Social Networking 4: Apple & Social Network

 Does Apple have social networks?

When Google came out with Google+, the tech world was wondering when would Apple launch its social network. However, we have not seen Apple’s Facebook-like social network until now. And it seems that Apple does not plan to do that yet.

Does Apple give up the opportunities in social media era? Surely NO. Actually Apple already has a series of social networks:

Ø  Music: Ping

Ø  Gaming: Game Centre

Ø  Updates: Cooperation with Twitter

Ø  IM: iMessage

Ø  Video Chat: FaceTime

Ø  Location: Family and Friends

Ø  …

Now we found that Apple already have an almost complete social network ecosystem that works greatly different from any other. You do not really have to “join” any part of it, and you just need to sign in with your Apple ID. Even though you were not aware of it, you have already involved in Apple’s social networks.

Why does Apple do not launch a Facebook-like social network?

Even though Apple has a wildly loyal user base and a nearly dominant place in not only big part of personal computers but also the smartphone market, it seems that they never sought to leverage their success and begin building their own Facebook-like social network. I think it is due the following reasons:

(1)  Crucial Competition

Even if Apple launch a social network for customers of iOS and Mac computer, they would have a hard time competing with the hundreds of millions of users that register into Facebook, Google+, Twitter and from platforms all over the world. Some Apple fans insist that if Apple enters the arena of social network and it will strive to be the best finally. That would be too risky. Apple cannot be the best all the time. Actually it suffered lots of failures already. Apple’s most precious lesson is saying no.

Just like Steve Jobs ever said “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ’no’ to 1000 things.”

(2)  They don’t really needed

Unlike Google, Apple does not really need a social network. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. However, Google has no access to Facebook’s information that occupies a huge part of the Internet nowadays. So Google launched its own social network, Google+, as a defensive trial. Apple’s revenue mainly comes from the sales of consumer electronics such as iPhone, iPad, MacBook computers and so forth. They don’t really need a social network to compete the other forgoers.

(3) Apple already has users' information

Have you ever purchased Apple devices, downloaded apps into your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or register an Apple ID? If you have, Apple already knows something much more valuable than your entire wall posts on Facebook, circles in Google+ or your tweets on Twitter. That is your credit card number, verified home address and current mobile number. It is said that Apple has more than 125 million credit card numbers on file.

Despite your payment information Apple knows your purchase history. It is rarely the case that you buy a Mac or iPhone and do not download apps into it. When is the last time your direct purchase via Facebook, Google+ or Twitter? All those information is priceless treasure.

What will Apple’s probable do with regard to social networks?

In addition to Apple’s already-exist social networks and deeply cooperation with Twitter, iCloud may be a valuable area. According to Tim Cook’s announcement, Apple has over 100 million iCloud subscriber at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in Feb. 2012.

“We have 100 million users of iCloud – we just launched it October! This is unbelievable.” --- Tim Cook

It means that Apple has access to over 100 million people’s calendars, contacts, bookmarks, photos, reminders and iCloud documents. They know the places you have been to with applications like Family and Friends and Find my iPhone. They are able to inspect your photos and got to know what messages you are sending with iMessage.

If Apple plans to set up a social network, iCloud has collected more than required information. Or will iCloud evolve to be a social network? Let’s wait and see : )

Social Networking 3: Case Study of Social Network Analysis

 What is social network analysis (SNA)?

Social Network Analysis is the study of the pattern of interaction between actors. Participants in the community are called actors such as people, groups, organizations and other information/knowledge entities. In SNA actors are depicted nodes, and valued relations between actors are depicted as links, or ties, either directed or undirected, between the corresponding nodes. SNA focuses on the social actor and relationship between the actors.

Describe the above social network according to the knowledge that I have learned in lecture 6-8.

For Alice, she has relationships with Bob, David and Carol.

For Bob, he has relationships with Alice and David.

For Carol, she has relationships with Alice and David.

For David, he has relationships with all the other 4 actors: Alice, Bob, Carol and Eva.

For Eva, she only has a relationship with David.

To present clearly, I denote their relationships by following social-matrix.

	Alice	Bob	Carol	David	Eva
Alice	-	1	1	1	0
Bob	1	-	0	1	0
Carol	1	0	-	1	0
David	1	1	1	-	1
Eva	0	0	0	1	-

As can be seen, it is a symmetric matrix along the diagonal. That is because I consider it to be a unidirectional network just like the pattern in Facebook.

This diagram comprises of 5 nodes and 6 ties (i.e. g = 5, L = 6). Then the Density is 2L/g(g-1) = 0.6.

The Group Degree Centralization:

Within this social network, who is the most influential?

Usually the most influential participant is also the most important one. In order to measure the importance of each node, we have three standard centrality measures capture a wide range of “importance” in a network: (1) Degree Centrality (2) Closeness Centrality (3) Between-ness Centrality.

Firstly, let’s calculate the degree centrality. It can be normalized as C’_D = d(n_i)/(g-1). Below is the degree centrality table.

	Degree Centrality
Alice	0.75
Bob	0.5
Carol	0.5
David	1
Eva	0.25

Degree centrality is the sum of all other actors who are directly connected to the actor in concern. It signifies activity or popularity. Through above table, David has the largest value of Degree Centrality which means David is the most popular one.

Secondly, we study it in terms of Closeness Centrality. Closeness represents the mean of the geodesic distances between some particular node and all other nodes connected with in. An actor is considered important if he/she is relatively close to all other actors. The normalized closeness centrality is as following.

	C’c (ni)
Alice	0.8
Bob	0.68
Carol	0.68
David	1
Eva	0.56

This parameter shows that David has the largest closeness. He is the most influential one for he is close to everyone.

Last but not least, we evaluate the Between-ness Centrality. It is a measure of the potential for control as an actor who is high in “between-ness” is able to act as a gatekeeper controlling the flow of resources between the alters that he or she connects.

According to the formula, we have C_B(Alice) = 0.5, C_B(Bob) = 0, C_B(Carol) = 0, C_B(David) = 3.5, C_B(Eva) = 0. Then the normalized results are as following.

	C’B (ni)
Alice	0.08
Bob	0
Carol	0
David	0.58
Eva	0

David has the biggest power as a gatekeeper.

Therefore, David is the most influential actor in this social network.

Suppose you are conducting a research on the social network of these five students and the above results are obtained, discuss the finding s and their implications based on your data.

My finding is that “Winners take all” is very common in a social network. The most active and popular actor usually is also the closest participant to the other partner. And he plays an important role in keeping this social network inter-connected. 

Social Networking 2: The Dilemma of Social Recommendation

Here comes the mid-term. By week 5, we almost finished the first half of this course, which mainly focuses on humanity fields including psychology, sociology, as well as anthropology. We learned some graphical representations of social networks on week 6, which means the scientific and technical part begins.

Among those topics, I would like to study social recommendation. Social media has changed the way to do traditional marketing and even online marketing. Users nowadays are able to publish and express their views and publish information online with Web 2.0. Oftentimes, this information requires a human perspective to process, for example indicate preference, quote alternative sources, categorize, add supporting materials and assessment of quality. This facilitates the potential users to consider, consume, and apply the information about a product and service. It makes social network users easily to refer to particular ratings and items and to redistribute these opinions to others.

Why do people choose your product? How do potential customers locate your goods? How to convert browsers into buyers? 

Reputation! Customers trust opinions and buyers who share their interest. Currently, customers do a lot of research online before making a big buying decision. The comments and reviews of previous customers play a more and more powerful role for retailers and e-commerce sites. As Internet is a chaotic information universe, social reviews and recommendation become more useful for consumers and more profitable for e-retailers.

However, the proliferation of user-generated content and the associated metadata on social multimedia sites introduces new challenges in search, for example unstructured data, vulnerability to spam and noise, short lifespan, much of the content offers little value to the general public. What is worse, some malicious users deliberately post misleading information on social multimedia sites. According to the recent news, Apple app store China branch is now heavily suffering the harassment of so-called Internet mercenaries. Those Internet mercenaries post fake comments on certain apps and push them to the Top popular ones. Now Apple users in China can not trust the recommended apps by Apple store, because those apps very likely cheat by employing the Internet mercenaries.

That is the dilemma of social recommendation. How to utilize its merits and prevent from malicious recommendation is such a big challenge.

Social Networking 1: The Power of sharing

On 1^st Feb 2012, Facebook Inc. filed for an initial public offering that could value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion, putting the company on track for one of the biggest U.S. stock-market debuts of all time. What makes Facebook becomes such a valuable company? It’s the power of sharing.

Before taking this course, Social Networking, I have already got to know it intuitively. I use Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and some other social networks almost everyday. I even know some techniques on how to construct such kind of social networking platforms. But this class gives me much fresh knowledge from a different perspective. On week 1, I acquired some definitions about social media, social networks and social computing. I consider the Facebook’s mission, “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”, to be best definition of social networks. On week 2, I understand social experience, cognitive processing and memory and social nature of human activity. It’s interesting to know that human beings process and store information in 3 stages. On week 3, I am really fond of learning the theory of knowledge and cognition. The core concept is the three different levels of cognitions: Cognition – “perceive new information”, Metacognition – “knowing about knowing”, Epistemic Cognition – “construction of knowledge”.

Among all the stuffs above, I would like to talk about Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model, which also known as multi-store model. It is an explanation of how memory processes work. You hear, see, and feel many things, but only a small number are remembered. It is important to learn about human information processing and memory so as to design social website that are usable and facilitate social interactions. Let’s take Facebook for example. Facebook usually recommend about 3 ~ 5 friends to you. When you point to a certain person, Facebook will display a simple profile about this people. All these designs have taken the limited capacity of human memory into consideration.

Back to Facebook's IPO, its success reflects people's great expectation on social networks. I think Facebook to be the third milestone within Internet development. The first one is Yahoo!. According to Yahoo's statement of its mission "providing knowledge obtained via personal experience, association, awareness and understanding.", Internet users first time have much easier access to the information they want in the chaos internet universe. Yahoo categorize numerous websites and form a hierarchic structure.  The second milestone is Google whose mission is "providing information obtained via investigation, study, data, measurement and numerical quantities". With google's search engine, you can search whatever information as you want in the Internet. Google provides the results by a series of PageRank-like algorithms with absolut neutral attitude. Facebook is totally different from Yahoo or Google. It gives information via "sharing". Those messages are posted by your friends, so the information become more attractive and trust-worthy. It gets every individuals involved.

Let's take the protest against legislation of 'Stop Online Privacy and Protect Intellectual Property Acts' as an example. Some social websites called on users in the US to contact their local congressman to vote against the bill on Jan. 18. By the next day, over 8 million people wrote their senators to protest against PIPA/SOPA bill according NYT reports. This led the US congress to reconsider and lay aside that bill. Once again, we witness the great power of Social Networks.