described in a Wikipedia entry on the Network Effect “sites like Twitter and Facebook [become] more useful the more users join“. But as well as users needing a critical mass and an understanding of the benefits of the service, there will also be a need for east-to-use tools. Initially I used the Twitter Web site but as I discovered from reading my early posts about Twitter,  I was using the Twhirl client around the time my Twitter use became embedded in my daily work routine.  The Tweetstats service I mentioned earlier also provides me with statistics on the Twitter clients I have used.  As can be seen Tweetdeck is now my preferred tool, with the usage statistics of the Web client primarily either reflecting, I suspect, my early use of the Web or use in Internet cafes.

Implications for My Use of Google+

What lessons might we learn from these reflections on how Twitter developed from claiming an id but making little use to finding valuable (and unexpected)  use cases which lead to the service being embedded in my professional life which can be applied to Google+?

Like, I suspect, many others of my peers I have claimed a Google+ account and have established contacts with people I know from both real world and online interactions (there are currently 116 people in my circles and 385 people who have included me in their circle).

Yesterday I found that Google+ accounts are now freely available to everyone, so the comment I have heard that Google+ is exclusive to the early adopters is not longer the case.

I also heard yesterday that Google+ have released APIs which should help in developing a richer environment of tools and services based around Google+ (in this case, use of Huddle) which, I feel, was valuable in Twitter becoming mainstream.

The Google+ service itself is becoming richer in functionality, with recent tweets from Aaron Tay alerting me to articles which describe how “Google+ Hangouts Go Mobile & Get More Collaborative” and explain “Why Google Plus Hangouts is the Killer App: Docs“.

It seems to me that it is now timely to explore ways in which Google+ may deliver benefits and also to gain an understanding of best practices including personal work flow processes.  Earlier this year I set up a daily blog which I used to keep notes and ideas.  I spotted using it after six months, partly because I felt I was getting little new from using a second WordPress blog.  However I’ve now made a decision to use Google+ as a middle ground between the (sometimes, as in this case, long) posts I publish on this blog and the conversations and  announcements which take place on Twitter.

Anyone else planning to make greater use of Google+? Or, like Dan Reimold, do you feel it’s a ghost town and is unlike to have a significant role to play?

Introduction

In introducing the event, Brian Kelly emphasised that the aims were to explore ways of gathering evidence that can demonstrate the impact of services and to devise appropriate metrics to support the needs of the higher and further eduction sector.

Many people argue that you cannot reduce education to mere numbers, as it is really about the quality of the experience. However, Kelly argued that numbers do matter, citing the recent JISC-funded Impact Report, which found that the public and the media are influenced by metrics. As we have to engage with this wider community, metrics are going to become more relevant.

View the introduction in full on Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Why Impact, ROI and Marketing are No Longer Dirty Words

Amber Thomas, JISC

Thomas mapped out the current landscape, drawing on her own experiences and those of colleagues working in other areas at JISC. She observed a dominant culture of resistance to measurement within education for a number of reasons, including the concern that caring about metrics will mean that only highly cited people or resources will be valued. She noted that the search for an effective impact model is taking place on shifting sands, as issues associated with the value, ownership and control of media channels are being contested, as is the fundamental role of the university within British society.

In discussing impact, Thomas noted that it would be tempting to use the language of markets – with education as a “product” – but stressed that this not how we see ourselves in the education sector. One of the challenges we face is how to represent the accepted narrative of the sector as a nurturer and broker of knowledge, through the use of metrics.

Thomas went on to describe some of the dirty words in this space and the measurements that are associated with them. However, she noted that these measurements can be used for good, as they can help to instigate change. To support this, she provided a model for the role of metrics in decision making, with metrics being one form of evidence, and evidence being only one form of influence on the decision maker.

She concluded by outlining our options for responding to the impact debate: we could deny the impact agenda is important, or we could deepen our understanding and improve our metrics so they work for us and are fit for purpose. The possible directions we could take include developing business intelligence approaches, improving data visualisation techniques and looking for better tools to give us deeper understanding of the metrics. She also stressed that we need to look more closely at the use and expectations of social media in the commercial sector, as we might find we are expecting too much of ourselves.

“I don’t think we can ignore the debate on impact and metrics… what we need to do is engage with the impact debate and use the sort of language that is expected of us to defend the values of the sector a we wish to defend them.”

View the presentation in full at Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Surveying our Landscape from Top to Bottom

Brian Kelly, UKOLN

Kelly provided an overview of the surveys he has been carrying out using a variety of analytics tools.

He began with a personal view: discussing the picture of his own Twitter usage provided by the Tweetstats tool, and how this differs from his own memory. He noted that the data did not always correspond with other evidence, emphasising that we cannot always trust the data associated with such tools.

“You need to be a bit skeptical when looking at this data… you can’t always trust all the data that you have.”

From an institutional perspective, he asked: “What can commercial analytics tools tell us about institutional use of Twitter?” He compared the Klout scores of Oxford and Cambridge Universities’ Twitter accounts, showing how visualisations of the numbers can give a much better understanding of what those numbers really mean than the numbers themselves do in isolation.

He continued in this vein by demonstrating Peer Index, which he used to analyse participants of the workshop. He noted that the top seven people are all people he knows and has had a drink with, so asked whether this shows that the gathering is really a self-referential circle? Kelly also noted how easy it can be to gain extra points and questioned whether it is ethical to boost your score in this way. However, he observed that research funding is determined by flawed metrics, and gaming the system is nothing new. So will universities head hunt researchers with valuable social media scores?

Next he looked at Slideshare statistics, using a presentation by Steve Wheeler as a case study. Wheeler made a presentation to 15 people, but his slides were viewed by over 15,000 people on Slideshare. Kelly asked us to consider the relationship between the number of views and the value of this resource. He also examined statistics from the collection of IWMW slides, observing that the commercial speakers had higher view rates, and that the most popular slides were not in corporate look and feel. This evidence could be used to challenge standard marketing perspectives.

Finally, Kelly compared Technorati and Wikio results to demonstrate that four people in the room were in the top 67 English language technology blogs. He pondered whether they should they share their success strategies, or how we could tell the story of this data in different ways.

To conclude, Brian emphasised that he believes this kind of analysis can inform decision making, so it is important to gather the data. However, the data can be flawed, so it is important to question it thoroughly.

View the presentation in full on Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Learning From Institutional Approaches

Ranjit Sidhu, SiD

Sidhu focussed primarily on the role of pound signs in communicating particular messages and connecting social media metrics to reality in a powerful way.

He began by observing that the data is often vague. The analytics institutions receive look exactly the same as the analytics used by commercial organisations, despite the fact that their needs and objectives differ widely. He attributed this to the dominance of the technology, which has taken control over the information that gets delivered, thus ensuring everyone gets data that is easy to deliver, rather than data that is meaningful to them. Sidhu also observed that universities often fail to break down their data into relevant slices, instead viewing it at such a high level that it cannot usefully be interpreted in financial terms.

In a self-confessed rant, Sidhu emphasised that you have a chance to tell the narrative of your data. Most social media data is openly available, so if you don’t, someone else will and you will no longer have control over that narrative.

“You need to be proactive with your data. If you’re proactive, people don’t sack you.”

Sidhu went on to demonstrate the type of analytics dashboard he creates for universities, discussing the importance design as well as the analysis itself. His dashboard features nine groups of data and only three key themes, which fit onto one A4 sheet and are arranged in an attractive way. He also discussed his methodology when creating these dashboards, which involves finding out what people want to know first, then finding the data to match those requirements. This is the reverse of common practice, where people take the data that is readily available and try to fit that to their requirements.

He explained the need to match up offline experience with online experience to help to generate projections and quantify the savings produced by online tools and social media. He exemplified this by talking us through one of the most powerful statistics he creates: a calculation demonstrating the amount saved by online downloads of prospectuses compared to sending printed versions. This is usually around £500 per month. This takes the online data, combines it with existing data from the comparable offline process, and creates a tangible value.

He extended this to show other types of story we could tell with such data, including the potential value of a website visit from a specific country. Once you have this, you can more effectively demonstrate the monetary value of social media by using referrer strings to show how a visitor from that country reached your site, and therefore make better decisions about how you attract those visitors.

“You have to justify your spend. Your justification has to be based on what you are trying to do at that particular time.”

View the presentation in full at Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Identity, Scholarship and Metrics

Martin Weller, The Open University

Weller posed many questions and points to ponder, focussing on how academic identity is changing now we are online.

He observed that identity is now distributed across different tools, with a greater tendency to intersect with the personal. There are more layers to consider: where once you had your discipline norms and your institutional norms, now there are more social media norms to observe to create cultural stickiness. You end up with a set of alternative representations of yourself, so your business card is now a much messier thing.

Weller went on to define impact as a change in behaviour, but emphasised that telling the story of impact online is actually very difficult. Your impact may be more about long term presence than an individual post. The metrics we currently use do not necessarily correspond to our traditional notions of academic impact: after all, what do views mean? What do links mean? What do embeds mean? How do they compare to citations?

He put forward the accepted view that blogging and tweeting provide you with an online identity, which drives attention to more traditional outputs. He placed this in the context of a digital academic footprint, which helps tell the story of the impact you are having within your community. Whilst metrics can be useful for this, he warned that they could also be dangerous, with official recognition leading to a gameable system.

He concluded by illustrating a sandwich model explaining why metrics will be increasingly important to what academics do: with top-down pressure from above to demonstrate impact when applying for funding, and bottom-up pressure from individuals asking why their impact via social media doesn’t count. Once you’ve got those two pressures, you have an inevitable situation.

View the presentation in full on Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Impact of Open Media at the OU

Andrew Law, The Open University

Law discussed the activities of the Open University when monitoring the various media channels used to disseminate content and how these metrics have led to real, significant funding decisions.

He observed that several of their online media channels did not necessarily have a very clear strategic remit. However, they found that the data was increasingly asking the question: “What is the purpose of all this activity?” Deeper analysis of this data led to the development of clearer stategies for these channels, based on their core institutional aims.

Law emphasised the importance of having all of the information about the different channels in one place to help dispel the myths that can grow up around particular tools. He used the example of iTunes U, which gets huge amounts of internal PR on campus, whilst channels like OpenLearn and YouTube sit very quietly in the background. However, the reality is very different and he observed that one of the challenges they face is ensuring that the broad story about the performance of all of these channels is well understood by the main stakeholders.

Law expanded on this, noting that whilst the iTunes U download statistics provide a positive story, it does not actually perform well against their KPIs compared to other channels, despite little or no investment in those other channels. He observed that their pedagogical approach to iTunes U – which includes offering multiple, small downloads, with transcripts and audio downloaded separately – can inflate the numbers. He compared this to their YouTube channel, which has received very little investment, but is performing very effectively. He also discussed the OpenLearn story, which has been quietly outstripping other channels against their KPIs – particularly in terms of conversions, because it has a lot of discoverable content. He emphasised that this is a very positive story for the university, which needs to be told and built upon.

By demonstrating these realities, the data has demanded of management a much clearer sense of purpose and strategy. This has led to real investment. The OU has massively increased the amount of money spent on YouTube and OpenLearn, representing a significant change in strategy.

In conclusion, Law did note that, so far, the data has only helped the university, not the end user, so their next steps include mapping journeys between these channels to identify the traffic blockages and better tune the service delivered across the board.

View the presentation in full on Vimeo

The Script Kiddie’s Perspective

Tony Hirst, The Open University

Hirst provided a set of observations and reflections, which ranged from ethical issues about the use of statistics through to practical demonstrations of visualised data.

He began by observing that social media are co-opting channels that were private and making them public, so there is nothing inherently new going on. He quoted Goodhart’s Law, emphasising that, whilst measuring things can be good, once measures are adopted as targets they distort what you are measuring and create systems open to corruption.

Hirst went on to discuss the perils of summary statistics and sampling bias. He emphasised that the way you frame your expectations about the data and the information that can be lost in the processing of that data are both vital considerations if you are to accurately tell the story of that data.

Hirst discussed the role of citations as a traditional measure of scholarly impact and the ways your content can be discovered, and thereby influence through citation. He highlighted three layers of discovery: the media layer, the social layer and the search engine layer, each of which enables your material to be discovered and therefore influence behaviour. He noted that if links come through to your own domain, you can already track how they are reaching your content. What is difficult to track is when there is lots of social media activity, but none of it is coming back to your domain.

Hirst demonstrated some approaches to tracking this type of activity, including the Open University’s Course Profiles Facebook app; Google search results, which are including more personalisation; and social media statistics gleaned through APIs, many of which can be accessed via an authentication route using OAuth.

Hirst concluded by discussing some visualisations of Twitter communities to show how these can provide insight into external perspectives and how we are defined by others in our community.

View the presentation in full on Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Conclusions

The workshop brought forward a number of concerns, that were often less about the tools and technologies involved, but more about the ethics and pitfalls of formalising the measurement of social media activity. The main concern seemed to be the potential for creating a gameable system, or metrics do not reflect reality in a useful way. Ensuring that the metrics we use are fit for purpose will not be an easy challenge, but the discussions held within this workshop helped to identify some potential routes to improving the value and integrity of social media data.

Last week saw a number of interesting Facebook developments which may have implications for the higher and further education sector.  A new Facebook feature, Facebook Questions, was rolled out to all users on March 24 and the following day an Operation Developer Love: Facebook Hack Day took place in Berlin which generated some interesting discussions on Twitter.   Whilst I am aware that many developers and others who have interests  in the use of networked technologies to support educational and research activities have concerns regarding various aspects of the Facebook environment I feel that there is a need to monitor significant developments and to have an open discussion about the potential of such developments as well as possible concerns.

Facebook Questions

A post was published on Mashable on 27 March 2011 which outlines reasons why “Why Facebook’s New Questions Tool Is Good for Brands & Businesses“. The post began:

Brands and businesses are looking for ways to leverage Facebook’s recently unveiled Questions tool in ways that differ from what they’re already doing on Q&A sites such as Quora, Yahoo Answers and LocalMind.

This new feature, which functions as a recommendation engine, was rolled out to all users on March 24. According to Ben Grossman, communication strategist for marketing agency Oxford Communications “It also presents a major opportunity for businesses to conduct market research and crowdsource in a far more elegant way than was previously possible“.

Looking at my Facebook contacts I’ve found that an early user of the new feature was Euan Semple who responded to the question “Check out the new Facebook Questions what do you think? :)“. The answer, it seems, is that 8 people aren’t sure, 4 love it, 16 feel it could be a useful tool whilst one person doesn’t like it at all.

Whilst many of my other Facebook contacts have been answering fairly trivial questions (such as “FOOTBALL OR RUGBY ? WHICH IS BETTER ? ” and “WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT“)  Aaron Tay, a librarian at the National University of Singapore (who was also recently named as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker 2011), has started to explore how the service can be used to support his professional interests, asking, for example, What is your favourite database/ search engine (excluding Google & Wikipedia)?

I have not yet come across any universities making use of Facebook Questions to gather feedback but as described in the Mashable blog post the feature can be used by organisations and groups and not just individuals. Once a Facebook page owner has set up the appropriate configuration options:

Brands, businesses, groups and organizations can then use Questions in several ways. For example, Grossman said:Ice cream parlors can find out what the flavor of the week should be.

• A gym can find out what time is best for its new hip-hop yoga class.
• Radio stations can determine the hottest concerts for the summer.
• Manufacturers can do a pulse check on fans’ holiday shopping plans.

In light of the increased importance of marketing an institution to new and existing customers (and since many new students will be paying £9,000 per year to attend University we should be regarding them – or their parents – as customers) I suspect we will start to see greater use of Facebook Questions. Is any University already using it, I wonder?

The Operation Developer Love: Facebook Hack Day

The #fbdevlov Twitter Discussion

On its own Facebook Questions is simply a new feature which has been deployed by a large scale social networking environment. Of greater interest to the develop[er community was the Operation Developer Love: Facebook Hack Day (see also the Facebook page) which took place in Berlin on Friday 25 March.

I became aware of this event through spotting tweets from three people in my Twitter stream: @gkob, @kidehen and @ldodds. I follow these three individuals as I am aware of their active involvement in Linked Data developments, which is illustrated in the following biographical details provided on Twitter or, in @ldodds case, his personal Web site:

@gkob (Georgi Kobilarov):
CEO at Uberblic Labs. data geek. building data infrastructure for the Web. trying to change the world. linked & open data advocate. ex dbpedia developer.

@kidehen (Kingsley Uyi Idehen)
Founder & CEO, OpenLink Software, An Open Linked Data Enthusiast.

@ldodds (Leigh Dodds)
Until recently Leigh Dodds was the CTO of Ingenta where he was responsible for the ongoing development of their publishing platform based on Semantic Web technologies. Leigh has recently joined Talis as Programme Manager for the Talis Platform

Since I am aware of their involvement in Linked Data development activities I was fascinated by the Twitter discussion which took place around the tweets for the Facebook Developer Love Hack Day. The Twitter hashtag for the event was #fbdevlove. I created a Twapper Keeper archive for the hashtag and also used Storify to keep an archive of the discussions around structured data available through Facebook and Linked Data developments. In brief  Georgi Kobilarov (@gkob) initiated the discussion with a message to other Linked Data developers::

#linkeddata folks: forget all your RDF & Sparql, you’ll have to compete with Facebook’s Graph API, and that war is about developer love

Kingsley Idehen (@kidehen) responded:

@gkob Facebook (#FB) is just another Data Space plugged into the global #WWW Data Space. It’s all good re. #LinkedData. “AND” is good :-)

@gkob #Facebook has been creating a massive#LinkedData hub since inception. It doesn’t have to be hardcore #RDF to be useful Linked Data.

@gkob key thing is this: #Facebook is a massive#LinkedData Space plugged into the global #WWWdata space. User Agents can query it.

@gkob I don’t have any problems querying#Facebook or meshing its data with data from other places en route to richer #LinkedData. All good.

@gkob #RDF != #LinkedData. What #Facebook#Microsoft #Google #Yahoo! etc.. r doing re. structured data (without #RDF) is quite valuable.

An interesting perspective, I thought. To put it another way, the global Social Web providers, such as Facebook, are well positioned to significantly enhance deployment of Linked Data by providing access to the large-scale structured information repositories they host.

Facebook’s Open Graph API

An example of a tool which developers can use to explore Facebook’s Open Graph API  was mentioned by @sicross: his Facebook Graph API Explorer. I have used this tool to retrieve data for two institutional Facebook pages: the University of Bath and the University of Cambridge. You can view the output for the Universities of Bath and Cambridge.

I have previously surveyed institutional Facebook pages for Russell Group Universities in order to identify emerging patterns of usage.  This survey provide a manual comparison which would be resource intensive to carry out across all UK Universities (and even more so if international comparisons were to be made).  However use of the Facebook Graph API Explorer has helped to identify patterns of usage which could be carried out in an automated way including the following numerical data:

University of Bath:

Nos. of likes: 3,357
Nos. of checkins: 1,081

University of Cambridge:

Nos. of likes: 69,824

We can immediately see that people have been using the Facebook Places feature has been used a significant number of times at the University of Bath but not at all at the University of Cambridge.  I must admit that I initially found this surprising: I would have expected an institutional geo-location service to have taken off in an institution which has many buildings scattered throughout the city as opposed to a primarily campus-based institution.  However, on reflection, it seems the opposite is true: checking in will have little value for an institution which has based in a large number of locations.  Of course it may be that geo-location services provide little value in the context of institutional use. Alternatively it may be that Facebook Places has failed to have an impact in this market – a suggestion which seems to be confirmed by an article published yesterday in the Daily Telegraph which informs us that “Foursquare has doubled its users since Facebook Places launched says chief“.

The potential to gather statistics on the number of Facebook ‘likes’ in an automated way will, I feel, help to provide evidence which can be used to inform policy decisions on institutional  use of Facebook and the resources which should be assigned to such work.  There could, of course, be dangers that such statistics would be used to publish league tables – but since the aims of higher educational institutions aren’t about maximising numbers of users on  Social Web services, such concerns shouldn’t be taken too seriously.  However the data gathered  could be used in order to help identify the effectiveness of online marketing activities.  And if an aim is to ensure that UK Universities are best positioned to market their services to overseas students the UK economy as a whole would benefit from a shared understanding of the benefits and the best practices.

“Is Facebook Killing Off The Company Website?”

A white paper entitled “The Effect of Social Networks and the Mobile Web on Website Traffic and the Inevitable Rise of Facebook Commerce” (PDF format) was published by Web Trends on 17 March 2011. In response Jeff Bullas published a blog post in which he asked “Is Facebook Killing Off The Company Website?“. This discussion centred around evidence of traffic to Fortune 100 company Web sites. The study revealed that “68% of the top 100 companies were experiencing a negative growth in unique visits over the past year, with an average drop of 23%“.  In order to identify whether Facebook was responsible for the significant decrease in numbers (as opposed, for example, to the effect of the recession) the numbers of visits to a number of company web site were compared with unique visits to equivalent Facebook pages  In a sample of 44 companies it was found that “40% exhibited higher traffic to their Facebook page compared to their website“.

It might be argued that University Web sites are very different from those provided by commercial companies – Universities are concerned with the complexities of teaching and learning and research whereas companies such as Coca Cola and Ford are simply produce drinks or motor vehicles. Such views were made on the Twitter channel during Ranjit Sidu’s talk at the IWMW 2010 event entitled “‘So what do you do exactly?’ In challenging times justifying the roles of the web teams” in which he suggested that the higher education sector could learn from the way companies which sell cars identify the effectiveness of their online activities). It was interesting to note that several participants echoed such sentiments.  So let’s be honest and admit that commercial companies and higher educational institutions are not dissimilar in having many diverse objectives and sometimes little understood complexities – and that both sectors may be in a position to exploit social Web services such as Facebook for a variety of purposes (marketing, sales consumer engagements, etc.)  but may also feel threatened by such services.

A Challenge For Developers

It was interesting to observe the tweets from the Facebook Developer’s Love hack day and not only to see the enthusiasm for making use of Facebook APIs but also hearing about how Facebook content could be made available as Linked Data on the Web.  There are still unresolved issues such as privacy and ownership of data associated with Facebook – but as we have seen similar issues are also faced by Twitter, with still some uncertainties regarding the copyright and ethical issues associated with use of tweets published by others and the ways in which Twitter can enforce their conditions of use of their service. But just as Twitter subsequently toned down the conditions governing reuse of their data, we are also seeing Facebook moving away from their ‘walled garden’  approach and providing APIs to allow others to reuse their content.

As can be seen from the recent post on Use of Facebook by Russell Group Universities Facebook clearly has a role to play across higher educational institutions. Managers and policy-makers within institutions will need to make decisions on how such services should be used and how much effort should be allocated to support such work.  Such decisions should be informed by evidence such as “How extensively is Facebook being being used across the sector?” and “What patterns of usage are emerging?“.

Since APIs are available such answers need no longer have to be based on manual surveys. A challenge I would like to pose developers is to provide answers to the following questions:

• Across a selected group of University Facebook pages (such as the Russell Group Universities for which links to the Facebook pages is available) what are the Facebook pages with the largest numbers of ‘Likes’?
• Are Facebook users of these pages making use of the Facebook Places feature to any significant extent?

It should be possible to provide answers to these questions be simply using the Facebook API to query the Facebook data store. However Linked Data developers may relish the challenge to combine this data store with DBPedia in order to answer the following additional question:

• Is there a correlation between the numbers of Facebook ‘Likes’ and the size of the institution – or to put it another way, which institution has the largest number of ‘Likes’ per student?

In the longer term it will be useful to monitor trends in institutional use of Facebook – which may, of course, include a decline in such usage if alternative offerings, such as Diaspora service (which will not claim any rights on content uploaded to the service).  But in order to be able to help identify a decline in Facebook usage it will be helpful to have a benchmark of current usage – so even developers who do not approve of Facebook terms and conditions may wish to participate in this challenge.

At a time of flux and upheaval in the higher education sector there is a need to be able to understand how institutions are responding to a changed environment. There may be a particular need to understand how networked services are being used which may have previously been regarded, in some areas, as inappropriate for institutional use. This is particularly true of Facebook which has been the subject of criticism for being a ‘walled-garden‘ and for what may be regarded as a cavalier approach to privacy.

But are institutions now making significant use of Facebook because of the benefits it is perceived to bring, such as the large ability to provide marketing to large numbers of users and the ability to embed other services within an environment which many users may be familiar with? Anecdotally we are hearing suggestions of the benefits which Facebook can provide,  such as the recent tweet from Stuart Brown which stated that  “10 course registrations attributable to OU FB apps Course Profiles and My OU Story“.

In order to provide a better understanding of how UK higher education institutions may be using Facebook a brief survey of official usage by Russell Group Universities has been carried out. The aim is to ensure that evidence is available to inform discussions on policies and practices.

Profiling Use of Facebook by Russell Group Universities

A recent post summarised “Institutional Use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities“. The twenty Russell Group Universities have also been used for a survey of institutional use of Facebook. There have been suggestions that a more comprehensive survey across all UK Universities would be useful. Whilst this may be true it would be resource-intensive to carry out such a survey. The Russell Group Universities has therefore been selected partly because of the geographical diversity of these institutions, which includes institutions based in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In addition since these institutions describe themselves as “the 20 leading UK universities which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector” we might expect the institutions tom be taking a leading role in exploiting social media to support their activities and provide examples of best practices which the wider community can learn from.

The survey of institutional Facebook usage by Russell Group Universities was carried out on 11 January 2011. The survey used Google to find an official institutional Facebook presence. Note in a number of cases no obvious institutional Facebook page could be found (note that Facebook pages for departments were not included).

A summary of the numbers of Facebook users who ‘liked’ the institution’s page is given, together with the numbers of ‘favourite pages’ the institution provides.   A list of additional pages available via the tabbed interface is also provided.

The results are given below.

Summary

A summary of the data collected is given below:

• Nos. of institutions with branded Facebook URL: 7
• Nos. of institutions with Facebook page: 7
• Nos. of institutions with Facebook group: 1
• Nos. of institutions with no easily found institutional Facebook presence: 5
• Nos. of institutions with neglected (or unofficial) institutional Facebook presence: 1
• Range of ‘likes’:  2,047 – 137,395

Related Surveys

The popularity of Facebook usage at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge has been confirmed by a recent post on “Top 10 of Social Media in HE” published by the Science Guide blog. The Science Guide survey “conducted research and created a Top 10 list of [European] HE of the best in social media and presents three prestigious universities that lose out in the race for Twitter, Facebook and co“.

The survey went on to point out that:

UK universities are by far outperforming other countries in communicating via social media. More than 60% of all university twitter followers are connected to UK institutions. They also account for 42,4% of all Facebook members.

In addition the “institutions that are widely regarded as elite and prestigious in Europe …  are ranked highest in quality of research, but … still have to find their way into the 21^st century” due to very limited or no use of Social Web service did not include any UK Universities.

Such comments suggest that UK Universities should be pleased with ways in which Social Web services are being integrated into existing services. But what additional observations can be made from the survey results published in this blog?

Discussion

How important might Facebook be to institutions?  I heard that at the recent Learning Without Frontiers conference it was suggested that Facebook users find the management capabilities of Facebook valuable as it makes it more difficult for content, such as embarrassing comments and photos, to escape into the wild.  Perhaps the ‘walled garden’ nature of Facebook is being regarded as a positive aspect of the service.

But is Facebook something which is only useful as a marketing  tool to attract new students or might it have a more significant role to play?  And rather than a one-way marketing channel might it have a role to play in facilitating discussions and debate and, if so,  might Facebook prove useful for internal discussions as well as engaging with new students?

I suspect the answers to such questions will be answered by observing patterns of usage, with, despite Facebook’s growth, the service is not liked by many who engage in actively discussions on blogs.  But looking at evidence of evidence of how Facebook is being used, rather than speculating on the relevance of Diaspora “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network” I feel it is worth looking at the approaches being taken by Cambridge University, with its page on “House Rules” and Cardiff University, who, from the information provided on their Facebook page appear to be positive about the benefits the service can provide.

Is it realistic to argue against the popularity of Facebook (142,176,215 unique visitors according to compete.com) and for institutions, at a time of cuts, to promote alternatives? Or should we be making use of the service to support a variety of institutional activities?   If you feel the latter is a decision  we need to make (and many of the Russell Group Universities already have) then in order to ensure Facebook is being used effectively there is a need to share emerging best practices. Wouldn’t you agree?

Back in October I asked “Is Stack Overflow Useful for Web Developers?“. The context to this question was the decline in usage of mailing lists by those involved in Web management and Web development. In response to an early post Virginia Knight suggested that “many email lists to have a natural life-cycle ending with dormancy”. But where, I asked in the post, should Web developers go if they have such queries which need answering?  Might Stack Overflow provide an alternative?

It was suggested that “most web developers will have come across Stack Overflow quite some time ago. If only through stumbling across it when Googling for a solution to a particular problem“. It was also pointed out that “Stack Overflow also runs Server Fault, and Super User; two very similar sites with a different focus“. But if there are a number of Social Web services which might provide advantages over mailing lists for developers, are there equivalent services with a more general scope, I wondered?

Introducing Quora

It was when I looking at Stack Overflow and its StackExchange sister sites that I came across the Quora service.  This is another question and answer site. But in answer to a question “How is Quora different from StackOverflow?” posed on Quora the answers given include:

• I’d say the connection between Quora’s founders and Facebook is the thing that has excited most people, but it remains to be seen whether this translates into something that makes Quora into a more compelling moneymaker than StackOverflow or the larger and broader sites like Answers.com.
• StackOverflow is a “programming Q & A site”. Quora’s scope is more general than that.
• StackOverflow (and its StackExchange sister sites) highlight quantitative achievements (scores, badges) much more, so the gamishness is “have I reached a new level?” Quora emphasizes instant feedback/live-presence, so the gamishness is “can I click back to where the action is happening right now.”
• It also focuses on many topics and you choose what to follow, instead of visiting different stackoverflow-based sites.

Meanwhil over on the Stack Overflow site the question “What can we learn from Quora?” is answered with the response:

I personally don’t think Quora is even on the same field as us — we’re playing baseball, they’re playing football. Here’s why:

• we don’t care about the social graph, we care about the information graph. Even if that leads off-site or comes from Google. Heck, we don’t even ask you to register — ever!
• we believe that the best content comes from topic specific sites (cooking, programming, parenting), and the communities that form around those topics, not a “generic one size fits all Q&A engine”
• we’re not tied to Facebook (and its social graph)
• we allow 100% anonymous participation
• we creative commons all our content (unsure what they do here)

So the services have different scopes and different approaches.  But is there anything to suggest that Quora might become popular, just as Stack Overflow has done within the developer community?

Is Quora Getting Popular?

Yesterday George Seimens (@gseimens) asked on Twitter:

What are good strategies for dealing with information overload? http://b.qr.ae/eO1DoU (Quora)

The tweet linked to a question posed on Quora: “What are some good strategies for dealing with information overload” and included George’s response.

I spotted this tweet shortly after reading another tweet from Cameron Neylon (@cameronneylon) who also referenced an answer he had provided on Quora:

“My answer on Quora to: What do people think about the recent Google report on social networks? http://qr.ae/GYDL“

My Twitter followers are starting to answer questions posed on Quora, it seems.  And, in addition, I am now being followed on Quora, a service I only joined a few months ago.  As can be seen, eight people started to follow me on Boxing Day!

It seems that we are starting to see signals which indicate a growing popularity in the Quora service, which includes responding to queries as well as following answers.

A question “How many people use Quora?” has been posed on Quora and the answers  (378,639 on 14 December 2010 being the most recent estimate) and accompanying graph indicate that Quora is rapidly growing in popularity.

I would speculate that the early adopters of Twitter might also be willing to make use of Quora in its early days.  I wonder if Quora might have a role to play in providing a forum for wider and more in-depth discussions of issues raised on Twitter?

Note: After writing this post I came across a post on TechnCrunch entitled “Q: What Does Quora Mean For The Future Of Blogging? A: Business As Usual” which cited a post by Robert Scoble in which he wondered  ”if Quora was the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?”. Robert Scoble summarised what he felt was innovative about the Quora service:

First, it learned from Twitter. Ask your users a question and they’ll answer it.

Second, they learned from Facebook. Build a news feed that brings new items to you.

Third, they learned from the best social networks. You follow people you like. But then they twisted it. You can follow topics. Or you can follow questions in addition to following people. This is great for new users who might not know anyone. They can follow topics.

Fourth, they learned from blogs about how to do great SEO. I’ve started seeing Quora show up on Google.

Fifth, they learned from FriendFeed, Digg, and other systems that let you vote up things. If you watch a question that has a lot of engagement you’ll even see votes roll in live. It’s very addictive.

Sixth, they brought the live “engagement display” that Google Wave had: it shows who is answering a question WHILE they are answering it.

Seventh, it has a great search engine for you to find things you are interested in

Interesting. In light of these observations I have chosen to follow topics on Linked Data and HTML5.  I also noticed that, unlike the first two topics, the Digital Preservation topic does not have a description of FAQ. Hmm, if you have a scholarly interest in a topic should you be looking to not only create a page in WIkipedia about the topic but also manage a discussion area in Quora? Perhaps the case for Quora is not yet proven but if you wish to maximise one’s impact surely the case for engagement with such popular services is now accepted?

Niall Sclater made his point succinctly:

@mweller @psychemedia delicious. i rest my case.

The case Niall was making was, I suspect, that one shouldn’t be promoting use of Cloud services within institutions. This is an argument (although that might be putting it a bit too strongly) which Niall has been having over the past few years with Tony Hirst and Martin Weller, his colleagues at the Open University.  As I described in a post on “When Two Tribes Go To War” back in 2007:

Niall Sclater, Director of the OU VLE Programme at the Open University recently pointed out that the Slideshare service was down, using this as an “attempt to inject some reality into the VLEs v Small Pieces debate“. His colleague at the Open University, Tony Hirst responded with a post entitled “An error has occurred whilst accessing this site” in which Tony, with “beautifully sweet irony“, alerted Niall to the fact that the OU’s Intranet was also down.

Back then the specifics related to the reliability of the Slideshare service, with Tony pointing out the the Slideshare service was actually more reliable that the Open University’s Intranet.  But that was just a minor detail. The leaked news that Yahoo was, it appeared, intending to close a social bookmarking services which is highly regarded by many of its users, was clearly of much more  significance.  So is Niall correct to rest his case on this news? Or, as Niall wrote his tweet before we found that the news of Delicious’s death was greatly exaggerated, might we feel that the issue is now simply whether an alternative social bookmarking service should be used?

My view is that we do need to recognise that such service may disappear and plan accordingly.  But such plans need to be based on how such services were used,  and what might be the most appropriate alternatives. Such alternative could be based within the institution – but this may not need necessarily be the case.

My Use of Delicious

I created my first delicious bookmarks back in December 2005.  I used delicious to bookmark the main URLs for my peer-reviewed papers, with the intention of being able to identify others who had bookmarked my papers – if they are interested in the papers I’ve written. I’m likely to find that they have bookmarked similar resources which will be of interest to me was my initial use case for delicious.

I subsequently discovered that the category used for my bookmarks could also be of interest; for example a paper on “Implementing A Holistic Approach To E-Learning Accessibility” was bookmarked by “madeliner: using the tag H807_block_1 – hmm, might social bookmarking have a role to play in suggesting how resources might be being used?  Was this paper being used in block 1 of an Open University course H807.  Further investigation reveal that this is a course on Innovations in elearning. So by using a social bookmaking service I am able to identify that a paper of mine is used by someone in the context of an Open University course. This might provide some evidence of impact which could prove useful.  Further investigation revealed that Lars Nyberg’s has bookmarked several of my papers using an ‘accessibility‘ tag. This suggests that I should read such bookmarks if I plan on writing further papers on this area.

My second use case for delicious was in bookmarking the resources I used in my presentations. If, for example, you visit the page for the seminar on “Web 2.0: Opportunities and Challenges for HE” which I gave at Coventry University in March 2006 you find that the resources used in the slides have also been bookmarked using delicious with the “coventry-2006-03″ tag.

This illustrates my second main use of delicious: bookmarking resources I use in my presentations. The reason I do this is so that people in the audience won’t have to scribble down URLs as they know that all the links I refer to in my talk are available online.  Using this approach also means that I have a record of when resources were used in various presentations and also how popular such resources may be.

The reason I am describing the different uses I make of Delicious and the benefits it provides are to help to appreciate what the requirements are, especially if alternatives are being considered.

Alternatives To Delicious?

The news that Delicious was one of a number of Yahoo services eamarked for ‘sunsetting’ has damaged Delicious’s brand and over the past few days many Delicious users have been exploring alternatives.  If I was to explore an alternative, what should I be looking for?

An important requirement is that the service should be widely used – after all my first use case was in helping to find others with similar interests.  In addition the service should be popular across a global research community and not restricted to the UK or, even worse, to within an institution.  This is a reason why I don’t feel that an open source solution such as Scuttle is appropriate for my requirements.

My solution is therefore to continue with the approach I’ve taken over previous years – to continue to use Delicious with periodic backups to Diigo.

Should We Have Predicted The Dangers?

Should the risks that Delicious may not be sustainable have been identified earlier?  The answer is, of course.  And, indeed, such risk were flagged, in my case going back to 2006 when a Risk Assessment page was created which listed the various externally-hosted services, including Delicious, used to support UKOLN’s IWMW 2006 event.  Back then we wrote:

A number of del.icio.us tags (e.g. iwmw2006) are recommended for bookmarking resources related to the workshop and to individual talks and sessions. There is a reliance on ongoing access to the relevant del.icio.us page

This Risk Assessment approach was subsequently described in a paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” which was published in the Program: electronic library and information systems journal.

More recently a paper on “Moving From Personal to Organisational Use of the Social Web” was presented at the Online Information 2010 conference. This paper built on our previous work and suggested that organisation should be carrying out audits of the use of third party services and documenting possible risks and strategies for addressing such risks.

Although that paper focussed primarily on use of blogging platforms the approaches are equally valid for use of social bookmarking services.  As mentioned above, Social Web services used to support UKOLN’s recent IWMW events have been accompanied with a list of the services and a summary of possible risks.  The risks that the Delicious service may not be sustainable have been addressed in two ways: back in 2008 a Diigo account was set up and a backup copy of Delicious bookmarks taken. In addition, since an important use of Delicious has been to provide short-term access to resources after an event, it is accepted that there would be no significant data loss  if such resources were no longer embedded within the appropriate event page.

What Have We Learnt?

I feel that the important lesson if to have a plan B.  For me the plan B is likely to be another Cloud Service, since an institutional service will not adequately address my requirements.

I also feel that this incident has helped to highlight the important of planning and understanding risks.  Such planning processes can be helped by an audit of use of such services, which can be applied at an individual, departmental or institutional level.  I will revisits such audits in a future posts but I feel I should conclude by making the reminder that institutional services may also not be sustainable, so there needs to be an audit of use of institutional services too.

And now there’s the Library Related People Facebook group. There was set up by Aaron Tay on Saturday 6 November and as he described in a blog post later that day:

I do feel that there is a need for such experimentation and so it is good to see that Aaron has set up this group to allow librarians from around the world to gain experience of the role, if any, which Facebook groups might provide for their users as well as possibly providing a forum for discussions by those working in the library sector.

And whilst several concerns related to use of Facebook Groups were discussed on the launch day (which I spotted in the chat window but now seems to have disappeared) it perhaps might be more interesting to discuss possible success criteria for an online community.  After all, I suspect that if an online social network had been set up using an open source software (such as Diaspora, the “The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network“) for some the political-correctness of the software environment would result in being unwilling to ask questions such as What is the environment for?; Do we need it?; how much will it cost?; What are the risks?; How will be know if it is a success and, conversely, How will we know if it’s a failure? But such questions will be asked about use of Facebook as an environment for hosting such a community.

When I joined  on Saturday 6 November 2010 the group had 46 members and by Saturday evening there were 192 members. On 8 November there were 299 members – and the current number can be see by visiting the members’ page.  But before anyone comments that the success of a social network environment shouldn’t be gauged simply by the number of members and growth rates (which, in this case, will be more to do with the extent of Aaron’s professional network and his esteem in the library community)  remember that I am seeking to understand how one can identify the success or not of a social network which could be applied equally to a Diaspora environment and a Facebook group. And if you reject the notion of success or failure, then you will be in a weak position to make criticisms of Aaron’s experiment.

My question,then, is does anyone have any suggestions for ways of identifying the success or failure of such social networks?

Back in 2007 Michael Webb, Director of IT Services at the University of Wales, Newport described “MyNewport – MyLearning Essentials for Facebook“, a Facebook application that allows students to access to Newport’s MyLearning Essentials resources from Facebook.

Michael described how this “allows students to start creating their own personal learning environment in a platform other than the one provided by the University“, adding that “we’ve targeted Facebook at the moment as it’s the fastest growing community, but if our users like the idea but want to work in another environment then that is fine – we can create applications for them as well“.

How much development effort did this take, you may wonder? “It took about a day and half from conception of the idea and joining the Facebook developer community on 10th July to launching it as a viable application for our students to use (or comment on) on the 11th July. It was straight forward as our VLE is built from components that can easily be repurposed, and uses open standards such as RSS to allow information to be passed to the Facebook application.“

Since then I’ve not been aware of much discussion about development of Facebook applications to support institutional requirements, apart from a document on COURSE PROFILES – A Facebook Application for Open University Students and Alumni written by Tony Hirst, Liam Green-Hughes, Stuart Brown and Martin Weller. Until Friday, that is, when I came across an article in Computer Weekly which described how “London School of Business and Finance offers MBA on Facebook“:

“Facebook users can now study an MBA for free at the London School of Business and Finance (LSBF) after the college launched a course that will be available on the social networking website.

Students will be able to study for free and will only pay if they want to be formally assessed for an MBA. The LSBF GlobalMBA, which has received £7.5m investment, is awarded by the University of Wales.

Valery Kisilevsky, group managing director of the London School of Business and Finance, said Facebook was chosen to host its The LSBF GlobalMBA application because it offered the chance to widen the availability of education.

‘We looked at how our current students communicate with each other and the college and Facebook is the platform of choice‘ said Kisilevsky.“

Now the London School of Business and Finance (LSBF) isn’t a University, rather it’s an “educational institution [which] offers industry-focussed programmes designed to reflect global market trends. LSBF attracts the most talented and ambitious candidates from more than 150 countries worldwide“. The Web site goes on to sate that LSBF “offers an unrivalled portfolio of professional qualifications, as well as innovative degree programmes at postgraduate and undergraduate level, with the flexibility to tailor your studies to your own career aspirations“.

Is LSBF setting a trend in exploiting a popular global social networking environment which could provide a cost-effective solution appropriate for today’s economic environment? Or will it be seen to be irrelevant?  I don’t think we can say.  But I think we do need to keep an eye out on weak signals which may hint at possible trends, especially those that might go against our preferred visions of future developments.

So is anyone engaged in development work using the Facebook platform? And what lessons can be learnt from the early work at Newport and the Open University?

As I tweeted yesterday I suspect some of my Twitter followers would not agree with the areas being addressed in these talks – talks about the ROI of social media and, as one person tweeted, turning fans and followers into customers.  Isn’t Twitter, for example, supposed to be about the individual and have a radical edge, rather than being used as a mainstream marketing channel.

By view is that social media can provide both roles and if university marketing people are using social media to attract students then I would welcome this – after all such approaches can be more cost-effective than printing glossy prospectuses and launching TV ad campaigns. But note that I’m saying “can” – there’s a need to gather evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of such approaches. After all, when we hear the amount of the cuts in the Comprehensive Spending Review tomorrow we will be even more conscious of the importance of using our fundings in an effective way.

But was this conference exploiting the expertise in social media which is available within the sector.  Looking at the programme it seems that many of the speakers were from the commercial sector. And although I’ve nothing against such links I would be concerned if funding provided to higher education left the sector and failed to tap into the expertise we possess.

This occurred to me last night when I received a couple of tweets from Tony Hirst (@psychemedia).  I had created a Twapper Keeper archive for the #ucassm tag (I was surprised that this hadn’t been done already) and, during the day (while I was on the train to London and observing the #ucassm discussions on my mobile phone) tweeted various statistics relevant to the discussions, including providing a link to the Summarizr statistics for the #ucassm tag (there have been 218 tweets from 48 Twitterers; the top Twitterers were ucassm (63 tweets),  EddieGouthwaite (20), andyheadworth (16) and  Aline_Hayes (14)).

Recent developments to the Twapper Keeper Twitter archiving service have been funded by the JISC and the Summarizr service was developed  by Andy Powell of Eduserv: the sector does have a strong interest and expertise in developing and using tools which can be used to gather and interpret evidence of usage of social media services.

Tony Hirst’s tweets provided further evidence. He provided graphical interpretations of the event’s hashtag community (he has previously described the tools and methodology used to do this)  and followed this up with an analysis of possible spam followers – clearly if you want to demonstrate ROI you’ll want to be able to remove spam followers and bots which are unlikely to decide to attend a University!

What is to be done in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort within the sector, minimise flaws in data analysis and ensure that the sector can exploit existing tools? As I was travelling to London yesterday I went to the Russell Hotel in order to make contact with the conference organisers – but they had all gone by the time I arrived. I’ll try and make contact by email. I’d also welcome comments on the content of the UCAS Social Media conference. Are there significant differences of opinions between the developer and marketing sectors – or are we moving towards a consensus on the importance of gathering evidence and use of the social media by institutions?

Note that I should add that the final few tweets of the day were very positiove about the conference: “Very glad to be home at end of long but enjoyable day. #ucassm conf was inspiring but also daunting: so much to do.“” and ”Feeling inspired by today’s #ucassm (social media) conference. Looking to get our students involved in lots of Facebook & Twitter projects!” One talk in particular which went down well was the one on “Social Media ROI – What’s in it for me?”. I was pleased that a number of the talks have been uploaded to Slideshare including this one, which is embedded below.

An article published in yesterday’s ZDNet announced that “Facebook lets users download data, create groups“. Soon Facebook users “will be able to go to their account settings and click a link to download all their data into a browsable zip file“.

On the DataPortability blog Steve Repetti felt that this news was “A step in the right direction, says vice-chair of the DataPortability Project“. His post began by pointing out that “Today’s announcement from Facebook represents the most important statement from them to-date regarding Data Portability. But to be clear, it is by no means the ultimate solution we all seek. Still, it represents major movement in the right direction.“and concluded “From a pure data portability perspective, there is still much more that Facebook can do, but I applaud their direction and effort. This is way more than PR, this is policy that has grown from within and is now escaping into the light. Today’s announcement is the beginning; the Sleeper is waking; and openness lives on with more on the way.“

The DataPortability’s communications chair Alisa Leonard pointed out the good news: “they now allow more access to your data through the download feature” whilst reminding us that “the Facebook [terms of service have] not changed — meaning your data is still on their server and while you can download, you cannot remove your data entirely (if you wished to do so)“.

Whatever your views on this announcement it can’t be denied that we have seen significant growth in usage of Facebook since I pointed out that “Something IS Going On With Facebook!” in May 2007.

But in what ways has Facebook grown in popularity over the past three years and how have institutions been making use of Facebook over that period?

Facebook’s Growth

Back in July the front page of the Metro announced Planet Facebook, with an accompanying graphic informing readers that “Globally Facebook has 500 million users“, “26 million Britains use it (that’s more than a third of the population)“, “More than 3 billion pictures are uploaded every month … and there are more than 60 million a status updates a day” and “collectively users spend more than 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook“.  The headline accompanied the news that Facebook had passed 500 million users, almost 8% of the global population.

More recently an article in the Guardian recently pointed out that “Shareholder trading values Facebook at more than $33bn“. It seems that Facebook is worth nearly twice as much as Yahoo! Meanwhile another recent article in Hitwise tells us that “Facebook accounts for 1 in 6 UK page views, but is it reaching saturation point?“. This article informed us that Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK: in June it accounted for 7.14% of all UK Internet visits and over half (54.48%) of all visits to a social networking websites. In terms of total visits it continues to trail Google UK (9.59% market share in June) … However, using the measure of total page views rather than visits, Facebook is way ahead. … the social network accounted for 16.73% of UK page views during June. In other words: 1 in every 6 Internet pages viewed in the UK was a Facebook page.

Last month at a symposium on Web Science held the Royal Society Tim Berners-Lee “let slip an interesting observation. Many people, said the web’s inventor, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web“. This comment was made by John Naughton in a column published in The Observer on “A Flickr of interest…” who pointed out that “When it was announced a couple of weeks ago that Flickr, the photo-hosting site, had hosted its five billionth picture, someone pointed out smugly that Facebook already has over three times that number.” Meanwhile a Techcrunch article reveals that  ”Facebook is Now the Second Largest Video Site in the U.S.”

The Observer article went on to point out that many photographs uploaded to Facebook tend to be very similar, and typically don’t have the impact of those provided on Flickr. I wouldn’t disagree with this. Facebook does have its limitations, It’s also true that Facebook isn’t universally liked, and there are many in, for example, the developer community who will point out concerns over Facebook’s cavalier approach to privacy and Facebook’s ‘walled garden’ which can suck content in but not allow content to be easily moved out of the environment – although that statement seems to have changed with the recent announcement that users will soon be able to download their data.

It is also worth pointing out that the Facebook statement on rights and responsibilities states that ‘You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook” whilst pointing out that (in order for Facebook to generate an income) Facebook users “specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook“.

Institutional Use of Facebook

Whilst criticisms of Facebook’s terms and conditions featured frequently across the  blogging community a couple of years ago there now seems to be a growing recognition that Facebook does have a role to play within our institutions. Facebook’s acceptance within the e-learning community struck me when I saw a tweet from Alan Cann about the Facebook pages for the ALT-C 2010 conference and the pages which have already been set up for ALT-C 2011.  Looking at the pages for ALT-C 2010 it seems to me that Facebook is being used as an aggregator of blog posts which are hosted in a more open environment. Such an approach can provide benefits for blog authors as it provides greater exposure to their content  and allows the virality of users ‘Liking’ the posts to reach out to people who are friends of those linking the content.

[NOTE Alan Cann has alerted me to the fact that ALT "have now decided not to have a separate page for each conference but to focus on http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alt-C/156500487710591 to try to build a more enduring community". Use this page if you'd like to participate rather than the two links I published initially].

And what of institutional use of Facebook?  In a report on CASE Europe’s recent annual conference Dan Martin summarised a talk by Alex Schultz, Internet Marketing Manager of Facebook by saying  ”there is really no escaping the fact Facebook is the dominant force in Social right now, and that institutions can benefit from its reach and penetration“.

The way in which Facebook has taken off across the higher education sector can be seen gauged from various posts I’ve written over the past 3 years. Back in November 2007 I wrote a post on “UK Universities On Facebook“. Back then I reported that “A Facebook search for organisations containing the word ‘university’ revealed (on Friday 9 November 2007) a total of 76 hits” – the total is no longer easily found but is over 500. The post included a screen image of the Facebook page for the University of Central Lancashire which showed that the University had a total of 8 fans – today almost 8,000 Facebook users ‘like’ the Facebook entry.

The following year, in June 2008 I wrote a post on Revisiting UK University Pages On Facebook. This post provided the following summary of the UK University entries will the largest number of fans:

The Open University Facebook page is the top of all University pages, with 7,539 fans (with the University of Michigan way behind in second place with 5,313 fans (up from a count of 2,874 a month ago). The other most popular UK Universities are Aston University (2,976 fans), Royal Holloway (1,765), Aberystwyth University (1,655 fans), University of Central Lancashire (1,475 fans), Keele University (1,420 fans), Cardiff University (1,357 fans) and the University of Surrey (1,166 fans).

The figures today are the Open University Facebook page (liked by 28,949 fans), Aston University (liked by 8,445), Royal Holloway (liked by 9,093), Aberystwyth University (liked by 7,326), University of Central Lancashire (liked by 7,982), Keele University (liked by 6,716), Cardiff University (liked by 18,698) and the University of Surrey (liked by 8,063).

From these figures we can see a 380% increase for the Open University, almost 700% for Surrey, over 470% for Keele, 540% for University of Central Lancashire, over 440% Aberystwyth and a massive 13,000% for Cardiff.

Clearly those predicted that Facebook would be a flash in the pan or would quickly be replaced by an open source competitor were mistaken.

But what is the story behind these figures? Has Cardiff University allocated significant levels of resources to encouraging use of Facebook? ;Have Facebook apps been developed which provide access to University services from within the Facebook environment? Or has the growth been led by the user community?

Looking to the Future

Whether we like it or not, we are now having to address the challenges of providing teaching and learning and research services under a Conservative/Lib Dem government. Similarly we will also need to be asking how we should go about exploiting the potential of Facebook within our institutions. We might need to ask, in these economically difficult times, whether institutional engagement with Facebook has delivered a return on the investment? Is there any evidence that use of Facebook as a marketing tool to attract overseas students has been successful? And if it might be relatively easy to put a value on the recruitment of overseas students, if Facebook is being used as a communications tool across campus, how would the effectiveness be measured?  And what about the question of the development of Facebook applications to support institutional interests? Have institutions (and their users) benefitted from the development of apps such as MyNewport (a submission to the IWMW 2008 innovation competition) or the Open University’s OU Course Profiles Facebook app (the launch of the service in November 2007 was described by Tony Hirst as “the first major push of our skunkworks Facebook app“)? Interestingly staff at the Open University wrote a document which summarised the initial experiences and the document, COURSE PROFILES – A Facebook Application for Open University Students and Alumni, although slightly dated is worth reading by those thinking about developing similar institutional Facebook apps.

As well as such questions which individual institutions may wish to find answers for, there may also benefits which can be gained from monitoring Facebook usage across the community. It may be misleading to extrapolate conclusions which may be made from the trends across these eight institutions.   Would it be possible, I wonder, for an automated tool to measure institutional uses of Facebook across the sector and for trends to be recorded?  Or rather than a technical solution, might a simpler approach for gathering evidence to inform discussions and decision making be to create a wiki? Or perhaps we could start with inviting readers to provide summaries as a comment to this post?  Anyone willing to do that?