There were some quite interesting suggestions made a few weeks ago by Chris Crum in his article What Facebook “Likes” Mean for Search & Reputation that Facebook with its recent implementation of the Social Graph, “Likes” and “Recommends” has the potential to become more of a recommendation engine than Google.

At a simple level, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” sushi restaurants in New York and those liked by my social network it can show me that information in search results. That hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social and more of a “recommendations engine” than Google at this point.

Google of course has been playing with social search in Labs but it’s more about displaying results that are relevant from your network.

Coincidently I also recently listened Brynn Evan’s and Will Evan’s Designing for sociality (Will’s also presenting later this year at UX Australia on Designing for enterprise social search). They make some great points about how search investigations in real life in terms of sense making are so often social. i.e. turning around to friends and colleagues to ask them if they know where you can find something, or have you come across this or that? These social connections are so immediate and valuable and are of course happening all the time in social networks like twitter and facebook.

Quite a deep analysis of these issues have been discussed in this paper: Morris, M.R., Teevan, J., and Panovich, K. What Do People Ask Their Social Networks, and Why? A Survey Study of Status Message Q&A Behavior. Proceedings of CHI 2010, in press. The researchers…

…conducted a survey of 624 people, asking them to share the questions they have asked and answered of their online social networks. We present detailed data on the frequency of this type of question asking, the types of questions asked, and respondents‟ motivations for asking their social networks rather than using more traditional search tools like Web search engines.

I think some of the really important findings they present are in relation to motivations for asking and issues such as “Trust” and privacy. i.e. What types of questions would I feel comfortable asking via a social network vs. private search tool usage. The following table presents results ranked in order of motivation.

Finally, I was surprised that among the excellent breakdown Stijn Debrouwere provides on Findability and Exploration: the future of search he omits the potential for “sociality of search as all of the above recently writings have discussed.

Congratulations to our very own Scott Bryant for being selected to speak at this year’s UX Australia conference!

Facebook’s F8 developer conference

(contributed by Melissa)

Here are a few really interesting links which I found so far on the F8 conference.

• A good summary: New Ways to Personalize Your Online Experience
• Showcase: Explore how sites integrate Facebook
• General conference info
• Watch keynotes live

Twitter’s developer conference

(contributed by Manuel)

At Chirp, the official Twitter developer conference, Twitter shared some revealing stats about its site, users, and growth that had previously been kept under wraps.

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
• Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet
• Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications
• Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees

You can also see some snapshots from the presentation.

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• Pat suggests Projective Techniques: Eliciting Deeper Thoughts by David Jacques
• Lexi suggests Pirate Google by Michele Goetz
• Pat suggests Why YouTube doesn’t get more agency money – and what they should do about it by Mark Pollard

We’re a bit light on this week, we must be busy :)

These are your users, read and be horrified

(contributed by Melissa)

Over on UX Magazine, Jonathan Anderson tells the story of the “RWW Facebook login” debacle…

ReadWriteWeb recently published an article titled Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. Being an interesting, timely article, it rose to the top of Google searches for “Facebook login.” Then: chaos and confusion. Lots and lots of the people who use Google instead of their browser’s address bar to access sites began confusing the ReadWriteWeb link with a link to Facebook itself, and began posting angry comments wondering why Facebook had been redesigned and asking when they’d be allowed to log in again.

…and then makes the link to the vox-pops video showing “users” don’t really know what browsers or search engines are, nor the difference between them. It’s like Funniest Home Videos for UX professionals! (Part of me thinks UX vox-pops are genius, the rest of me recognises they are cruel and embarrassing. Watch the video and enjoy lulz.)

Capturing storytelling on video (like Clint Eastwood!)

(contributed by Pat)

Shawn Callahan from Anecdote shares some tips for capturing stories on video:

A few nights ago I watch Changeling starring Angelina Jolie. It’s directed by Clint Eastwood (has he ever directed a dud movie?) and I was fascinated by a short documentary we found in the DVD extras where Clint explained why he never calls out ‘Action’ when directing a scene. As an actor Clint found a director’s call to ‘Action’ off putting. He was immediately reminded that he was an actor, acting and his performance suffered. Instead Clint calmly and quietly says things like, “OK, in your own time …” or “when you are ready …”

Simple but useful tips from a guy who knows a lot about getting stories out of people. It’s an increasingly popular method of getting under the skin of an issue (the storytelling…or technically story listening) but getting candid video of the story is also being used more and more. It’s a great form or emotive/persuasive communication and I’d really like to start producing more little video snippets to share with our internal clients.