The Social Networking Girl

We’ve had some discussion recently among the local twitter community here at Penn State about how many people we all follow on twitter.. and why.  The consensus was that most of us try to follow no more than 100 people and all for the same basic reason… it’s not beneficial. At more than 100 people, conversations begin to become fragmented and you can’t really feel connected to more than that many people.  While this may not be the case for everyone, the majority of the people I’ve spoken with at Penn State feel this way.

It was interesting then, to read this post from ReadWriteWeb today discussing this very thing. An excerpt from the post here:

“Research by Robin Dunbar indicates that 100 to 150 is the approximate natural group size in which everyone can really know everyone else. “Human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people, judging from the logarithm of our brain size; and sure enough, studies of hunter-gatherer groups, military units, and city dwellers’ address books suggest that 100 to 150 is the natural group size within which people can know just about everyone directly,” writes Jonathan Haidt in the book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” drawing on research by Dunbar.”

The post also discusses the difference between the amount of friends a person might have on Facebook as opposed to twitter and for me there’s a difference.  I feel as though I could have a million ‘friends’ on Facebook and be fine with that because it’s not conversational in the way twitter is.  It’s like the difference between a dinner party and attending a Penn State football game. I’m ok hanging around with thousands of people as long as I don’t really want to get to know all of them. If I want to spend quality time with them.. then I’d prefer the dinner party.

A few weeks ago I received an email asking me if I would be interested in trying out a new tool/technology called Vivaty.  I did a quick twitter poll asking if anyone knew anything about Vivaty to which NO ONE responded (Seriously people.. what the heck). So that told me that either no one knew anything about Vivaty, or no one felt like telling me about it so I figured I was on my own and I’d give it a whirl just to see what it was about.

This past week I was able to take part in a conference call and demonstration with Keith McCurdy, the President and CEO of Vivaty, and I gotta say.. I think this has potential. Keith introduced himself by saying that he worked previously for Electronic Arts and had developed Vivaty as a platform and wanted to get my impressions.  We used WebEx so Keith was able to walk me through some “scenes” and show me what you’re able to do while we discussed it.

In a nutshell, from my point of view, Vivaty allows you to log into a ’scene’ which is your own personal virtual environment. You have an avatar that you create with very simple choices.. not great amounts of avatar customization right up front but in my opinion.. that’s a good thing. Sometimes that stuff can be a little (a lot?) overwhelming at first. So anyway.. you log into your ’scene’ and you’re able to invite others to come join you. The scene that Keith showed me was sort of a patio area with a pool and some outdoor furniture but apparently there are/will be many others to choose from as well.  As we were hanging out at Keith’s pool he showed me how users can move objects/furniture around to customize their area and make it more unique.  It felt to me very much like a Second Life environment, but with one difference.. it’s web-based. No intensive graphic requirements, no huge processor, no leaving people out because they don’t have a powerful graphics card capable of running it.. very nice.

Another fantastic thing Vivaty can do is take YouTube URLs and allow them to be embedded in the scene and viewed by anyone that’s present in that area. There were also photos on the wall that were brought in from a Flickr RSS feed.  Vivaty is almost like a big mash-up of web content in a fantastically neat virtual package.

Vivaty is currently in beta and being used in Facebook. I’ve been invited and if any of my readers are interested, I do have some other beta invites that I can toss your way and get you included.. PC only at this point, it seems. I was a little disappointed with that because I do prefer my mac, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

Vivaty Pros:
Web-based
Immersive
Customizable
Can pull web-content from other sites into environment (YouTube, Flickr, etc)
No risk of ugly, inappropriate ’scenes’ to interfere with your space
Seems to be very user-friendly and easy to understand/navigate
More control over your environment/space

Vivaty Cons:
Still in beta
Other than the discussion with me, there was no real consideration about educational uses, but in all fairness, they did say that these were things they hadn’t thought about, but would now consider.

From my perspective, Vivaty has a lot going for it. If you can restrict your logins to a specific group (or class) you can easily have a defined, secure, virtual environment that’s community-based where groups of people can meet, discuss and view web-content together. If we were able to use a tool like this within ANGEL, for instance, allowing each online class to have their own virtual room where the entire class could meet I can see a lot of potential there for some really wonderful interactions.

I’m pleased to have been asked to provide some input and check things out and I’m looking forward to playing around with Vivaty.  I’m hopeful that they’ll keep educational institutions in mind as they progress forward and I can’t wait to see what opportunities this will present.  A big thank you to Raksha, Keith and Heidi.

Just came across this post on ReadWriteWeb that references a study that will appear in New Scientist Magazine that has found that things like blogs, instant messaging and social media sites are better than traditional media in times of emergency because they connect people and provide warnings in real-time.

It’s a really great post and definitely worth reading. I love that they’ve used real examples of how all of these sites and tools have really been useful recently. They’ve also shown the real value of using these things in emergency situations.

I wonder.. with the proliferation of blogs, twitterers and people using these tools, if at some point “traditional” media will disappear. It seems, at least for myself, that more and more I’m tired of the ‘drama’ that old-school media brings to the table and I just want to get the quick, honest assessment from a ‘real’ person on the front lines.