Over 60 years ago, this effect was first verified in an experiment by psychologist Bertram Forer with some students. He constructed a personality assessment from various horoscopes, and gave the same assessment individually to every student who took a personality test.

The assessment included sentences such as:

At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved.

Almost anyone can find some truth about themselves in sentences like that.  And, in repeated experiments that tendency held true.  And with social media and other online (or offline) interactions, there is perhaps the same tendency to follow the Forer effect.

If a social media tool analyzes our online traits and provides us with a judgement, we probably will think it must have truth in it.  After all, it’s about us, based on our own input.

Even knowing that an interaction is non-human, such as interacting with a “bot” of some sort (or a voice response system), we still feel that the interaction is ours alone.  But perhaps like a credit score run amok with other people’s information, we should not accept the assessment without making sure it’s not co-mingling our information with others.

To some extent, what you believe becomes your reality, and certainly our belief can get us past otherwise-overwhelming challenges.

If a new tool tells you that you are #1,230 of all tweeters worldwide (on Twitter), you are inclined to want to believe it. But what if it were partly a randomly-generated number?

hmmm….

And in a perhaps orthogonal way, an online persona is our own Forer effect upon the world, and this can be bolstered using social networks.  It’s the same old technique put online: if enough people refer about someone as a visionary, then it is easier to believe to be true about that person.  And we can get others to say those nice things about us! (article continues below)

Sites such as Facebook & LinkedIn, along newer sites such as Philtro, are also trying to enhance their picture of who you are via your social network, in order to provide you with more relevant information (and, of course, advertisements).

While this social network assessment technology is still new, over time we are likely to expect our online services to deliver us what we like, without us having to do much to filter those information & media feeds.  Just say (one day) to your phone/PDA – “I want to watch a minute of the most interesting clips of my friend’s party last night, and after that chill out for about 30 minutes to some new music like what I heard there.  Go!” and you just might get what you instructed.

And you may believe it’s been done just for you.

The reasons behind being what could be called “semi-social” are varied, and include:

• Desire to be different
• Fear of (using) technology
• Not enough desire to socialize online
• Not enough time to socialize online – information overload
• Most friends or relatives not using online social websites
• Desire to cut back on online social activities

So, your choices on how to handle these miscreants – um, miscellaneous users – include:

• Acknowledge them – Show that you know that not everyone “gets” it and tone down the geeky/chic-y plug-ins and social media campaigns
• Help them – Provide work-arounds so that semi-socials can partake of your website’s offerings
• Ignore them – Don’t slow down the speed at which you use every possible social media tool to expand your reach, while risking alienating people who are semi-social.
• Invite them to socialize – Take a chance that you may find their moment to start socializing via one of your preferred methods. (This invitation can happen along with the first bullet point above – after acknowledging them.)

We’re all semi-social and even non-social during the course of a given day. So, it is easy to understand the mindset of someone who is routinely less social online. That is, if you can stop posting for a moment and ponder about them.

Times Square, New York City (2009), slightly altered. © 2009 ChiefSocialOfficer.com

Whether it is written, or not, if you are using social media then you have a strategy.  The key to excellence starts with how much time you devote to something, and this area is no exception.

There has been advice out there on social media strategy for a year or more. Following up the strategy, there are lots of lists to help you plan. A strategy is important, since you can do anything with social media.

And it’s all free!

Not really. As the excellent slide deck below points out (see slide 38), it takes time. Time is not free, even if you are not getting paid. There is the opportunity cost of making a choice, as time spent on one activity prevents or delays another one.

Or, will we elect to stay in mostly same-thinking groups?  As we join up in communities online, the homophily aspect could kick in.  Homophily is defined as the tendency to be friends with others who are similar, and is described futher in this New York Times article.

Birds of a feather flock together… True?  Looks like it.  As stated in this 2001 paper “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” the tendency shown is to connect with people who are like you: “Similarity breeds connection”.  If you’ve stumbled upon a MySpace.com profile that is for an artist in Los Angeles, you will likely see this tendancy at work as you see their friends and the interactions. The University of Wolverhampton in England determined in a study that homophily exists on MySpace (Homophily in Myspace – MS Word format).

Geese of a feather on the snowy Potomac River in Washington DC

In looking how a phenomenon, concept, or media can “go viral”, the virality aspect has to allow it travel along different groups, each with may have their own different patterns of interaction.

And political alignments can seemingly prove this “fact” – that birds of a feather flock together.  As has been seen increasingly online, getting the message out directly to small homogenous social groups has value, especially as it usually comes from a member of the group.

But this same social group limits your options. As you meet and interact with new people, via your social networks, they will pretty much be the same as your old friends.  Exceptions to this trend possibly include on-the-job interactions, networking for a new job, and ad hoc activities such as searching for a lost pet or person.

For support towards goals, this similarity within a group can be a positive aspect.  For a marketing campaign, it is both a hindrance and a help.  People resist ideas or concepts that come from outside their group, but if it is shared within a group it is helped by the peer-to-peer approvals.

As pointed out in this O’Reilly blog post & comments, social networking sites encourage you after you sign up to invite all of your friends to join (or at least load them up as contacts).  Is homophilus behavior a feature or a bug?  How about in one’s own life?

This depends on whether a person wants change, and to some extent if they are open to conflict.  Engaging with people who think and act differently from you often means conflict.

On sites such as Twitter, we can search and see different and opposing views to our own, but odds are that we are not following or friending these people, on average.  On a philosophical note, then, each can blame themselves for limiting their choices of friends.

In the trend of people to find their news via online social activities, the news we get there is filtered by our preference in friends.  The videos we get pointed to, the memes we share… they are going to vary among friend-lines.  This inbreeding of content perhaps goes contrary to the common belief that we are expanding our horizons by interacting with hundreds or thousands of friends online.  This trend may be also relevant to how mainstream news covers mostly the same events.

The people who become online web celebrities cross the boundaries of smaller social groups… or may define larger groups as they show commonalities.  They connect to us on levels that transcend simple small-group connections, and sometimes even transcend language barriers, and satisfy people’s yearning to be part of something bigger.  Even as we also apparently yearn to part of something similar.

A definition of social: the aspect of life that is lived in communities.

Another definition of social: belonging to organized groups, with a known or assumed boundary that defines the group.

A definition of community: a group of interacting people sharing one or more life aspects in common.

The wikipedia definition of community is longer than these definitions.  It delves into sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other areas.  One could derive from it that online communities fall into the general category of either “communities of culture” or “community organizations”, with the other  category being geography.

Yet online – and virtual – communities have evolved to a different blend that has not existed before.  The sheer number of virtual communities may grow to equal or exceed the population that supports it – i.e. the population of the world.  This growth won’t happen overnight.  But if you assume that 80% or 90% of the population may be candidates for virtual communities (including groups), and people usually join multiple groups, the case can be made for billions of groups existing in 5 to 10 years.

But what is the “blend that has not existed before“?  It is the interwoven way that community boundaries exist and change in the virtual world.

In the real world, communities are usually physical, and also non-overlapping.  The town of, for example, Fundale, consisted of the society that lived within its borders.  Physical borders defined geographical community borders.  And the teachers of Fundale would be the community defined by teachers working in the town’s borders.

In the virtual world, communities now overlap.   There can be a Teachers of Fundale group on Facebook, another one on MySpace, another one at TeachersOfFundale.org, and numerous other ones.  Membership is almost guaranteed to be different in each of these communities, as some of them may not even know about the existence of the others.

Oh, and what about the Instuctors of Fundale?  And the Professors of Fundale?  And don’t forget the Fundale Educators and the Coaches of Fundale.  Each of these communities may differ in name only from the functional boundaries of “people that instruct or teach other within Fundale“.

What’s the point?  Why should you care?

The largest social network is… the human race.  Some people reading this post may assume (or hope) that one day there will be one online social network that becomes #1 worldwide and that everyone will join.  We’re all members of the human race, after all, and we deserve our virtual platform with no walls for everyone on the planet, right?  But that one worldwide social networking platform is not likely to exist anytime soon, as there are hundreds of social networks launching each week (our estimate based on a few scattered stories and statistics).

Instead, envision an online world that mirrors – and expands on – the mix of communities in the real world.  Boundaries are mushy – membership fickle – and the human nature of competition is just as real as in the offline world.  (All your members are belong to us.)

You may believe you are the member of a particular community.  When does that membership cross into areas that are outside of the community?  How do you describe the essence of your membership? For many communities online, it becomes hard to define the boundaries, especially if anyone can join and quit at will.

The activity of the members creates the community.  Usually this description applies to the social activity, and it also includes activity that may not be on-topic for the community.  If an online community member (who is a member of 12 communities simultaneously) uploads a video to YouTube or a photo to Flickr, and links it to 4 or 5 communities, and then is removed from 2 of those communities…

…the boundaries and intersections of “community” may start to become more interesting. As does the strength or level of group participation, the distributed nature of community (including what is going to explode with technology such as Open Social and Facebook Connect), and mobile aspects.  Understanding the dynamics behind community boundaries is worth exploring, as that aspect has a lot to do with how community exists out of its ability to satisfy basic human needs (to belong, to be understood, to have meaning).

The community boundaries become defined by the members of the moment, and their activities and contributions.

Consider this post to be the first attempt to get words around how to manage the chaos of online communities, and that it is to be continued (link will be added when that happens).

Author’s Disclaimer: Fundale.com is a site that I’m involved in, and is not an actual town (that I know of).

Over the last three days there have been two major startup demonstration events – DEMO and TechCrunch50.

The presenters are among the top of the crop for this year’s startups (notwithstanding the ones we will showcase on Startup Rockstars!).  If you step back and realize the sheer volume of new tech ideas that are launching or recently launched, you might (and should) be overwhelmed.  Mostly the theme seemed to be (1) social and (2) mobile (as in iPhone apps).

I was able to watch many presentation from both of these events online, and at times there was almost 3,000 people watching the live TechCrunch50 stream (on Ustream.tv).  This viewer number is large for an online show of any kind today, but also notable because it’s an unknown event to most people.  It was (probably) never advertised on mainstream TV.  And so this post is relevant to the current panel on TechCrunch50, which *wins* the ratings race by default as it was the only event streamed live. Both events were well-attended over the last three days, with the long-running DEMO event stating it was their largest-attended event so far.

As I type this post, the TechCrunch50 is wrapping up with a Hollywood discussion panel.  While they are discussing whether YouTube “is a disruptive force in Hollywood?” (question by Michael Arrington), most of the conversation is about how the old model of watching TV is evolving to even newer sites and services than YouTube. 

Some of this change is described as generational, as large numbers of teens (at least in the USA) now are watching shows on the web, totally ignoring mainstream over-the-air (or -cable) network programming.  So the challenge is to leverage what I termed the “assimilation of TV” into the social web.

Examples of how this assimilation happens is when a TV show has a major online presence, including clips or entire shows, blogs, and online social interactions with viewers and fans.  While most stars aren’t on Facebook or Twitter, some are slowly embracing technology such as Seesmic, which allows video comments and feedback to be posted immediately on the web.

A separate post will discuss the higher-level issues brought out by the trend of startups.  For now, the merger forecast years ago between TV and the internet has happened, and will continue to happen.  With films released on the internet included, the total merging of media is at hand.  How will this affect your business, your lifestyle, and our civilization?

And now back to the show, already in progress. (and next up after that, the re-runs of what was missed!)

There is increasing buzz this month about online clouds – the services that host our applications, contain our data, and can scale on demand.  Those who recall grid computing or mesh computing or distributed computing will understand the concept behind clouds: computing services as a utility, like electricity or water. 

What is the forecast for clouds?  Growth.  With recent articles on large technology companies getting together on cloud computing, it will no doubt ride the hype curve very rapidly (even amid some tech voices of sanity).

As in a previous post here which included highlights of the advance from yesterday’s best computers to today’s desktop computers, the lower prices now, combined with the scale of global computing data center resources & virtualization, means that computing actually can be a utility. 

In concept, it follows the pattern of the internet – shared resources along with proprietary/private resources, with costs driven lower by higher adoption rates.  Shared costs of email relay and internet traffic routed across servers allowed free email to mostly replace paid email.  But this time, shared computing via a cloud really will change the, um, landscape. 

Why?  Developers.

Many tech-savvy people, based on blog comment posts this week, don’t get the cloud.  They will, one day soon, but it will take an understanding of how development in the cloud can be done more cheaply, with more scalability, distributed globally.  A year from now there will dozens of startups that succeeded in 2008 and early 2009 by leveraging the cloud, combined in many cases with social networks, mashup-ready data, and a keen sense of how to solve problems that are still forming in online user expectations.

As in a previous post here highlighting the big changes of old computers to today’s computers, the lower prices now combined with the scale of global computing data center resources means that computing actually can be a utility. 

Clouds arrive in Hong Kong.

[ Buzzword prediction: clouds will be superceded in buzz-worthiness by what they float in: the atmosphere ]

Stripping away the more mystical aspects, one could assume that the current path of technology is to create an actual akashic record of all events of our world – everything that can be recorded. Road traffic, transactions, conversations, and with microblogging all the rage… apparently every thought (as in, tweets on Twitter.com and updates on sites such as facebook.com and myspace.com).

What about recording thoughts from within the brain? Possible, as EEG (electroencephalography) and MEG have shown. And this development will continue to develop, as who would not want to control a computer – and thus other mechanical devices – with their brains, as shown in the video below about the Neurosky controller:

Assuming technology will evolve and refine thought-reading further, then it also will allow thought-recording. Initially it would be a stream of simple commands such as “move mouse up”.

But how about the future? Less than 40 years ago the large computers that filled an entire room contained less information than fits on a CD or on a memory card for a camera or mobile phone. Today’s personal computers are 100 times smaller, and 1000 times cheaper, and run laps around their ancestors in terms of speed & performance.

So by one stretch – and it is a stretch – the crude EEG game controllers of today will evolve in 20 or 30 years to devices that will read and extract our ideas and concepts. And there will be storage media to record this brain activity, and likely also record a 3-D representation of real events, continuously. These events would include human activity, and nature, weather, etc. While we may not be able to capture past events or the thoughts of someone like Shakespeare as he was writing, we have already started capturing this arguably permanent record of human consciousness.

Going back to the definition of akashic, it contains: “…adherents describe the existence of various akashic records (e.g., human, animal, plant, mineral, etc.) that in their summation encompass all possible knowledge.” There is a counter-balance in that “the akashic records have been rejected by the scientific community, due to a lack of any independently verifiable evidence.”

Evidence lacking, that is, until the scientific community creates it. Or, actually, as we all create it.