Aleks Krotoski talking about the social graph.

• [missed the start] A social psychologist, trying to examine connections
• Pathways can be mapped across friends and people.
• Mass friending…impact the data and how the network connects.
• there are certain relationships and strengths of relationships. You can technological measure strength but difficult as you get to semantics.
• Adding arrows to the graph starts adding information. You can add lots of information, but then it all gets mushy in the middle.  Fuzzy and gooey and technologiest don’t like that. Then I come into the mix and go oooh psychology.
• So how do you measure strength…
  • I asked the social psy questions. list friends and rating of them..
• Based study on actual connection on a virtual world, on the qualitative assessment of relationships
  • Second half of study was looking at getting behavioural shortcuts for this
  • some evidence about how interactions acorss various channels indicates trust.  ie talking in public, IM in SL, outside of SL via email.
• Once you have all the information, all the messy stuff. I was looking at interconnected, closely related groups of people.  I’m interested in them…as they know each other. In the mess, many people, but don’t know others, they identify as something.  Look at a self-decared group to see if they are differently connected.  I did an island analysis, pulled out 4 groups of people who are extremely closely connected to each other.  There’s a lot of trust between each other.
• The point: There are social relationships which have psychologies that can;t ey be articualted through technolgy.  There are social flocking/network effects in these spaces – people move to where their friends are.   Whatever is happening…they’re capturing a lot of data about us.
• The data they are capturing is going to be a key discussion coming up

Tags: aleks krotoski, second life, barcampbrighton, social graph