Development Blog

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Well, CHI is finally over and it’s a bittersweet feeling. It’s been an overwhelming and overstimlating experience. The final day of CHI held a number of really cool talks:

Social software in the office

The area of enterprise social software is always one I’m always interested in so I was very excited about this session. The first talk was describing a study on blog reading and writing at HP labs. They did a series of semi-structured interviews with HP employees all around the company with a focus on the diversity of input. Everything for new employees to people who had been there for 30 years and across all different continents. The results highlight some of the benifits but also problems of blogging. I related to this paper a lot, finding out that other people had the same issues with blogging that I do. In particular, the lack of feedback was a huge disincentive to blog. When people did get feedback, it was from side channels, via email or in person. This seems to me an indication that something might be fundamentally broken with blog commenting and I’m going to have to do some more pondering on this.

The second talk was on how photo sharing is used on the IBM internal social network and I felt that the relentlessly cheery tone detracted from the insight in this presentation. The talk focused so much on how photo sharing had all these positive effects that it seemed like more of a sales pitch and I found myself wondering how valid the observations actually were. Sure, you can claim through interviews that viewing collegue’s photos increased connectedness but maybe it’s just a more socially acceptable way of wasting time now.

Next was a note on location and privacy by Microsoft Research. It happened to be scheduled at the same time as another location and privacy talk in another track and I was torn between which one I wanted to go to. In the end, I wish I had gone to the other one. The results of the study were basically that location information was not a factor in privacy. Was this because people genuinely don’t care about location or because the study design just didn’t elicit the right information?

The next talk was a great one on how different university groups maintain shared document repository spaces. The speaker made the analogy between shared document spaces and communal fridges where people are unwilling to throw out other people’s food. Unlike fridges though, documents don’t eventually rot and so any document space ends up overwhelmed with crud. It’s an interesting problem space to explore. I tried thinking about it for a while and it has me stumped. I wouldn’t have much of a clue as to how to fix such a problem.

Reflecting on Design, Textual Displays & CoCollage

I told a collegue last night “This may be ironic but I only recently realised I’m a very reflective person”. What I meant was that I didn’t realise how the level of reflection I found natural was so rare in other people. This session on reflective design was very interesting to me. The first talk I attended was on meta-principles of interaction design and I think the general feeling in the room was that there was something significant to unpack there but it was something that would take a much more careful reading of the paper and critical thought. Thus, I don’t think there’s much I can comment on about this talk.

The next talk was on using texture as an input modality for devices and I thought it was an interesting exploration. The authors showed why texture was an interesting input mechanism for different devices: It’s unobtrusive, static, easy to access and you can use it on the go. Examples of texture displays might be using the back of the phone to display whether there was a missed call/text message, augmenting doorknobs with weather information or keyboard rests which change texture 10 minutes before an appointment. While the technology is not there yet, the speaker went through a survey of several promising materials and, overall, I think he made a compelling case. It’ll be interesting to see how real designers end up using it.

Finally, I went to a talk by a local Seattle startup, Strands Inc on using public displays to enhance the community feeling of a coffeeshop in Seattle. They talked about how you could use technology as a tool to enhance connection and community feeling. I thought the tool and the talk were great but one persistant frustration I’ve had with academia is the hesitancy to talk frankly about sex. I asked a question about it and the presenter claimed that they didn’t see that as the primary motivation and I was welcome to look at their data but I have a hard time believing you could build a tool like this and not have it be used primarily for helping people get laid. Still, we’ll see…

Computer Mediated Communication, Industrial HCI & Aesthetics

In the final session of the conference, I jumped between a bunch of sessions.

By far my favourite talk of the day was on using computer mediated communication to enhance the “empty moments” between long distance intimate couples. The presenters did a lot of smart insight on just what is it drives the connection between long distance couples and how to design a tool to support rather than hurt that process. This talk was interesting to me because I had previously done some thinking on how intimate friends share vs ordinary friends and what we want to share only with our inner circle of 5 – 6 people. While we wanted to share excitement with our friends, with people we are intimate with, what adds to that emotional depth is the sharing of “empty moments” or moments in which nothing really exciting is going on. I would highly reccomend going back to the original paper for this one as it conveys the full context and nuance of what they found.

The next talk I went to was on making the analogy between our understanding of fire, temperature and heat and how it relates to our evolution now in HCI. Having embedded my HCI thinking in a historic context, I didn’t find anything too profound from this but I thought it was a valuable paper.

The final talk was on aesthetics vs usability and the results were so obvious I would have rather preferred he handed them out on 3×5 cards and let us get to something else.

Ending Keynote

It felt profound in a generic way. I was too tired to remember most of it.

Lab tours

The day after CHI, the three local labs, Google, IBM & Microsoft had an open house. I missed the Google one and I want to devote a full blog post to IBM and it’s social software research. The Microsoft tour was interesting because the Cambridge, Massachusetts office is still relatively new (there is also a Cambridge, England office which complicates things significantly). Probably the most interesting thing I got from the MS tour was their new Startup Labs. I think it’s a bold move by Microsoft and it’s an open question whether it’s even possible to bottle the “special sauce” that drives great startups but I’m going to be watching this project with great interest.

Reflections

I’m still trying to decompress and unpack all the information I’ve absorbed from CHI and I hope I’ll have the chance to write a summary post some time in the next few days. We’ll see how that goes.

Day 1

Day 2

About CHI:

Computer Human Interaction (CHI) is the premier academic conference every year for academic Human Computer Interaction researchers and for professional usability experts, user experience people and interaction designers who are doing cutting edge stuff. Every year, something like 3000 or so people descend for 4 days of often overwhelming talks, panels, demonstrations, video presentations, networking and, ideally, plenty of drinking. It’s considered somewhat of a taste maker and arbiter within this community. No one person can give a completely impartial view of CHI, most of the time, there’s literally about 14 different things going on at once. The most you can do is go to as much of the stuff that interests you as possible and hook into interesting conversation in the crowd.

Still, CHI is somewhat remote from the workaday world of people who are building just another web application or mobile app. The stuff talked about at CHI is often highly abstract and, quite frankly useless to professional developers and designers. Despite that, I love it. It’s a bunch of overwhelming smart people with an astonishingly diverse array of interests all talking about the stuff they’re passionate about with a mix of brilliant insight and hilarious naivety.

Day 3

Day 3 was a pretty tiring day for me and I was exhausted from the grind and overstimulation of this thing. Most of the talks were uninsipiring and I found myself drifting off a lot but there was one shining bright spot in all of it which was that I went to what I think was the best talk, not only of this CHI, but of any CHI I’ve ever been. So for this post, I’m going to focus primarily on just one talk.

Resonance on the Web: Web Dynamics and Revisitation Patterns

I wasn’t even originally planning to go to this talk. Living in the Seattle area and knowing most of the University of Washington HCI people, my general rule is that I want to reserve CHI time for non-UW talks. However, I had come to that session for an earlier talk I wanted to see and nothing else inspired me so I decided to stay and I was glad I did.

Many of the other talks that I’ve enjoyed at CHI have involved tightly scoping a problem and then coming up with a neat experimental method that probes the question in an effective manner. Eytan Adar’s talk on revisitation and dynamic content was something completely different; it was an exploration into a messy, complex and nuanced data set and an analysis of that dataset which cut through the thicket of noise to produce clear and interesting insight.

“Resonance on the web” is a continuation of some work presented last year at CHI on revisitation patterns on the web. Using an instrumented Microsoft Live toolbar, Eytan collected the usage patterns of 600,000 web users and measured how often they returned to different types of webpages. Some webpages showed short revisitation patterns, most people who return, return 5 minutes or so after their last visit. Others showed that people returned every 6 months or so. By analysing how people revisit a webpage, it was possible to infer what broad class of site it was.

The work presented this year was an extension of this which looks at what people are interested on a page based on revisitation patterns. I’m not going to be able to go into the full subtlety of the talk and I recommend you read the paper for the full details but the basic gist of it is simple:

Most webpages these days are dynamic content. Different elements of the page change, ads change upon every refresh, content changes once in a while, site navigation elements barely ever change. By analysing the same page over time, it’s possible to find which DOM elements change at what rates and then, by matching it to revisitation patterns, you can infer what content people are interested in keeping track of. For news sites like the New York Times, people are constantly refreshing to find the newest content. For shopping sites like Costco, people are mainly coming back to search for things so the navigation bar is the most relevant information. For sites like woot.com, people are mainly interested in the content.

What can you do with this data? Eytan presented two possible applications. One was automatic generation of a mobile site. Since we can infer what content is relevant to most people, we can extract just those elements out for mobile presentation. The other was in generating web snippets for search. Knowing what people are looking for once they’re on the site means you can give them a preview of that information in the summary for search results.

The beauty of this presentation wasn’t just in the results though, it was the entire process that was used to arrive at this understanding and, if there’s one paper you read from CHI this year, I recommend this one.

For information about day 1, see here

About CHI:

I’m not sure how many people reading this are familiar with the CHI conference so here is a quick overview. Computer Human Interaction (CHI) is the premier academic conference every year for academic Human Computer Interaction researchers and for professional usability experts, user experience people and interaction designers who are doing cutting edge stuff. Every year, something like 3000 or so people descend for 4 days of often overwhelming talks, panels, demonstrations, video presentations, networking and, ideally, plenty of drinking. It’s considered somewhat of a taste maker and arbiter within this community. No one person can give a completely impartial view of CHI, most of the time, there’s literally about 14 different things going on at once. The most you can do is go to as much of the stuff that interests you as possible and hook into interesting conversation in the crowd.

Still, CHI is somewhat remote from the workaday world of people who are building just another web application or mobile app. The stuff talked about at CHI is often highly abstract and, quite frankly useless to professional developers and designers. Despite that, I love it. It’s a bunch of overwhelming smart people with an astonishingly diverse array of interests all talking about the stuff they’re passionate about with a mix of brilliant insight and hilarious naivety.

Computer Mediated Communications

phew, there is much more social stuff this year than previous years and I’m glad CHI is finally turning into a place where the social people feel a bit more comfortable. The first talk in this session was a really excellent piece of work on deception on Instant Messaging and, specifically, what the author referred to as “Butler lies” aka, lies your butler would have told for you if you had one. They had a really nice piece of experimental methodology where they instrumented the Pidgin IM client and asked users to rate every single message they sent on a scale of 0 – 5 for deception. Overall, about 10% of all user messages involved some kind of deception and 2% were butler lies. People mainly used butler lies for providing a convenient fiction for exiting a conversation, pretending they had work to do or they were going to cook dinner.

I don’t know what real insight can be gleaned from this paper but I think it’s excellent in setting a context for talking about design that needs to accomodate deception and polite fictions. In particular, the idea of designing for narratives is one I think is particularly important and I’m glad I’m seeing more of that kind of talk within this community.

The second talk, I’m honesly baffled by and I don’t know how to interpret it, even now. So “In CMC we trust, the role of similarity” was an attempt to replicate the classic work on similarity and trustworthiness within a virtual setting. They had participants play essentially an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game with 5 minute chat sessions after every 5 rounds. They then compared similarity metrics of the chat and showed that most types of similarly were correlated with better co-operation but explicit talk about money or negative language lead to less trust.

There’s a umber of things with this studyt that make it tricky to interpret, one was the complex relationship between the game and “trust”. One of my collegues indicated to me that a lot of that could be similarly explained by trying to navigate different strategies and not about trust at all. By defining trust as as being about trustworthiness within a game,I think there was a competing desire between seeming similar to the other person and seeming like a reliable person.

Another thing I couldn’t really wrap my head around was the way they interpreted and coded the text data. It wasn’t clear to me exactly what the things they were measuring meant in terms of real world behaviours.

Finally, their data seemed to suggest that there were a bunch of confounding factors that make the results hard to interpret. The first chat session between users was only after the 5th game but it seemed to me at that time that people had already decided whether or not to trust the other person. What would have been really interesting but was not probed was what factors caused people to shift from a high trust to low trust condition and vice versa.

The final paper in the talk, I didn’t pay that much attention to. It involved some kind of interesting visualisation of showing who does how much talking in a group chat box which is an interesting idea but I felt like they didn’t develop it in any interesting way. The effect they were looking at was how quickly groups come to consensus when they have this indication and I didn’t feel like they asked a provoking enough question for me to stay engaged.

Scientometric analysis of CHI

This was a panel based on the analysis of previous CHI papers from the last 20 years. I thought the presented weaved an interesting story of various interesting things he found in the CHI data. Probably the most relevant and controversial being that a best paper nomination/award is essentially useless for predicting future impact and, with that, the implication that if the committee is useless at picking a best paper, is it really great at picking accepted papers? The panel then presented 4 different reactions to this work and I thought all of it was interesting and thoughtfully teased apart.

Social networking sites

The first talk for this was the one I’ve been most interested in for the entire conference. Moira Burke presented some work she did at an internship at facebook where they examined what motivated new users to share photos on facebook. She did both a quantitative study with the massive reams of facebook data she had access to and then sprinkled it with anecdotes from qualitative interviews. The results are what you expect from large data sets, low p-values but also reasonably low mean effect sizes. What will be really interesting to me is the next step of this research where they start moving some of this stuff into design and A/B testing.

The next work did essentially the same thing, except looking at what predicts helpfulness in reviews on amazon. Probably the most interesting thing from that is that recency has a significant effect, probably due to the design of amazon. One thing I didn’t think to ask during the talk is that that seems like a highly weird result given that every review was recent at some point. The only way I can see to explain this is explosive growth in the usage of reviews at amazon. Maybe I’m interpreting the data wrong…

The final piece of work was on tensions on facebook and negotiating different social spheres interacting on facebook. It ties in with a lot of my work on faceted identity and I think it did a good if unimaginative job at exploring some of these issues. Since I plan to be writing much more about this in a published form, I won’t bother to re-iterate my thoughts on faceted identity at this point.

The final section, like yesterday, held nothing of interest so I’ve been spending this time catching up with people and also writing this blog post. For those of you actually at CHI, the dub reception is 7:30 tonight at the Marriott Copley Place Hotel, 4th Floor Salon E. Looking forward to letting loose and partying a little.

It’s been a long day so far, I took the red eye from Seattle last night so I’ve been up for a total of 28.5 hours so far. Apologies if not everything is coherent.

About CHI:

I’m not sure how many people reading this are familiar with the CHI conference so here is a quick overview. Computer Human Interaction (CHI) is the premier academic conference every year for academic Human Computer Interaction researchers and for professional usability experts, user experience people and interaction designers who are doing cutting edge stuff. Every year, something like 3000 or so people descend for 4 days of often overwhelming talks, panels, demonstrations, video presentations, networking and, ideally, plenty of drinking. It’s considered somewhat of a taste maker and arbiter within this community. No one person can give a completely impartial view of CHI, most of the time, there’s literally about 14 different things going on at once. The most you can do is go to as much of the stuff that interests you as possible and hook into interesting conversation in the crowd.

Still, CHI is somewhat remote from the workaday world of people who are building just another web application or mobile app. The stuff talked about at CHI is often highly abstract and, quite frankly useless to professional developers and designers. Despite that, I love it. It’s a bunch of overwhelming smart people with an astonishingly diverse array of interests all talking about the stuff they’re passionate about with a mix of brilliant insight and hilarious naivety.

Keynote

The keynote was given by Judy Olson on Social Ergonomics and I had really high hopes for it as it was right in my area. I, personally, found it unneccesarily shallow but I kept on hearing from other people that they loved it so perhaps my perception was due to an overly familiar view of the work.

Judy talks about the idea of ergonomics and how it defines the relationship between the body and space and then she brings this metaphor to the social sphere. Stuff like proxemics tells us how to behave based on the distance people stand away from us, subtle social cues help us guide conversation and we judge attention based on gaze among other things. Pretty standard stuff so far and, while interesting, nothing overly challenging or difficult to work with. She then goes on to detail how such cues break down when we mess with the physics of real space: satellite delays in speech, video conferencing in which the other participant is both smaller and at  weird angle and poor audio causing people to lean into a teleconference.

My biggest disappointment with this talk, and note that this is purely my personal opinion and I think that the research she does is great, is that:

a) I thought ergonomics was an overly restrictive metaphor in this case and resulted in a rather literal translation from real to virtual space. Everything is conceptualised within the standard 3D framework that the human body is used to operating in. I think such an overly reductive approach misses the richness that comes from highly abstract forms of online communication. What are the ergonomics of a social graph or a asynchronous conversation over forums? I’m somewhat of a collector of metaphors for social design and social ergonomics strikes me as a rather poor one.

b) I felt that her work focused overly on rich, mediated face to face or simulated face to face interaction which is a very researchy kind of area but one I believe to be largely irrelevant when it comes to producing impactful designs in the field.

In the early days of HCI, there was this tendency to try and get computers to replicate the full richness of face to face interaction and, with it, came an implicit assumption that face to face interaction was the gold standard when it came to social behaviour. I’m not accusing Judy of that now, I think the field has moved somewhat past that phase now and tries to exploit the unique benefits of technology, but there is still a prejudice towards heavyweight, overly mediated interactions.

I think one subtle bias for this was that such systems were easy to evaluate and, thus, easy to publish for. You just use real face to face interaction as the control and then you can test how good your new system is compared to the control. Simple numbers, simple paper. But as I pointed out in my blog post on virtual worlds, the truth is that real life interaction really isn’t all that great and the true power of virtual interaction is to be blatantly better than real life interaction in certain ways and suffer from being poorer in others. The two modes of interaction are apples and oranges but to admit this means that you can’t perform simplistic analysis.

If we were to look at the true success stories of technology mediated interaction, they would be voice, text messaging, email, IM, forums, blogs, social networks etc. We love these forms precisely because they aren’t face to face interaction. You can perform them across space, perform them across time, strip the social nuance of phrases, deliberately add ambiguity, reply in your underwear, take time in constructing your thoughts and present a fictionalized version of yourself. All of this stuff is horrific if abused but awesome if used right.

Open source projects are probably one of the most well studied remote collaboration tasks and, in almost every single real life open source deployment, people reported that they loved having a constantly on ambient skype channel between sites as it greatly increased team cohesion but every time they experimented with video, they would shut it off in about 2 or 3 weeks. Now, the true HCI zealot would argue that this is because the technology and design of such systems is not advanced enough but I am skeptical about such faith.

Yes, video chat has it’s place and serious, rich co-located interaction of the style Judy Olson (and many other HCI researchers I know) have a place in communication but I think they are and will always remain a niche place and I would much rather the CHI community focus more on the complex social nuances of these seemingly simple and boring communiction mediums instead of building yet another technologically complicated remote co-located workspace that assumes the only reason we’re not remote co-locating is due to technology.

Phew, so that was Judy Olson’s talk. I have to say despite everything else, CHI is taking social stuff noticeably more seriously this year than it was last and I’m glad they’re finally on the social wave… 5 years after it had crested.

Creativity, challenges & opportunities in social computing

Call me old fashioned but I expect panels to actually panel for a significant period of time, not just present. Sure, give a 5 minute overview of your work but the reason we put you up there was to provide the spontaneous discovery of information that only back and forth conversation can provide. Of the 4 panel participants, only one actually stuck out in my mind and that was the Scratch project at MIT. I’ve not had time to explore it but I would definitely love to come back to this at some point and give it a thorough exploration.

One thing that was noted in the questioning was that the panel really didn’t talk about the “dark side” of social computing and I feel like the panel continually soft balled their way through that point, even while claiming to take it seriously.

Online Relationships

This was a great session with some really interesting material. The most outstanding talk of the bunch had to be Eric Gilbert’s on revisiting The Strength of Weak Ties work that the Grannaanbanana guy did way back int the 70′s and repackaging it smartly with interesting new data. Social scientists have been theorizing for many decades on what makes some relationships “strong” while others casual and have come up with several factors they think influence it. What Gilbert has done was ask 35 participants on facebook to rate the strength of their tie with each and every one of their facebook friends and see what facebook data can estimate the strength of such ties. He nicely seperates out bulk statistics such as how many blog posts and how many positive emotion words into larger, sociologically relevant categories like intimacy and reciprocity.

He then proceeds to perform a tight piece of statistical analysis which does a careful job of sifting through the data. Of the results I remember, R^2 was 0.5 and MAE was 10% but the most interesting one was that if the task was to simple many a binary distinction between strong and weak ties, the accuracy was 87%. What I wish he had talked about more was the outlier cases which completely confounded the regression model. He presented two but I think a few more would have really put that 87% in context. If a false match is 100 times worse than a correct match, then a 13% error rate stops looking so good.

Jilin Chen’s talk on the performance of recommendation systems was a neat little piece of experimentation but I thought it unfortunately just subtly missed the point. Chen’s work was on replicating the “People you may know” feature from facebook on the IBM internal social network site, beehive (I really have to talk more about IBM’s efforts in the social computing space because it’s really one of the greatest stories never told within the web 2.0 world). He experimented with 4 different algorithms for suggesting people and, my interpretation of his conclusion seemed to be, they all seemed roughly the same in quality but biased differently between recommending old and recommending new friends and that their fancy system resulted in the most friends added.

What seemed like the tragic waste for this study was the implicit assumption that more friends = better friends. I know from my personal experience that when facebook added their “people you may know” feature, I was horrified because the top 5 people on my list were people I was well aware were on facebook but I had no interest in friending. Sure enough, within the next 2 weeks, 3 of those 5 people had sent me friend requests and I was forced to deny a request for the first time in my facebook career. A look at quality rather than quantity of friend requests would have done this paper a lot of good.

The 3rd and 4th papers in this session were both notes so lightning 10 minute talks and I was honestly baffled by some of the results given.

A quick summary of “My Dating Site Thinks I’m a Loser” was that they wanted to evaluate how much people gamed a reccomender system that gave them bad results. They had two conditions: showing the user a picture of themselves or not and giving one reccomendation per 10 questions or 4 recommendations at the end. Oddly enough, putting in a picture turned out to be a major confounding factor. With the picture in, people gamed less for the 10 minute condition but without the picture, people gamed more. (as an aside, there’s a fascinating visual language to psychology 2×2 graphs which I only realised today. I’ll have to write about it sometime as people who see a a lot of psych studies can see two straight lines on a graph and instantly infer what and how is interesting about it). I have no idea what to make of this information, why would looking at your own picture lead to such a radical shift in behaviour?

Finally, was a paper on designing for forgiveness which I found odd and challenging to get a handle on. I understand that forgiveness is an interesting social topic and one I should be in theory interested in but it was presented in such an abstract manner and without any examples that I found myself unable to judge whether it was even an interesting take on the topic or not. Oh well, I guess I’ll read the paper for this one when I have the time.

Session 3

When I was looking through the program for the first two sessions, there were so many interesting talks I couldn’t make. There was fascinating stuff on privacy, navigation, security, trust and a whole bunch more that I so dearly wanted to go to but were in conflict with more important talks. I think the one I most wanted to see was a panel on how user experience can learn from food design, being a major major foodie and one who’s plugged into the food discourse, it pained me to miss it. But the third session, there was not a single paper I was dying to see. So I mainly spent that time getting some relaxed networking in, free from the vicious time constraints of 30 minute breaks.

Conclusions

Phew, blogging a conference takes a lot of time and I’m starting to understand why people prefer to twitter conferences instead. Still, I think it’s important to make the material in the CHI community relevant to a larger audience and also I think to provide one person’s interpretion on what can often seem like intimidating topics to the uninitiated. So often, I see people approach talks uncritically because they assume they know so little and the presenter so much. But once you’re willing to hold to your own opinions and defend them respectfully, regardless of the “eminence” of the author, you start to see the literature in a different light.

I’ll be attending the CHI 2009 conference over the next 4 days and I’ll try my best to blog about my experience. This is my 3rd CHI and one that I didn’t decide to go to until just a few weeks ago. Right now, I’m in the main ballroom (really pretty btw) and listening to the standard ACM talk that’s at every CHI.

The CHI community is a funny one to me. I find it quite ironic that it’s a gathering of over 3000 technologists who are ostensibly interested in the new vistas of technology and interaction and yet it seems so old fashioned and not in touch with using these actual technologies. There seems to be some decent activity on twitter which is encouraging but I struggled to find any decent blog coverage of CHI last year so I’m going to be doing my best this year.

The keynote is about to start so I’ll end my first post here.

I’ve never liked sites that replicate the paper-based conventions for footnoting. The entire point of the web is that it’s non-linear and multi-dimensional. Does anyone know of any good tools (or website) that have footnotes in-place in the text which dynamically expand when you click on them?

Venturebeat is reporting that Facebook is planning to introduce a system of giving people credits for status updates:

My first reaction to this was “That’s evil“.

My second reaction was “That’s brilliant“.

After further consideration, I amended it to “That’s brilliantly evil“.

Currently, my position is that it could be any one of the three depending on how they choose to go about it.

What Facebook has done in essence is linked social status to economic status and I think a lot of how this will play out depends on how facebook crafts the narrative around this.

Let’s look at the three alternatives in turn:

Evil

By turning social interaction into a economic exchange, facebook turns the default social relationship from one of Balanced Reciprocity into one of Negative Reciprocity.

When we deal with close friends, we engage in a gift culture. I do good things for you because I like you and I expect you’ll return the favor at some later date. With strangers, we are forced to default to an economic exchange because there does not exist a sufficient level of trust to permit a gift culture. What role someone plays in our social sphere is determined by what sort of reciprocity interaction we engage in.

If facebook links their virtual currency up directly to social status with no other viable alternatives, then it forces people to negotiate an economic exchange in relationships which were previous based on gifting. This becomes a hugely uncomfortable experience as one person now occupies two different reciprocity relationships and it becomes unclear what the social obligations are.

If credits become the default social currency of facebook, then I predict disaster. If someone on the site ever thinks “Hey, how come he gave John 300 credits but he only gave me 200 credits? He must like John 50% more”, then facebook is in for some tough times ahead.

Brilliant

At the same time, if facebook designs this feature right, it could be the holy grail of monetization that they’ve been searching for. I’ve never been too convinced that advertising was going to be the business model for facebook given that they have such a rich social tapestry to explore. If they manage to design this feature so that economic exchange is an augmentation of social interaction, then they can leverage credits as a more authentic form of social engagement.

Many of our real world authentic social interactions are marked by economic exchange. Buying a beer for a friend or bringing back souvenirs from a trip abroad for example. In these cases, money spent makes these activities seem more authentic, not less. How can facebook exploit this? I’m not quite sure. But if they manage to strike the right balance, they could end up with a system that both promotes even deeper social engagement while at the same time, make them money hand over fist.

Brilliantly Evil

The most chilling of these three alternatives is that facebook manages to co-opt social status by turning it into an economic exchange. DeBeers convinced America that you buy a diamond to demonstrate your love for a girl and that you love her because the diamond is expensive. The DeBeers mentality is that the only authentic way to demonstrate social status is through economic exchange.

If facebook manages to accomplish this, then the result will be that every facebook employee will become an instant millionaire but facebook profile pages end up looking like something from MTV Cribz.

The road ahead:

Facebook credits has the potential to greatly enhance the range of social expression on the site but it also has the potential to become a complete disaster. Which one of these paths facebook ends up taking depends crucially on the narratives that it’s users adopt and these narratives depend crucially on how facebook credits ends up being designed.

At this point, I’ve only had a few hours to digest this so I don’t think I’m ready to give design suggestions but here are some things I suggest would be worthwhile to explore:

• What do credits incentivize? Can they become subject to the overjustification effect? Any incentive scheme is going to distort behaviour, and always in ways you never anticipate. Deciding what credits do will have a major function in how they are used.
• What does credits make comparable that previously wasn’t? How many home cooked meals is getting picked up in the rain after getting a flat tire? It’s precisely because such questions are hard to answer that make gift exchanges so convenient. If Facebook puts a value on something that was previously hard to price, it removes some of the social ambiguity that makes friendships run smoothly.
• How close to money should it be? Behavioural Economics has shown consistently that Humans regard money-items as very different from non-money items. Under the right conditions, people will prefer $10 gift cards over $15 in cash and are willing to steal $1 chocolate bars but not $1 bills. By calling them credits, facebook pushes it towards the money end of the spectrum which may or may not be what they desire.
• How close is the link between cash and credits? How many different ways are there of gaining credits and which of these methods is credible? In the original article, the only two ways that credits can be earned are through buying them or building up reputation. Is someone who gives out lots of credits a person who’s rich or a person who has high social status? Is there any way to tell? If there is, does buying credits increase or decrease your social status?

I have to admit, I’m intrigued by the credit system and the social implications that it has. With the right design principles, it could potentially be a game changer much in the same way that the Facebook Application Platform is. And yet, in my discussion with friends so far, I’ve heard nothing but pessimism and I think this is a reflection of all the various ways a scheme like this could go wrong. I guess there’s nothing to do but wait and see what happens.