Facebook Friday: Yet Another Take on Facebook and Politics - Votes Aside, the Value's in the Buzz

Yet to live up to its potential as a venue for political activism, the viral nature of Facebook.com brings politics and political views into focus for undergrads

Daily I’m bombarded with Facebook group requests, application invites, and messages from friends and candidates in attempts to recruit and more importantly, maintain support for their causes or campaigns. Sometimes reaching the inbox through auto-generated emails, my Facebook experiences have continually managed to introduce and keep politics, whether presidential or individual political leanings, on the computer screen and on the brain. Though there’s been skepticism as to whether or not Facebook.com functions well outside the social networking mindset, the impact that Facebook has on youth and politics manifests itself in this viral manner of messages, requests, and reminders through one’s social network much more clearly than the effects it has or will have on getting actual votes in 2008 or inspiring political activism off-line.

A much-understated aspect of Facebook’s influence is the fact that it is a forum in which incoming college students and new users could be introduced and initially confronted with politics. A seventeen year-old college freshman is painstakingly putting together his or her Facebook profile for the first time and is suddenly propositioned to choose his or her political views. Located just a few lines beneath their name and school, their political affiliation will feature prominently in new friends’ first impressions. While I’m aware that many are introduced to or engaged in politics far prior to joining Facebook, whether through school or at home, there are many who have not yet faced the decision to define themselves politically. They are forced to question their peers, their parents or themselves as to what exactly choosing “liberal” or “conservative” would entail. They’re more likely to notice what political views their friends have chosen and perhaps wondering why such choices were made. Facebook also notably chose to place this field under “basic information”, which psychologically – if it’s really so “basic” – could push even more users to make the choice to define themselves politically. It would be a stretch to state that this initiation into the world of Facebook has or will have a discernible impact on introducing the youngest voters to politics. One could also argue that the college environment itself inspires the interest in politics, but this potential newfound political buzz is worthy of note and potential study as Facebook spreads among college and high school students.

Beyond the concept of this initiation are the details. The political views field itself on Facebook is a little constraining as it offers a limited eight options to choose from - including “liberal”, “conservative”, “apathetic” or the ever-exhilarating “other.” The religious views field gives the option for custom-text – as it should – but for some reason the folks at Facebook deemed custom-text a bit much when dealing with political views. While this minimal array of choices may just be a tactic to serve better demographic information for advertising, it still places certain constraints on users who may want to say more about themselves than “other”.

Also noteworthy is the fact that with this recently popularized social networking technology, we – or Facebook employees, depending on privacy settings – have access to these statistics on users’ political views. There are now ways to obtain quick stats out there on the web for the chosen political views broken down by age group, geographic location, level of education or college sophomores who list “very liberal” yet cite Reagan in their “favorite quotes” section (it could happen?). The wide array of user networks that Facebook supports offer great insights into the social and political tendencies of the users. At this point, the user-base represents a fairly large and growing slice of the American public and more specifically, a youthful demographic generally charged with low voter-turnout.

There is also the possibility or potential to track the changing political views of America’s youth as they graduate college, embark on different career paths, start families or age in general. This is, of course, assuming that the generation that made Facebook popular continues on with the social networking fad as they age, which yet to be determined. Sticking with the hypothetical that Facebook maintains its popularity, I must note that one of my father’s favorite quotes is “If you’re under the age of 25 and a Republican, you’re insensitive, but if you’re over the age of 25 and a Democrat, you’re ignorant.” Will the adage hold true as those in their mid-twenties begin get the feeling they have something to lose with higher taxes or bigger government? Tough to say and a bit beside the point – but the sociological studies of shifting political affiliations as they relate to age or geography, for example, could only be enhanced by including this information.

Others would make the claim that this information gathered from Facebook would not necessarily be as reliable as anonymous polling because it is a social space and not well-utilized as a political forum. To these critics, one must ask, what would users have to gain by misrepresenting themselves when they have the choice not to display their political view at all? The privacy issue is also fairly controversial, as one would think no one has the given right to mine this data, but social scientists have indeed been utilizing Facebook to examine social interactions and to study how exactly traditional theories about relationships, identity, collective action and political engagement hold in these relatively new online social forums. Also, Facebook has no policy that prohibits academic research involving user profiles given that these users have not activated certain privacy settings.

Returning to the issue of mobilizing voters, many questions have concerned what role Facebook groups will play in the 2008 Presidential election. Once again the statistics are and will be very inconclusive as there is no concrete way to measure Facebook activity or engagement as it relates to voter turnout. Groups do serve as a means to distribute candidate information as well as draw the attention of supporters to one page. However, the unfortunate reality of Facebook groups is that they are not very engaging and seem to serve more as a social “tag” or label on a Facebook user’s profile. While there is space to post videos or links as well as a discussion board, the lack of any logical organization other than chronological order really detracts from the interaction of the group members with eachother or with the issues the candidate puts forth. If I was a young, potential Barack Obama supporter and my hot issue was healthcare, there is nothing jumping out at me at first glance on this group page. I would have to muck through the discussion board and do a text-search for my issue. At surface, this may not seem like a huge barrier in getting through to voters. However, minding the fact that Facebook is first and foremost a social space and most users maintain that mindset, it should be as easy and quick as possible for a member to initially connect to the group on a personal level.

One notable group spawning from the 2008 Presidential Election is “1,000,000 Strong for Barack.” Was that group membership benchmark met? Not quite yet – membership currently hovers in between 400,000-500,000 users. Comedian Stephen Colbert’s brief run at the Presidency did, however, produce a “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert” and membership shot up to about 1,500,000 users before he abandoned his Presidential bid in early November 2007 when the South Carolina Democratic Party denied him a spot on the ballot. This more or less fake campaign was likely able to attract that many Facebook users to its cause because it takes much less thought or research to back a fake candidate than it would to actually take the time to choose to support a “real” candidate. This instance attests to the social networking nature of Facebook – the satirical concept of Stephen Colbert running for President was quicker to whip young users into a group-joining frenzy without thought, whereas Barack Obama – touting the largest membership of a supporting Facebook group over other candidates – couldn’t get near the same numbers.

Then, of course, there is the bottom line that despite the widespread youth support on Facebook, Colbert’s candidacy never did quite get off the ground. College students nationwide were supporting him and actively recruiting to his cause online, but it would seem as though none were motivated enough by his online presence to make a concerted effort off-line – where it mattered – to petition the South Carolina Democratic Party to put him on the ballot.

A popular blog covering social networking sites, Mashable.com, conducted a poll in October 2007 as to what effect Facebook campaigning will have on politics and the majority of responses fell under the “it might have a minor impact” category over “it will sway the vote” and “there will be no effect.” These results indicate that there is a belief that the potential is there for Facebook and social networking sites in general to have an impact – though by and large, Mashable-readers are tech-savvy themselves and would have a greater tendency to believe this is the case. Whether Facebook and political campaigns are really capitalizing on this potential is the underlying issue. Facebook is still generally considered a social space by its young user-base, and the groups and applications require no more real effort to join and maintain membership than a mouse-click -- a point which makes transferring the force of online enthusiasm into off-line political activity less likely. Where Facebook does succeed is in the introduction to and continual reminders of political events, political leanings and politics in general among undergrads nationwide. Whether or not this constant buzz boosts the impact of Facebook on politics and elections in the coming years remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: in order for Facebook to become more relevant and live up to its potential in the realm of politics, it will need to introduce a politically functional offshoot with more engaging user-forums for debate and recruitment that continue to fully utilize the strong social networks users have built.

Why We Sleep

I awoke last night with a start from a nightmare that wasn’t too fun. I don’t want to get into the details, but it got me thinking about the purpose of dreams, and sleep in general. I was wide awake and probably thought about this for a good 2 hours before drifting off to sleep again. I became, and still am, enamored with a theory about why we sleep. It just seems to make sense to me, so I thought I would share it with the world. The theory stems from my information retrieval and data storage expertise I have accumulated while working on related technologies at two different search companies that I founded/co-founded, and one internet intelligence company where I worked as VP of R&D – my job was to create custom large scale data-mining applications. Not trying to brag or anything here – just trying to say I have put quite a bit of thought into these technologies, from both the hardware and software sides.

My theory comes in two parts, which I feel are both very closely related but different enough that they need to be explained separately.

Part 1: Information Indexing

When you go about creating a high performance search engine you invariably come across a point where you are trading speed for flexibility. When designing a very large scale index, you think about these tradeoffs constantly. Unless you are Google and you can afford hundreds of thousands of servers with gobs of memory, you are usually going to relegate large indexes to a physical disk. This is unfortunate because it creates massive problems when indexing a document. Sorry, let me first explain how a document is indexed: basically you invert it. Instead of a list of documents with words inside, you create lists of words with documents inside. So when you search for the word “monkey”, you just pull out the page that says “monkey” and read down the list of documents. The problem with this is that a document may have hundreds or thousands of words, and breaking up the document takes a long time because of the physical limits of the speed of the disk to which you are writing. Let’s say you have 500 words in a document, and you have a disk that is capable of locating a word’s list on the disk in 5 milliseconds (these are actually very typical numbers). The location of the word on disk is basically the average “seek time” of the disk drive. 5 milliseconds seems very fast to locate a file on disk, but when you need to do it 500 times, suddenly it takes 2.5 seconds to index a document. This is a veritable eternity in computing times, especially when you are hoping to index billions of documents. To have one server index one billion documents at this rate would take more than 79 years. Even with 1000 servers it would take nearly 29 days. This is still way too long for several million dollars in hardware. We want to do it in 1/10 that time.

So what do we do? It may have occurred to you as you read above that just because a document has 500 words, it doesn’t necessarily mean there are 500 unique words. If the word “there” is found in the document five times then we only need to do one seek to write all five of those references. Now what if we cut apart two documents at once and one document has the word “there” five times and the other has the word “there” three times. Instead of eight seeks we can cut this down to just one. This is called batch updating the index. We accumulate the info for a certain number of documents and then we can update the index all at once much more efficiently.

So this brings us to our first mention of the brain. The brain may seem like a mystical device to humans right now, but I imagine it is far from mystical. In fact it’s probably in many ways similar to a memory storage device not unlike a disk drive. We have all heard people talk about the concepts of “long term” and “short term” memory, and to me this makes perfect sense. My theory is that as we are accumulating memories throughout the day they are stored in our short term memory, and then when we sleep there is a “batch update” of our long term memory where our brain delivers the memories to the relevant sections of our brain. In order for our brains to ultimately be as efficient as possible in memory storage, it seems to me that something like this has to happen. I have done exactly ZERO research when writing this up, so I have no idea if loss of sleep has a correlation with the inability to store long term memories, but that is my guess.

Part 2: Fragmentation

One of the other big problems with storing things on a physical disk is that data can become fragmented over time. This is actually true of RAM as well, but because RAM is so fast, the effects are rarely noticed. However, the simple fact is that if two things are stored in physical memory very closely to each other, then it is much faster to retrieve them than if they were in two separate ends of the device. For a real life analogy, let’s think of borrowing some books on psychology and physics. If you are in college perhaps you might go to your psychology professor and borrow a book, and then to your physics professor to borrow a book. But it is much easier to just go to the library where both can be found as well as many more. Unfortunately, in Part 1 when we did our batch update of the index and we looked to the physical location where “there” was, we noticed that the file it was in was full, and that there was other data next to it that we couldn’t move. So we basically left a note on the “there” file that said “the rest of the data for this file is across the street in another file”. So when we go to read our list of documents from our “there” file, we may need to actually look in many physical places for all the data. This is very inefficient.

If you used Windows 95, or a version of Windows roughly in that era, you may remember the program “Defrag” that was a part of Windows. What this program did was reorganize your hard drive so that all these pieces of data were in the same place. Part of this was to free up large blocks of memory, but another reason was to make sure that the data for a particular file was all stored in the same physical location on disk so that reading that data would be efficient. Maybe you noticed that if you went a long time without defragging your drive that it would take a very long time to complete, whereas if you did it every day, it wasn’t such a problem.

So this brings me back to the brain. Believing it is a physical storage device not unlike a disk drive, I tend to think that information in our brain can become fragmented over time, and that part of the job of sleep is to defrag the data in our head.

Problems with My Theory

Obviously data is not stored in our head as 1’s and 0’s like in a computer. I have no idea how it’s stored or even if it can technically be called “data”, but I do feel strongly that it is something analogous. Instead of files of data, we have nebulous clouds of something-or-others that are probably not coherent, definable, or even contiguous. The purpose of that sentence was to make you not understand it exactly. That’s kind of what I think memories are - things you can’t really understand exactly – but they probably mean something.

Other Problems With My Theory

There are probably one million more problems with this theory. It is more meant to be a though exercise than anything else, and I would like to hear feedback from people who actually study the brain/sleep/dreams/memory etc. to see what their thoughts are.

Conclusion

It is a good idea to get lots of sleep.

Searchles CEO Elias Shams Raps Social Search and Business Destiny with John Hrastar on DC Radio

Searchles CEO, Elias Shams (the caveman), braved an early Saturday morning to have an in-depth discussion about the current Web 2.0 environment, the web community's rise in DC, as well as Searchles' own past, present and future with Business Destiny Radio host, John Hrastar. The weekly hour-long show focuses on providing CEOs and business owners with useful information and insights on how to run and grow their businesses. This past Saturday, the show focused not only on Searchles but on the evolution of search, social media transformations, and the business models behind Web 2.0's latest innovations.

John Hrastar was really on the mark with his questions as he sought out what differentiates Searchles from traditional search or popular social bookmarking destinations, and how the two concepts are intertwined to build a social network on top of a strong core of social search. John and Elias also discussed how social search concepts can be integrated with online media sites to further their online advertising model in adding key social media components - a market Searchles is currently targeting with our online Social Discovery solutions. Later in the interview, the fact that our nation's capitol is currently home to a burgeoning Web 2.0 community sparks the idea that this search technology could potentially be useful for Government entities as well - certainly new and exciting territory for the social search community.

In the case that your late Friday prevented you from tuning in, you can listen to the entire interview here on Business Destiny Radio's website - pretty interesting stuff. Look Ma, I only said 'Web 2.0' three times. Natch...four.

Where Facebook Falters: Underachievement in Social Search and Discovery

Facebook, much more so than MySpace, is based on a strong foundation of off-line networks of trust – college or high school classmates, old friends, co-workers, or business contacts. Via newsfeed and email notifications, Facebook does a fine job of keeping folks up-to-date on the current favorite songs, geographic location, complicated relationships, and Scrabulous activities of those in their trusted networks. As far as information exchange – bookmarking, link-sharing, most-read articles, etc – is concerned, however, the popular social networking site has yet to really leverage the social structure they have created to apply it to search and discovery.

Some users are indeed sharing links they find on the web via Facebook and you will also see a fair amount of Facebook bookmarklets (a la Digg, del.icio.us) next to news articles and popular videos, but the vast majority of link-sharing is occurring outside of Facebook where these networks of trusts users have taken the time to build on-site cannot be effectively utilized. Facebook should consider the development of updates or displays as simple as “this week’s top links in my network” or related Facebook groups based on my bookmarks, ranging to options that dig a little deeper like a search leveraging the collective knowledge of Linux experts and their connections. This would lead to greater user-awareness and utilization of these search and discovery capabilities through social networks.

Social search features such as the ability to search keywords or links within certain networks would also be an important connection for Facebook users to trusted content on the web. Facebook thus far has done a very poor job with search – only allowing searches performed across Facebook-determined networks with a practically non-existent search across posted links or content. And it wouldn’t necessarily be an easy fix - at this point there would be certain challenges to developing search technology compatible with Facebook’s underlying structure because, well…search is just plain hard. This is why most social search sites don't actually run the search themselves, why some “regular search engines" give up after trying, why "search companies sell for a premium", and why "you may not want to try to do search yourself."

Throw a Facebook app at it? Creating a third-party search application wouldn’t really solve the problem here. Apps don’t integrate with the framework of the site well enough to make it possible for a third-party to offer useful search capabilities. A large portion of one user’s trusted network would have to add the application in order for it to be remotely effective, which really just complicates what should be a fairly straightforward functionality – a network search. Applications are also treated as a separate entity from Facebook groups, pages, profiles, etc as indicated by current “search results” – again with a lack of integration. Network search capabilities would have to be engrained into the site itself with Facebook, Inc. at the helm in order to succeed here and really accomplish something noteworthy in the social search space.