the Sam Jackson College Experience

About a month ago, I wrote about patterns I found comparing Yale and Harvard in Google searches through Google Trends. Well, just today, Facebook released a simply fascinating tool called “Lexicon” which is the same thing, but for wall posts. Computers (not humans!) track the content of every wallpost for words and phrases, and you can search for trends and comparisons over time using this new tool. Very cool, right?

Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall. It does not count repeated terms by the same user on the same day. This is to account for the seasonality of Wall posting in general; for example, there are fewer overall posts in the month of December.

My complaint about my previous Google Trends related efforts had been the fact that Google Trends was not targeted enough to college age students to give more precise sampling to *really* show the trends when it came to buzz about individual schools over the course of the admissions cycle. Facebook’s demographics pretty much fix this problem, and the following chart is very exciting.

The greatest influence here can be seen from Harvard and Princeton dropping their early programs. Yale has a huge attention buzz boost in December, but by spring admissions time it is at parity with Princeton (Gasp!) and Harvard has a significant edge in attention. As with Google Trends data, the same incredibly eerie trend occurs where everyone talking about school A talks exactly proportionately with those talking about school B with the same upticks and downticks, with high levels of accuracy.

In general, the same observations as before apply… just nice to see them borne out in slightly cleaner data somewhere else. Read about the patterns I found in the Google Trends data by clicking here, or see below.

Compare with Google Trends data (Red is Harvard, blue is Yale).

Teachers, educators, and librarians sometimes ponder the possible uses of Facebook as an education tool; students and teachers alike talk about the awkwardness and occasional utility that arises from online social networking interactions between-groups. The Education Committee of Missouri has weighed in with a proposal which paints its picture using a giant “sex offenders are everywhere, trying to sneak into our schools” brush. The Columbia Missourian reports:

Teachers would be restricted from connecting with students on Web sites such as Facebook under a proposal by the House Education Committee chairwoman.

The Education Committee added a section to a bill Wednesday regarding teacher-student interaction on social networking Web sites that parents cannot access.

The umbrella bill, aimed at keeping sexual offenders from teaching in Missouri schools, would prohibit teachers from using a “non-work-related Internet site” to communicate with students where third parties have no access. In other words, parents need to see profiles.

“Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-St. Louis, committee chairwoman and sponsor of the bill, said its purpose is to protect children from offenders that school administration cannot catch.” Thus, to protect children from the very small fraction of would-be teachers who might possibly be sex offenders or otherwise have villainous intentions for the youth of Missouri, a whole potential range of social interactions are set to be neutered. Why not ban e-mail, telegraphs, or carrier pigeons, too?

There’s a joke in here somewhere about Missouri being the “Show Me State” but I’m not even going to search for it, because this is just so poorly calculated in my mind–the goal and the means to achieving that goal seem very disconnected and its reminiscent of the deeply misinformed national debate on so many “protect the children from the scary internet” stories in Washington. Thoughts? Christian, other teachers and educators, your opinions especially wanted. Faculty + facebook — always no go?

Mashable had a great post today, “DOWNLOAD EVERYTHING: 30+ Firefox Add-ons For Downloading Images, Videos & Files” many of which are very useful–check it out if you’re a Firefox user (and if you’re not, check it out so you can see why you ought to be). But nestled within those embedded video downloaders and screen grabbing extensions was one which struck me as elegant in its simplicity and dangerous in its potential: Facebook Photo Album Downloader.

Promising to allow users to “easily download whole albums off Facebook” (it does) this should be a good reminder of how easily photos people upload to Facebook can just as quickly be pulled down onto users hard drives and travel from there anywhere in the world.

Be careful, people! I stopped warning people about the content of their facebook albums sometime last year after I found no one would respond seriously to the links to real-life accounts of life implosions and job disasters from Facebook content. Just think about it!

I pretty much agreed with Fred Stutzman out of the gate on the Facebook gifts feature when he said that the pricing and demand wasn’t there appropriately for these to work out terribly well. Well, it’s about four months now since the introduction of the Facebook gifts capacity and I thought that was as arbitrary an occasion as any to look back and contemplate its failure. My specific inspiration for this is that recently with the F8 facebook platform in place there is a ‘Free gifts’ application which is exactly what it sounds like. I know I’m not eager to give more publicity and hype to the facebook machine but hey, bandwagon.

In my anecdotal experience the gifts went something like this for every friend I had on facebook: You had one free gift and you chose it reasonably carefully (perhaps) and gave it to one particular person, or you perhaps hoarded it and then, at some later junction, you gave it to one particular person. Then you became aggravated at the distraction of the ‘Give a Gift’ button on everyone’s wall.

As of this writing there are 177 gifts available for purchase in the ‘catalog’ many of them ‘limited edition’ but really none of them having fewer than 100,000 available for purchase, many with 1,000,000 and several with 10,000,000. I think some went out of stock originally and are since gone. All the same, any current movement could probably be accounted for by new registrations–that 3% growth that everyone always talks about with Facebook. Just speculative, I suppose, but I think any purchases are really exceptions to the rule. Maybe Facebook’s PR line differs, but coming from a school which is decidedly posher, I might expect, than the median facebook user’s, if there was going to be purchasing I think my demographic might be leading the way a little bit. It’s not happening.

Danah Boyd envisioned the gifts as being unsustainable long term in their then-current form, which looks to have been pretty spot on, too. I also originally felt great resonance with Danah’s suggestion that scarcity should be involved more–Facebook almost started out really strong on this one when they had a limited introduction school by school which had people excited and wondering what the gifts were all about. Within a relatively short timespan, though, all interest had waned.

I guess at this point I’m looking to see if either something shifts with the gift strategy (evolution) or they’re swept under the rug (extinction). I wonder if the additional bandwidth cost of those characters of code and occasional server calls for gift images etc has cost Facebook money relative to gift revenue?

Final note: super-sharp readers will see I’ve tagged this post ’social networking site’ despite the fact that Facebook likes not to be called that anymore. Maybe they’ll change their name to a symbol next…

Update: 2:20 am – Apparently four of my friends, newsfeed tells me, have recently received the ‘congrats grad’ gift! Check first, though–two of them are a couple and these are their first gift-givings, and the other two… well, I can’t explain those immediately, but it’s not very statistically significant given the dearth of gifting I should have been seeing given the depth of my friend-pool. Oh well.

One More Note: Inside Facebook has some nice info on the Free Gifts app which inspired this post.

Karine Joly, who writes the must-read CollegeWebEditor blog about higher education marketing and PR, interviewed me a few months ago about my experience with Facebook and other social networking sites for an April 2007 piece she wrote in University Business titled “Facebook, MySpace, and Co.” Karine and I were talking about my experience using social networking tools to socialize online with the other 2011 prefrosh early actions kids and that led into the interview where I formally answered some of her questions on the topic.

An excerpt from the e-mail interview:

1) As an early admit of the class of 2011 at Yale, you got a chance to interact with your peers as early as December. Why is it something important to you?

Some Yalies who had dabbled with online networking when they were pre-frosh stopped by the online groups and pointed out that they ended up awkwardly removing a lot of their mysterious online friends once they got to school and started to make connections in the flesh; all the same, everyone seemed to agree that communicating online was a worthwhile use of time. The allure here is not so much the possibility of making friends before the start of the school year as it is the opportunity to get a taste of your future classmates. These messages back and forth offer illuminating glimpses, however brief, into the character and composition of the future class.

If you want to see the rest, you’re going to have to click through to read the full interview on her site! Although the bulk of my response got left on the cutting room floor, don’t miss the article in UB and check out the other interviews on her site, where she has full responses from the other interviewees, all very interesting.

I hear she’s also got a neat new social networking site of her own, Higher Ed Experts, for higher education professionals. Not being one, I can’t report much on it, but check it out–sounded neat.