Notes
The second shift is a major change in the structure of the web. It’s moving away from being built around content, and is being rebuilt around people.
is correlated with a major change in how people spend their time on the web. They’re spending less time interacting with content, and more time communicating with other people.
They have lower resolution graphics, they are less powerful, they are one dimensional. But they have one feature that the other games don’t have: They are built around people and their relationships.
The games in the Call of Duty franchise are powerful and photorealistic. Since 2003, ActiVision has produced seven independent Call of Duty games. Total sales stand at 60 million copies. Zynga’s CityVille was launched in December 2010. It is less powerful, with much lower-resolution graphics than Call of Duty. It has 110 million users, almost double that of the full Call of Duty franchise, because it is built around people.
It connects with Facebook to allow you to choose a friend to buy for, and then reorganizes the content around the things that person has “liked” on Facebook. Suddenly, it’s much easier to buy a gift that you think your friend will like.
The homepage has changed into things that Neil might like, based on what he has liked on Facebook. Now it’s easy for me to buy him a gift. The web is being rebuilt around people
We’re moving away from a web that connects documents together to a web that connects people together.
We watch movies and go to concerts with our friends. We ask travel advice and go traveling with our friends. We buy things when we’re with friends. We share news with our friends. Even with traditionally conservative business verticals such as finance, we turn to friends for advice—on the best bank to join, or what mortgage rate is reasonable. Businesses that place people, rather than content or technology, at the center of their business model are thriving and in some cases outperforming incumbents.
When we interacted with websites, we couldn’t interact with other people. With the second phase (middle) we started seeing opportunities for interaction with others. Some websites had reviews, and ways to leave comments. Many businesses simply added social network buttons to their existing site pages. This was social behavior being bolted on. We are now entering the third phase (right), where websites are being rebuilt around people. Social behavior is the key feature. It is not bolted on.
Don’t think about the social web as a set of features to add on to your existing site. The social web is not about adding a “like” button or a “share” button to your web pages. Bolting on social features will not work, because we don’t bolt on social behavior offline. We’ve seen how Zynga, Facebook Photos, and Etsy reinvented businesses by designing around people.
Think of the social web like you think of electricity. It’s always there, powering everything else. Social behavior is the same: always there, motivating us to act. It should be placed in the center of the development process.
For thousands of years, people have formed into groups, built strong and weak relationships with others, formed allegiances, and spread rumor and gossip. We have always relied on each other. Humans are social creatures with a need to connect to others; whether we need information, advice, or emotional support, we turn to one another.
Despite being able to call anyone in our mobile phone address book, usually numbering hundreds of people, 80 percent of our phone calls are to the same four people.1
We’re at the beginning of a cycle in business where we can move away from this idea of “influentials” and instead focus marketing activity on small connected groups of close friends. This shift is what marketers are starting to think about, and what will be the prominent theme for this decade.
Scientist Albert-László Barabási found that networks were governed by three laws.2 The first law is growth. As people go about their lives, they make new connections and the network grows. We tend to keep the connections we have, and add the new ones. One example of this is on Facebook, where we tend to add more people than we remove, and our friend count tends to slowly increase over time. The second law is preferential attachment. People with more connections tend to get even more connections. When all else is equal, our bias is to connect to the people who are already heavily connected. The third law is fitness. Fitness describes how desirable it is to connect to that person. Their higher fitness could be from a range of factors including credibility, trust, domain knowledge, and so on. People with higher fitness are deemed more desirable to connect to, and are connected to more frequently.
The number of our connections follows a common pattern: 5–15–50–150–500
Our social network starts with our inner circle, which typically includes up to 5 people. As our core group, we turn to these people for advice, for emotional support, and in times of trouble. Beyond this is a group of between 12 and 15 people. This group is known to social psychologists as the sympathy group. It’s all the people whose deaths would leave you distraught. Beyond this is a group of about 50 people. These are the people who you communicate with on at least a semi-regular basis. This is the last group where you could confidently say you know about something that happened to them recently, or are generally aware of how they are doing. Beyond that is a group of about 150. These are the people with whom you can maintain stable social relations. You know each of these people, and you know which of them know each other. Once a group goes beyond this number, we start to observe antisocial behavior, with people no longer acting in the best interests of the group. Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar has observed that this number repeats itself throughout history. Neolithic villages tended to separate into two once they increased beyond 150 inhabitants, as the behavior of group members could no longer be maintained by peer pressure alone. The Roman army was split into groups of about 150 so that everyone in the group knew each other and would stick together.4 Group cohesion in online games collapses when the group reaches about 150 active users. Wikipedia involvement tends to plateau at about 150 active administrators.5 The number of sick days per employee increases dramatically once the business reaches 150 employees.4 This number, 150, is a physiological limit of our brain. We may have many more connections than 150, but we don’t know what is happening in their lives. Regardless of what technology we introduce, this physiological limit will remain the same.
The next group is about 500 people. These are our weak ties—friends of friends, people we meet occasionally, or people we met recently. These are people you know but don’t feel close to. We have met many more than 500 people in our lifetime, but beyond 500 we stop recognizing their names. People with more than 500 friends on Facebook often have a hard time figuring out who some of the people are.
We have evolved to form groups Groups helped our ancestors stay safe from their predators, and helped communities survive through the toughest of conditions. Needing to belong to groups is hard-wired into all of us. Many research studies have shown that • We have a tendency to form groups, some of which are based on very arbitrary characteristics. • People will make considerable sacrifices for the benefit of their group. • In certain situations, groups think better than individuals.6 It was wise of our ancestors to stick together.
Our groups are independent. Our friends from college don’t know our friends from when we lived in a different city, and they don’t know our family members. Every one of us uniquely connects others together.
We have four to six groups formed around life stage, hobbies, and shared experiences We’ve already seen how people have multiple groups of friends. Most people have between four and six groups of friends, and each group usually contains fewer than ten people; the average is four group members. The people in each group know each other well, but they don’t know the people in the other groups.6
The groups in our social network form around life stages, shared experiences, and shared interests.
Create content that is likely to resonate with small groups of friends, rather than content that is aiming for universal appeal across large populations.
Messages shared within a group are likely to be relevant to more members of the group, as the members often have similar attitudes and interests. Trying to force content to spread from group to group can lead to that content being perceived as spam.
Using existing connections is a powerful way to build new connections. It highlights the shortest paths between people, which can be useful for sharing information to more relevant groups, or connecting with new people. Airbnb is a service that allows people to rent out their homes to strangers. As these people don’t know each other, which makes it hard to know who to trust, Airbnb used Facebook connections to make it possible to see whether you are connected to the other people through friends of friends. It’s now easy to ask the mutual friend about whether we’re likely to get on well with the host, or whether we’re likely to like their place.
Fun friends are people who socialize together primarily for fun. They don’t have a deep relationship, and don’t provide each other with emotional support.
Favor friends are people who help each other out in a functional manner but not in an emotional manner. • Helpmates display characteristics of both favor friends and fun friends. They socialize together for fun and also help each other out in a functional manner.
One common mistake is to design for all relationship types. Something designed for close friends to interact will look very different from something designed for friends of friends to interact, which will look different again from something designed for strangers to interact. To be successful, choose the relationship type that’s most important for you and design for that.
We trust our strong ties, and are more likely to let them know intimate details of our life. This can include what we do, where we go, what we buy, and what we decide not to buy. Assuming they give us permission, in the future we’ll be able to see which of our friends have visited certain locations, stores, or websites, and what products or services they bought. We’ll be able to see how they rated the experience, and if they haven’t explicitly given a rating, we’ll be able to directly reach out to them and solicit advice about our potential purchases. All products and services will be
This also introduces some awkward social exchanges that don’t exist offline. People are often worried about whether to accept a friend request, or delete a contact, in case they meet that person again. The binary nature of our online tools misses all the subtlety and nuance of our offline interactions with weak ties.
This could mean meeting up via a mutual friend. Or it could mean interacting because we need to complete a shared task. Other times it might be because we share a hobby or are on the same sports team, or because we’re seeking information.
Our weak ties are at the periphery of our social network, which means they are connected to more diverse sets of people than our strong ties, which are more central in our network. These diverse ties pass on more novel information, and so they can often know more than our strong ties do.
Our unconscious brain detects this pattern, and instructs us to start searching for information two or three degrees away from us to ensure that we are receiving new information. This pattern has been observed with many things, including finding a new job or finding a good piano teacher.21
One downside to sourcing information from our weak ties is that we know less about their knowledge and whether we can trust their judgment. Their credibility is not as well defined as our strong ties. Because of this, surfacing information about our weak ties will be crucial for encouraging interactions between people. We will need to know that our weak ties are qualified to talk about specific topics, and that they are trustworthy.
Showing others’ behavior is a powerful way to influence people. Behavioral change precedes attitudinal change. Facebook’s Open Graph shows the activity of other people, and gives people tools to undertake the same activity.
We often change our behavior to conform to the expectations, attitudes, and behavior of our group. This can include our family, friends, workmates, or sports teammates.7 This often happens subconsciously.
We’re social creatures, and social networks have been around for over 10,000 years. The web is being fundamentally rebuilt around people, because our online life is catching up with our offline life. Going forward, the social behavior we’ve evolved over those thousands of years will be what motivates us to act on the web.
Our social networks are made up of small, independent groups, connected through us
Focus on many small, independent groups of friends