Cybertough Industries

If you decide to take a nap in the middle of a work day you can and should be held accountable. When you buy the newest Dean Koontz book at the airport you are choosing to spend 8-10 hours in order to finish. Get a dog, buy a goldfish, rent an apartment; all responsibilities you sign-up for. There is a cost to everything we choose to do in life.

There is also a real cost for friending someone.

The term friending comes in many flavors:

…the action of adding somebody as a friend for social networking sites or social community sites etc. (1)

…just want to communicate more efficiently with your closest handful of “real-world” friends… (2)

The concept of meeting people and collecting friends online… (3)

…the display of these friends and the messages they send to others relates to their place in the social hierarchies… (4)

Basically, the act of friending, as a verb, is connecting to people (friends, family, peers or strangers) on a social networking site. The purpose varies, but the core desire is our need to stay connected with a community of people considered as friends. The trends seems to be leaning a bit over the line of friends in order to build up the kingdom of friended people.  As described within Designing Social Interfaces (pp.472), “Teens may choose to accept request from peers they know but do not feel close to, if only to avoid offending them.” This reluctance to offend is not limited to the teen population. There is a certain amount of prestige associated with your number of followers (or who you follow). This is where the true cost of friending starts to impact.

The normal person writes around 20 wpm, transcribes at 33 wpm, types at 60 wpm and reads at 275 wpm (5). Which means you could read this specific post in around two minutes of time (although it took me considerably longer to write). There is/was a real-cost for you to read my article.

Overloaded!

What is that cost?

If we think about it in terms of time we should be able to measure what the impact is of friending someone. This impact will be based upon the historical average of the number of articles, tweets, stream or wall updates that any single individual publishes. If we consider that most people will go no more than two layers deep (the immediate post and to follow the included hyperlink), the math may seem complex but is rather simple.

Here is some sample data, based on merely one of my social network accounts.

• Twitter
  
  • Tweets
    • 431 tweets, 5624 words over 620 days, avg 9 words a day at 275 wpm reading
    • ~ 2 seconds per day
  • Twitter-Links (links posted in Twitter)
    • 71 links, 66409 words over 620 days, avg 107 words a day at 275 wpm reading
    • ~ 23 seconds a day
  • Total: ~25 seconds per day to follow my Twitter account
    It also means that with my current 80 followers, my tweets are consuming:  33 minutes per day (on average)

Basic architecture of a solution

The analysis I did is pretty accurate considering it contained all my tweets since I started posting on March 20, 2008. The data was first extracted using Tweetake (7), then cut up to perform word count. I then extracted all the URL’s from the data and performed a manual analysis using the Kwintessential website word counting tool (6). Using the average reading speed data I referenced earlier, and averaging over each day (versus only the number of days I posted), a value was arrived at.

You start to see what type of impact, or fee, that could be applied to an individual based upon their posting patterns. In order to complete the analysis like I did, a real-time solution needs to be created that can be connected to each social networking system of major coincidence. Access to sufficient historical data would also be required in order to build a relatively accurate profile of that accounts activity. Additionally, the ability to bridge multiple social sites in order to build a full picture of not only an individual stream but the full picture of that individuals social postings.

There are tools that do this in part, throughout the web, but nothing that does a full-blown calculation on how much it would cost to become a friend of someone. What a wonderful idea? Know how much of your time will be sunk before subscribing to the tweeting spammer (twammer?). Understand that this person posts blog articles re-posted from every RSS subscription they have. Before I go off and start doing more work on this I was wondering if anyone else thinks this is a good idea with value?

References

1. Urban Dictionary (link)
2. MySpace for dummies By Ryan Hupfer, Mitch Maxson, Ryan Williams (link)
3. Social Networking Communities and E-Dating Services: Concepts and Implications By Celia Romm-Livermore, Kristina Setzekorn (link)
4. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience By Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone (link)
5. Wiki: Words per minute (link)
6. Kwintessential: The Website Word Count Tool (link)
7. Tweetake: Back Up your Twitterings! (link)

  This article has been Digiproved © 2010