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Twitter, Facebook, and Personality Type

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What can one glean of someone’s personality type based on preference for Twitter vs. Facebook usage? David Hughes at Manchester Business School and his colleagues surveyed 300 people online and were scored on the “big five” personality factors of extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness. The study’s findings are summarized here:

People who used Facebook mostly for socialising tended to score more highly on sociability and neuroticism (consistent with past research suggesting that shy people use the site to forge social ties and combat loneliness). Social use of Twitter correlated with higher sociability and openness (but not neuroticism) and with lower scores on conscientiousness. This suggests that social Twitter users don’t use it so much to combat loneliness, but more as a form of social procrastination. 

What about using the sites as an informational tool? There was an intriguing divergence here. People who said they used Facebook as an informational tool tended to score higher on neuroticism, sociability, extraversion and openness, but lower on conscientiousness and “need for cognition”. Informational users of Twitter were the mirror opposite: they scored higher on conscientiousness and “need for cognition”, but lower on neuroticism, extraversion and sociability. The researchers interpreted these patterns as suggesting that Facebook users seek and share information as a way of avoiding more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. Twitter users, by contrast, use the site for its cognitive stimulation – as a way of uncovering useful information and material without socialising (this was particularly true for older participants).

Finally, what about people’s overall preference for Twitter or Facebook? Again, people who scored higher in “need for cognition” tended to prefer Twitter, whilst higher scorers in sociability, neuroticism and extraversion tended to prefer Facebook. Simplifying the results, one might say that Facebook is the more social of the two social networking sites, whereas Twitter is more about sharing and exchanging information. 

It’s an interesting study, though I would have liked to see a sample size of a magnitude higher, and more balanced with the female-male ratio.

World’s Richest People, Adjusted for Age

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The most recent tally of the world’s wealthiest people by Forbes magazine put the Facebook founder’s net worth at $13.5 billion in 2011, ranking him 52nd in the world. But Zuckerberg’s 28.4% stake in Facebook could see his fortune rise to as much as $28.4 billion, assuming that Facebook’s valuation is $100 billion.

The telling chart below profiles the world’s richest people in age-adjusted terms (per age capita). At 27, Zuckerberg is number one on this list, with over $1B of wealth per each year of his life. In the top 100 richest people in the world, only the co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are also under 40.

(Source: The Economist)

Graffiti Artist to Make $200 Million from Facebook Stock

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Facebook announced its IPO yesterday, in an effort to raise $5 billion (perhaps more), which will be the largest internet public offering ever. Many people who hold Facebook shares are poised to become millionaires overnight. The New York Times reports a story of one David Choe, a graffiti artist who painted murals on the walls of Facebook’s first offices in Palo Alto, California. He chose to be paid in stock rather than in cash. Now, he’s poised to become an ultra-millionaire, to the tune of $200 million or more.

Many “advisers” to the company at that time, which is how Mr. Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company, according to a former Facebook employee. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $100 billion. Mr. Choe’s payment is valued at roughly $200 million, according to a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives.

Sounds like Choe has won the lottery (by comparison, a $380 million Mega Millions jackpot in 2011 had a cash payout of $240 million, the largest in the history of the American lottery).

On a final note, what is the artist’s advice for living? “Always double down on 11. Always.”

What Software is Used at Facebook?

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Andrei Alexandrescu, a self-professed hacker and current employee at Facebook, is interviewed by Server Side Magazine and answers what software/tools they use at Facebook. It’s a Linux world, with a lot of tools developed in-house:

Each Facebook engineer gets a choice of MacBook or Windows laptop, plus the invariable 30′ monitor (yum). But development is not really happening on the laptop itself; to get any work done, engineers connect to a remote Linux machine (each engineer has one assigned) using a variety of protocols over ssh (plain terminal, nx, vnc, and probably more).

There’s freedom in choosing editors, so the usual suspects – emacs and vim – are quite popular, with some Eclipse and others here and there. I personally prefer emacs via nx, the combo works quite swimmingly even over a slow connection.

We also have a lot of cool organizational tools, many developed in house. That sounds a bit NIHish, but the history behind it is that we tried hard to make off-the-shelf tools work at the scale and quality we need them to, failed, and had to write our own.

The tools use our own technologies (talk about dog food) so they work, look, and integrate beautifully. Best part, if someone doesn’t like something, well, they can just fix it. (To wit, our email and calendar software is off-the-shelf and is the most unpleasant tool to deal with. Get this – we have a few people “specialized” in sending large meeting invites out, because there are bugs that require peculiar expertise to work around. Not to mention that such invites come with “Do not accept from an iPhone lest you corrupt the invite for everyone!”)

Anyway, back to our tool chain. Once an engineer makes a code change that passes unit tests and lint, they submit for review a so-called “diff” via our Phabricator system, which we open sourced.

The reviewers are selected partly manually, partly automatically; virtually not one line of code is committed without having been inspected by at least one (other) engineer. Phabricator is great at this flow, making diff analysis, comment exchange, and revision updates very handy. I’d recommend it.

Once the diff has been approved, the author uploads it to our central git repository. We love git; when I joined two years ago, we were just starting to migrate from svn to git, and today we virtually all use git. Some of us (including myself) wrote a few popular git scripts that integrate with our workflow.

To build C++ code we have our own build system driving a build farm. I don’t do front-end work, so I don’t know many details in that area; in broad strokes, we use the recently-released HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) for development, and the static HipHop compiler for the production site.

We have quite a few more browser-based tools for improving workflow, such as task management, discussions, wiki, peer review, recruiting and interviewing, analytics, systems management, and many many more. Really for pretty much any typical need “there’s an app for that”. And if there isn’t, there’s a vast infrastructure allowing you to build one quickly.

Read the full interview to find out about the D programming language…

On Slowing Down

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Some startling statistics about our obsession with technology:

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

That’s from an op-ed “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer, who also notes that there are hotels that cite lack of access to internet and television as a selling point:

I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

In 2011, I’ve had the chance to unwind and go internet-free for a few days (at least several independent occasions). One of my resolutions for the coming year is to have more days where I unwind and slow down.

Facebook Timeline and Advertising

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Did you think Facebook’s latest move of unveiling Timeline was a way of improving user experience? Perhaps, but as this BetaBeat post posits, it’s also designed to woo advertisers:

In what seemed like an unrelated move, in September, Facebook announced a brand new type of profile called Timeline, where your whole personal history is laid out by month-by-month, all the way back to your birth. At the time, Facebook described it to consumers as a chance to: “Share and highlight your most memorable posts, photos and life events on your timeline. This is where you can tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now.” By the end of this year all 800 million plus Facebook profiles will have been converted to this new interface.

What most users don’t know is that the new features being introduced are all centered around increasing the value of Facebook to advertisers, to the point where Facebook representatives have been selling the idea that Timeline is actually about re-conceptualizing users around their consumer preferences, or as they put it, “brands are now an essential part of people’s identities.”

The name itself is cleverly designed to conceal the fact that your profile no longer arranges information chronologically. Yes, things are laid out by year and by month. But, when it comes to what’s displayed to your social circle at any given time, other metrics, including direct payments to Facebook itself, will now influence the ranking and placement of stories. This payola will be a crucial part of the graph rank, the new metric for placement that the social network uses to determine what appears on your profile.

If this seems a bit disheartening, remember that you aren’t a Facebook customer: its advertisers are.

The Upside of Facebook Use

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How is being active on Facebook and other social media sites affecting your friendships in real life?

According to Matthew Brashears, a Cornell University sociologist who surveyed more than 2,000 adults from a national database and found that from 1985 to 2010, the number of truly close friends people cited has dropped (even if we’re more active in socialization than ever before). On average, participants listed 2.03 close friends in Brashears’ survey. That number was down from about three in a 1985 study.

Here’s the gist:

Does that mean we’re more isolated in these times when we seem to meet more people online than in person? (How many of your Facebook “friends” are really friends of yours?) Defying some of the stereotypes of the digital age, social scientists say Facebook may actually be healthy for us. Keith Hampton at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a report for the Pew Research Center in which he found that “Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people.”

“Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people,” wrote Hampton in a blog post. “And, it is not a trivial amount of support. Compared to other things that matter for support — like being married or living with a partner — it really matters. Frequent Facebook use is equivalent to about half the boost in support you get from being married.“

That last sentence is both encouraging and frightening at the same time.

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For one personal perspective on virtual friendships, please check out Cheri’s five-part series, beginning here. Then move on to Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V. Highly recommended reading.

The Other Zuckerberg

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The New York Times has a brief profile of Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s creative and rebellious older sister:

In August, Ms. Zuckerberg, 29, quit her job at Facebook, where she had been among the first two dozen people hired. Most recently, she was the director of marketing. In its early days, Ms. Zuckerberg was a buoyant presence, representing her reticent brother to an eager press. Later, she earned attention (not always favorable) singing at company functions with a band composed of colleagues. And she came up with the idea for Facebook Live, the social network’s video channel, which has featured interviews conducted by Facebook executives with Oprah Winfrey and President Obama.

So is Randi on Facebook and Twitter, then?

Now Ms. Zuckerberg has started her own business, R to Z Media, to help companies take advantage of social media.

Mark and Randi discussing Randi’s compensation package, right before she started working at Facebook:

On her last night there she joined her brother in his office to negotiate her signing package. Mr. Zuckerberg, then 21, sat behind a desk and slipped her a piece of paper with two lines: one with her salary; another with the number of stock options she would receive. She crossed out the stock options, doubled the salary and slid it back. “He took the pen back from me and rewrote the original offer he proposed,” she said. “And, he’s like: ‘Trust me. You don’t want what you think you want.’ ”

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Not to miss: a profile of Mark Zuckerberg, published last year.

Technology’s Gang of Four

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From The London Review of Books, we have this gem:

This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless…

Very interesting analogy from the real Gang of Four to technology companies. Do you agree?

On Love, Facebook, Endings, and Epiphanators

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Last year, I blogged about Brian Phillips’s incredible essay, “Pelé as a Comedian.” I wrote that it is one of those pieces that you read for the writing, and I absolutely still stand by my decision. If you haven’t read it, take ten minutes out of your life, and do so.

Why do I bring up Phillips’s essay from last year? Because I believe I found a piece, which for so far in 2011, would file under the same characterization: you read it for the writing. The piece is “Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?” by Paul Ford, published in New York Magazine. It’s about social media, Facebook in particular, and our connection (or disconnection) to those around us, but more importantly, with ourselves. It’s about beginnings and endings and the go-betweens. You read between the lines, and you discern so much. Your brain begins to flutter: I never thought of it like that. You will.

The writing is sublime:

I watched in real time as these people reconstructed themselves in the wake of events — altering their avatars, committing to new causes, liking and linking, boiling over in anger at dumb comments, eventually posting jokes again, or uploading new photos. Learning to take the measure of the world with new eyes. No other medium has shown me this in the same way. Even the most personal literary memoir has more distance, more compression, than these status updates.

What is The Epiphanator?

Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels.

This is my favourite part, probably:

At the end of every magazine article, before the “■,” is the quote from the general in Afghanistan that ties everything together. The evening news segment concludes by showing the secretary of State getting back onto her helicopter. There’s the kiss, the kicker, the snappy comeback, the defused bomb. The Epiphanator transmits them all. It promises that things are orderly. It insists that life makes sense, that there is an underlying logic.

Just read it. Paul Ford makes me want to be a better writer.