Clay’s rant about women begins with his former male student’s request for a recommendation. Clay asks the student to write down what he thinks Clay should say about him. The student returns with his draft peppered with praise, which Clay then tones down a notch “…so that it sounds like it’s coming from a person and not a PR department” before sending it off.

Right. If you ask me, this whole practice of writing your own letter of recommendation is dodgy, but that’s entirely another discussion.

Having signed the letter, Clay is left feeling annoyed. The interesting bit is that he’s not annoyed at himself for getting into this situation, or the student in question for being cheeky – no, he’s upset at us women.

Hang on. “What have we done to get the pointy finger?” I thought to myself reading this. Apparently it is not what we’ve done, it’s what we haven’t done, or will not do. Women, he says, would never write a letter overstating their abilities. And that’s because…

“… not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. It’s not that women will be better off being con artists; a lot of con artists aren’t better off being con artists either. It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.”

Clay admire the con artists. Why? Because a risk taker have bigger wins than those who are not. But they also fall harder. With a touch of admiration he mentions David Hampton who pretended he was Sydney Poitier’s son to make people give him money, but also points to the fact that these kinds of lies are not sustainable for long and inevitably lead to failure and “jail”. It’s the risks we can live up to Clay promote: ‘harmless con artistry’, such as lying about your skills in an interview.

“It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.”

I’m left with the feeling that until women dare being like men, we’re simply mediocre.

This is why I felt upset after reading Clay’s post.  I too agree that being able to speak up for yourself or promote yourself is desirable & necessary qualities. Being able to say “I’m proud of my work” is crucial for someone who wants to advance in their career.  It’s just that I fail to see how ‘con artistry’ solves what I think is the real problem:

How do we recognize real talent, accomplishment, skills and ambition fairly?

We’re not getting anywhere by favoring ‘male’ nor ‘female’ behavior. If at all possible, the only way forward is to kill the idea that one of the two sexes is more successful or more right in their actions than the other: Women’s effort and work will never be recognized fairly in society, in the arts or at the work place until we accept the ridiculously simple thought that women should not have to become men in order to be successful.

I’m going to put my hand up and say what I feel: I want to be great and I want to be me. I’d rather not have to become a “Moustache McMasculine” to succeed.

Clay, your rant is not really about women – you’re not annoyed about women’s behavior. You’re annoyed at one student overstating his abilities and upset that you’ve signed a letter that’s not entirely reflective of the truth. And perhaps you realize that by supporting this behavior, you’re part of a culture that is so difficult to change.

Look at that! Not only does it know I am 39 (nearly as old as Tim) but it also knows that I am female, and although I can’t say this for sure, this little ad also seems to have figured out that one of my favourite colours is … pink (No, I haven’t revealed the colour of my bra in my status line).

As it happens, super agency Made by Many is already supplying me with an awesome phone, but I got interested in this deal nevertheless. Not because the offer was appealing, but seemingly offered exclusively to me, I could not resist clicking on the ad to find out more. I wanted to know why this offer was made to 39 year old women… is this for real…? So I clicked the ad…. and…

Hello Vodafone.

Indeed, by clicking the link I landed on a Vodafone page offering a free (pink!) phone, but hang on… the terms aren’t right. As I’m browsing the page in hope of discovering the apparently well hidden and exclusive section for 39 year old women, suddenly there’s a pop up asking me if I want to chat with a representative. Sure..! Let’s save some time and cut to the chase.

But what followed is a miserable story: Not a single one of my 39 years nor my lovely female body make me special on the internet in any way. There’s no exclusive deal.

Furthermore – while you like me expected that any offer based on sex and age is a lie – you might be surprised to hear that  the entire offer run on FB was false.

Read the entire hilarious transcript of my conversation with the representative below (click to enlarge). I throw my hands up in despair.

Poor Austin doesn’t seem like the smartest rep in the world (since when did Tweetpic start selling phones?) and he certainly gave me a proper crap customer experience. But I cannot blame him for Facebook’s & Vodafone’s dishonest exploitation of your personal data to lure you into clicking on offers that are not real.

When is this industry going to understand the damage they are causing themselves?

Chat with Austin from Vodafone part 1 - click to read

Chat with Austin & Naomi from Vodafone - part 2 (click to enlarge)

The article is based on Christakis and Fowler’s research on the National Heart Institute’s Framingham Heart Study. 15,000 Framingham residents and their descendants have been followed since 1948 to learn about cardiovascular disease – but two years ago, Christakis and Fowler used the very same data set to analyze if people can influence each other’s behaviour just by socializing.

That’s kind of obvious, you’d think… But what is striking about what these two researcher have found is that the strongest influence might not come from your friends, but from friends of friends. Even those you haven’t met. Looking at obesity, for instance, Christakis and Fowler claims that a Framingham resident is nearly 20% more likely to put on weight if a friend of a friend does, even if the connecting friends weight remains the same. Even a friend of a friend’s friend’s weight gain (try saying that quickly!) is also putting you at risk, with a 10% increase.

“You may not know him personally, but your friend’s husband’s co-worker can make you fat. And your sister’s friend’s boyfriend can make you thin.”

Scary? It certainly shows how important a person’s social network is. The same theory applies for happiness – spreading good or bad feelings. But before you run off to unfollow certain tweeters and delete friends from Facebook to stay happy & thin and so on – consider this:

“The subconscious nature of emotional mirroring might explain one of the more curious findings in their research: If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends.Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones.”

The argument is that different types of behaviour have different levels of contagiousness and spread in different ways. Being happy, for instance, is not about having a small, tight network – it is the sum of the positive small moments you have during the day – regardless of the source. Have you ever seen someone do something nice for someone else and be touched by it? Have you felt like smiling just because a stranger smiled at you? Mirroring other people’s emotional state directly affects your own, and apparently, happiness trumps unhappiness.

While happiness can be contagious regardless of the source – the contagiousness of other behaviours is directly affected by the type of relationship you perceive to have with the source:

Their other finding is more intriguing and arguably more significant: They discovered that behaviors appear to spread differently depending on the type of friendship that exists between two people. In the Framingham study, people were asked to name a close friend. But the friendships weren’t always symmetrical. Though Steven might designate Peter as his friend, Peter might not think of Steven the same way; he might never designate Steven as a friend. Christakis and Fowler found that this “directionality” mattered greatly. According to their data, if Steven becomes obese, it has no effect on Peter at all, because he doesn’t think of Steven as a close friend.n contrast, if Peter gains weight, then Steven’s risk of obesity rises by almost 100 percent.

I’ve always been interested in why some types of behaviour trumps others. Thompson’s article and Christakis and Fowler’s research is so interesting because it shows that the type of friendship/relationship you have with people as well as where they’re placed in your network matters when it comes to the strength of your behaviour influence.

Understanding where the influence happens in a social network wether that be a person or a subset of people is crucial when you design systems that are intended to encourage a certain behaviour from people, like doing favours or taking actions.

Some time back, I wrote a very frustrated post on how experts from the field of psychology make sweeping generalizations of what it means to use online services like twitter, facebook and other social networking sites.

As someone who once pursued an academic career, I found it shocking to see how careless these claims where – random ‘opinions’ completely unsupported by any evidence, but yesterday, my faith in the academic field was restored when “28″ (our nickname for Anjali) and I went to see Prof. John Cacioppo’s presentation “Connected Minds: Loneliness, Social Brains and the Need for Community”, hosted by the RSA.

“An individual’s complete involvement in a thriving, engaged and altruistic community is more than spiritually beneficial. As a social species, humans create emergent organisations beyond the individual—structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilisations, and international alliances. These emergent structures evolved hand-in-hand with supporting genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms because the consequent social behaviors helped humans survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce. We are only now beginning to truly understand the ramifications of our individualistic lifestyles, as our social brains struggle to cope with isolation, loneliness and failing communities.”

What a brilliant talk.

Most of us feel lonely now and then. I certainly do. But while I have tools in place to ‘snap’ out of it – some people are chronically lonely.

Being chronically lonely does not necessarily mean that you haven’t got people in your life or that you’re a ‘loner’ with no social skills. It means having a different sensitivity to a need for human connection. If you have a high need for interaction and connection with other people, you will end up feeling lonely if that need is not met, while another person might feel perfectly happy with less contact than you do.

Lonely people end up in a vicious circle and are prone to get depressed. When they experience the world in light of their unfulfilled social needs, they become highly alert for what they perceive as social social threats. “If my answer to the question isn’t right, everybody will think I’m stupid so I better say nothing” might be one perception, while “She’s choosing to see another friend tonight so she must not like me very much” might be another. As you can imagine, this behaviour often attract more loneliness in the end – if A’s social needs are met sooner than B’s, A might feel claustrophobic by B’s frequent requests and begin to avoid B.

So far, this sounds like a personal problem. But not only does Cacioppo say that loneliness is determined by your genes, he also that loneliness is contagious, and that the future of our society inevitably will be shaped by how we manage our need for human connection.

He finds that there are three dimensions that determine loneliness:

1 – Do I have someone in my life who cares for me and loves me? (people who are close to you)

2 – Face to Face communication

3 – Collective Connectedness  (the quality of your social network)

Obviously, this immediately prompted our ‘favourite’ question from the audience – what’s the role of Facebook in all of this.

“Let’s not talk about Facebook, but social media” Cacioppo smiled.

“It’s the way you USE social media that is significant. ”

Cacioppo pointed to the many cases of people who are lonely because they’re isolated. They might have a handicap, an illness or some other reason why they’re not able to meet people face to face and in these cases, social media provides invaluable tools that can help someone feel less lonely.

But when someone completely replaces face to face interactions with social media, they might feel a temporary boost yet inevitably end up feeling lonely again.

“Most people do not use social media in this way,” Prof. Cacioppo ended. The host added it is far more common for people to use social media to enrich their existing networks.

Obviously this post is just a tiny snapshot of the brilliant talk we were given yesterday. I’m still thinking about how loneliness affect us all and how lonely people can use social media as a tool to improve their social networks and lives. The full talk will soon be available at the RSA website, or if you’re as fascinated by this topic as I am, go pick up a copy of his book Loneliness – highly recommended. Or visit ScienceofLoneliness.com!

There’s loads of similar web based services out there. But although they might be easy to use, this is in no way a guarantee that people stay on top of recording (or even completing!) their tasks.  A few weeks into the project you often find that the whole group, previously collaborating in one space, have moved the whole thing offline, into their separate in-boxes and what have you. Now things have turned a little bit Texas.

Perhaps this happens because most systems are designed around the users functional needs while the motivational and emotional bits are completely ignored. Well, you may say… does it matter if a system is boring to use if it does what it says on the tin..?

That’s true if you’re happy to get on with things, tick the check box when the job is done and don’t worry much about the mundane aspect of it all… But if you’re one of us ‘daydreaming slackers’ who are driven mad by this humdrum type activity then you might need a little ‘kick’ to get going.

In spite of having the same functional needs to complete a task, we’re rarely motivated by the same stuff. Some take pleasure in seeing a completed check list, others can only recall what a painful job it was to get there. You can split these groups of preferences into even smaller ones. That’s why it is an enormous challenge to design motivational aspects into services.

Reward and punishment are two very common strategies for motivation. Often only one is in use at a time:

Sometimes, the two are in use simultaneously… “If you eat all your peas, you’ll get dessert…”

I don’t think there’s any doubt that collaborative systems would be much more effective if they were designed with motivational features. Just look at games – using both strategies, they’re designed to make us desire to progress to the next level.

An example of this is Farmville on Facebook. Keep on top of your farmer responsibilities and you’ll earn money. Forget, and your crop will wilt. The horror. It’s unpleasant.

Obviously farming won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but neither will, uhmm, time sheeting…

Anyway, Famville is a FB application that cleverly gives the user a clear incentive to frequently spam their walls with game info at the same time as giving their friends a reason to lurk around their wall, waiting for this to happen…

The game keeps you fussing and caring for your farm by giving you ribbons whenever you’ve accomplished a goal. In true FB style, there’s a ribbon for nearly everything – harvest enough to build your cash reserve, then buy a few buildings and hey hey presto – you’re awarded a great architect ribbon and a gift.

Pick fruit from at least 5 trees and you’ll get the amazingly rare “knock on wood ribbon”. The ribbons are then posted on your wall so you can bask in a well deserved glory – but wait! Just because you’re so great, your friends should get rewarded too…. click [ Get a bonus from Elin ] and a bonus sum will be added to your game money. Clever. Now I feel guilty when I don’t share these posts on my wall.

(I’m not going to mention names, but there’s quite a few loiterers hanging around my wall these days….)

There’s lots more to Farmville, but that’s not the point of this post. Neither is to turn Basecamp or similar services into Farmville…

For all of us who design services, it is very important to put aside purely functional needs for some moments and think about how to motivate users.

I’d be gutted if I logged into Basecamp and found all my tasks wilted. On the other hand, life would be quite alright if every hour entered in my Harvest timesheets resulted in some beautiful, personal data visualisation at the end of the month.. or better yet, I could pick up a bonus reward every time @stueccles completes his:)

The agency is now on the lookout for 70 (tidy) women to drive their ad decorated cars around town. (sorry, link in Norwegian)

“Seeking clean women is a visual way of communicating that we’re looking for people who will keep the cars neat and tidy. Great ambassadors, it’s that simple,” said Nova Vista’s MD.

Speaking to the Norwegian paper Dagbladet, he also tells us that the added bonus by using women is that we also don’t drive like pigs.

Finally time to do away with that old silly expression that either starts or end with “women behind the wheel”, is it then…?

To bad that the chief editor of the feminist magazine Fett (Fat, directly translated to English – meaning awesome if used as slang) kind of steps in the salad when she comments that this is really a very old fashioned view. Men are just as good as taking care of their car as women, “…if not better” she claims.

She’s got one point, though. “It might be 70 very tidy women driving around in these cars, but they might not be very smart” she adds. Each woman must pay NOK 1790 a month to drive the car. That’s nearly £180.

Well, it made me laugh this morning:)

That’s something we’re very interested in here at Made by Many, so we’ve invited world-renowned author and futurist Howard Rheingold to present an evaluation of the outcomes and predictions he made in the 2002 best-seller “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”.

Howard’s talk will be followed by an open discussion – I’m sure it will be a lively one! The event will appeal to anyone interested in new models of mass collaboration, crowd-sourcing and emergent intelligence that are made possible with the advent of ubiquitous social computing. We’ve only got a few free seats left, so if you’re interested, get in touch with me asap at elin@madebymany.co.uk and I will try to get you on the guest list.

The event will take place next Wednesday (July 8th) at 15:30 – 17:00 in BBH’s offices at 60 Kingly Street.

Below is a video clip of a talk Howard gave for Ted on collaboration, and Smart Mobs has also got it’s own blog over at smartmobs.com. And of course, don’t forget to follow @hrheingold on Twitter!

The five most popular candidates will then speak on a ticketed, final event in April – which will be video recorded and put online for another round of voting before the final winner is announced.

I’m on the list. That feels…..scary…exciting! So my next paragraph should probably be a hard sell on why you should run off and hit my name on that poll… but you’re smarter than that:)

I don’t like to exclude men and have mixed feelings about focusing on “women” speakers only. Makes it somehow feel “easier” and less important, doesn’t it? As if women don’t have a chance when pitched against men.. But at the same time, there is something to be said for the idea of gathering a group of women to discuss what they think the most important issues within social media is today and where they all think we’re going in the future. Women aren’t always as competitive nor do they put themselves forward in the same way as men, so we’ll see a lot of unusual perspectives and thoughts.

I don’t know all of the candidates named and the organizers aren’t doing the best job of introducing the women (which makes it hard to vote!), but I still spot a great person on that list. I absolutely loved Aleks Krotoski’s (@aleksk) talk on why the web and game industry would benefit from collaborating together at the Dconstruct conference last year. She’s so great that I’d rather ask her for lessons than compete against her!

Which makes me think that even though this event is pitched with a competitive element, the strength of it will be making room for more voices rather looking for just one. That’s exactly what social media is about, don’t you think?

Go on, then, get voting!

Uh oh. Big deal, you might think – some people change their avatars as often as they change shoes. And so do I – but not here at my work blog.

For the past half year I’ve been writing under a stranger’s face – a “spare” avatar bestowed upon me by Isaac until yesterday.

At first, I found it awkward to write and felt slightly irritated by being represented by a stranger. Whenever I published a post, this mean, hungry little lady with black hair and a sour pout would pop out like a Jack in the Box from somewhere deep inside Wordpress, ready to devour my every character. I’d look at the site and feel disconnected from my words. Now the blog post was hers… she even wore my name!

At Made by Many, we have a love/hate relationship with our work avatars. Drawn by an artist who’s been given quite a lot of artistic license, we’re not always in agreement weather a whiff of green to our skin tone or a splash of purple hair really help bring out our best features…. Some of us have now and then been known to refuse to blog under these “dreadful caricatures”, but the truth is that they do make us feel like a team and we all wear them like a badge of honor.  “At least we don’t take ourselves too seriously!” says William.

But self-representation and avatar usage can be a serious matter online. The avatars we chose to represent ourselves have an impact on how we behave and also on how we’re perceived online.

That’s why sites that easily allow you to change your avatar often are more engaging and interactive. People change their avatar to reflect their mood, send secret messages to other friends, display self- attributes, social role, a fantasy representation of who they want to be or they might just want to provoke. Just look at this collection of people from the Metrotwin homepage:

Metrotwin people

If you look closer at the Metrotwin people, you’ll find a lot of stereotypical usage: The football enthusiast, the pet lovers, the travelers, the proud parent, the beauty, the humorist, the hobbyist, the eye, the cartoonist, the standard portrait and so on. And if you hit refresh when you’re on the site – you’ll see these types repeat again and again. I find this incredibly fascinating – seeing people’s creative use of avatars make me much more interested in finding out what’s going on at a site and communicate with the people who use it.

But not all of us are fans of creative self representations online… In a talk on Facebook given by Blake Chandlee last year, he mentioned his dislike of people who aren’t using their real photo to represent themselves, especially those touting a pet pic on their profile.

I first thought he was just being funny… but then I came across this thread on a FB discussion group where people complain that their profiles are deleted when they use “fluffy” avatars and “kittens” as profile pics. Says Pamela Noordman:

Facebook is one of the better examples there is of a site that makes it easy and fun for people to maintain multiple avatars. So why they give their user this functionality just to tell them later they don’t like the way they use it is beyond me…

Although I’d always be supporting the user’s right to wear the hat they want and my Facebook avatar seldom stays the same for more than a few days – I’m not entirely disagreeing with Chandlee. The amount of complaints I’ve gotten from twitter followers who’re confused when they come from twitter to this blog proves the importance of a consistent, recognizable avatar.

I’m very happy to finally blog under an avatar that look and feel more like myself, although the first comment I got on my new, real avatar was someone questioning weather or not I was wearing a fox on my head…now that was a bit rude, don’t you think?

Perhaps the problem is this simple: They just don’t have the time to spend on participating in these communities which a thorough understanding of these phenomena require. You can’t just sign up and click a few buttons. You’ve got to get involved. That’s time expensive when the deadlines are ticking.

This is why, I think, journalists continue to fall prey to the most outrageously ridiculous claims from those with titles within fields like psychology who claim to understand something about human interactions in the online world. Journalists just don’t know how to vet what’s being told to them from the “experts”.

Sweeping generalizations that misguide the public on the reality of what happens online is a big problem. Here’s what journalist Andy Pemberton of the Times Online learned via his informants about the stereotypical twitter user:

“The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”

“We are the most narcissistic age ever,” agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

Are you on twitter? Is this how you feel?

I doubt it. How are Dr. Davis Lewis and Dr. James Oliver supporting their claims? I don’t see a study and I can’t glean from their web presence that they’ve got much background related to experiences in the online world. Obviously their descriptions will fit some people – but exactly how many? 1%? 20%? 87%? 100%?

Andy Pemberton seems to have sought the advice from all the wrong sources when he sat down to write this article. His next move is to find someone who likens Twitter to a giant baby monitor:

“For Alain de Botton, author of Status Anxiety and the forthcoming The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Twitter represents “a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. It’s like when a parent goes into a child’s room to check the child is still breathing. It is a giant baby monitor.”

Alain de Botton is a writer. Of course he is going to use such metaphors.

Bizarrely, I’m actually not monitoring anybody when I use twitter. I’m not there to be permanently connected to anybody either. In fact, I don’t know who most of my followers or people I follow are and I’ve got no anxiety about this any more than than I do opening my front door to leave my house and walk out in the world in the morning.

Perhaps here’s where we are at the root of the problem. The terminology “following/follower” certainly suggests that you’re actively watching other people, and the “what are you doing” question followed by the tweet field suggest that whatever we type must be mundane. But the level of intensity in which we follow others is not quite at the level the doctors imagine.

Most people who use Twitter, also use additional third party tools like Tweet Deck which allows you to group the people you’re following. I have three groups in addition to replies, direct messages and all: Work, Friends, Twitter friends. When I’m on, I follow these groups. Then I have a quick glance at the “all” stream to see what’s going on elsewhere. When I tweet, I’m either asking questions, sharing links to stuff I find interesting or amusing, or just “chatting” to friends as the day go by. I fail to see why this need to cause the psychologist so much distress.

This use of third party tools points to another problem when it comes to understanding the Twitter service. If you’re just looking at the Twitter site, it’s really hard to get how this service can be useful at all. It’s just a never ending stream with random tweets which grows constantly.

Using tools like tweet deck to manage the tweets will help you filter the noise. This means the “mundane” type tweets the journalists go on about actually seldom pop into your stream.

“Mundane” is also a very relative term – if a friend of mine tweets “homeward bound” or “eating a carrot” they’re inviting to some social banter between friends or providing me with info I’d like to hear. Perhaps I’m meeting up with this friend and now I know they’re on time. Perhaps it tells me that I’ve lost track of time at work and should be heading home myself.

But according to Oliver James the psychologist, because this is being said on twitter and not by a person right in front of me, I’m fantasist:

“To ‘follow’ someone is to have a fantasy of who this person you’re following is, and you use it as a map reference or signpost to guide your own life because you are lost,” says James. “I would guess that the typical profile of a ‘follower’ is someone who is young and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless. They don’t have an inner life,” he says.

If I’m lost, it’s because I’m lost for words.

I honestly don’t understand how James is capable of even thinking this stuff. Has the emergence of the online world moved the whole field of psychology is into shambles?