During the initial roundtable of the day, the discussion turned to Facebook, and its role as the new portal:

While I can understand the impulse to draw parallels between the role AOL held for many (especially media) companies in the early days of the (commercial) internet, I think we’ve got to be careful to not miss the lesson the portals never properly learned: on the web, everything else is always one click (or one tab, or one window) away.

In other words, Facebook may be the new portal, but does the concept of a portal even make sense in a world of multi-tabbed browsers, multi-tasking users, and multi-device access? If there ever was a world in which a portal could truly be the user’s starting point and the window through which that user viewed everything on the web (already a questionable claim), that day has long passed. Many web users spend significant amounts of time “on” or “in” Facebook, true, but what else are they doing at the same time?

The question becomes more than just academic when you come at it as a large scale retailer trying to create a strategy for Facebook.

JC Penney’s store, which launched just before the holiday season, is a Facebook Application (powered by Usablenet) which enables the whole shopping experience without leaving the social network. As Consumerist put it:

JCPenney just snagged the “anchor store” spot on Facebook, becoming the first retailer to let shoppers purchase crap directly from their Facebook page application through a fully integrated e-commerce platform.

FastCompany was a bit more polite (not sure Penney’s PR likes the term “crap”):

Today J.C. Penney became the first major retailer to make its entire catalog available to shoppers within Facebook—not just to peruse, but to buy.

Starting now, you can purchase any of the 250,000 items that the department store sells online from its Facebook page. The company expects many sales will take place as a result of shoppers seeing items listed in their friends’ news feeds and then clicking through to the product pages, still within Facebook.

The application itself is really quite simple. It relies on approach familiar to most of us from Usablenet’s mobile versions of websites: minimizing / transforming the existing site (server-side) and providing the transformed content to the new context – in this case, presenting a transformed version of JC Penney’s ecommerce site in an iFrame inside Facebook. (So long as you are in a browser session in which you’ve already authorized the app, you can actually load it outside a Facebook context by opening a new tab and visiting https://m.usablenet.com/ma/jcpenney.com/index.html?auth=yes).

Landing Page of the new JCPenney Facebook Store application

When the user clicks on of the categories on the left, the app loads (via JQuery) new content representing the subcategories, on down to specific shelf page and then a product detail page, as you can see in this brief video:

The major problem with this approach is that the application never changes the top-most frame’s URL as the user navigates. Start on the landing page, drill down to Men, then to suits and sportcoats, then to a specific coat. Now, back up to the shelf page. D’oh! If you’re like me, your habit is to hit the back button in the browser (or even the keyboard shortcut for it), but if you do that here, you’re SOL. (If you’ve opened the store in a new tab or window, you may find your back button disabled, depending on your browser – but if the tab or window you are in has a history, back will take you to the last url you visited before entering the store).

The problem is that the app isn’t changing the original url you were on once you entered the store, so no new entries are created in your browser history. This was a problem with frames the first time around, and remains one with this approach. (Aside: in WPBook we handle this by targetting all links to top and creating fully formed apps.facebook.com/app/path style URLs).

Usability issues aside (and yes, there is breadcrumb / back navigation just below the top navigation – but it is easy to miss), my bigger issue with the application is just how non-integrated with Facebook it is. JC Penney doesn’t seem to be taking any advantage of the fact that I’m already logged in to Facebook and have granted the application all kinds of privileges in the process.

When you first load the application, you’ll get this permission screen:

Permissions Request for Shop JCPenney Application

So you’ve granted the app permission to access your name, photo, gender, and “any other information I’ve shared with everyone” – which for most folks is a lot of other information. But then if I go to the “store locator” within the app, it doesn’t offer to use my location from my profile (or ask for the extended permission user_location, which an application can specifically request):

Store Finder inside Facebook - doesn't leverage user_location

So maybe there isn’t much leverage in the store locator inside Facebook – or perhaps it might be better at that point to request the location from the browser rather than from Facebook. But the same lack of integration more glaringly comes up when you go to check out. For example, say I found an LCD TV I wanted to purchase. (The broken image icon in the screenshot occurs randomly throughout the app – seems to be something amiss with the translation into Facebook App in some cases):

Department page for House -> Electronics -> TV and Video

Clicking in to a TV, and adding it to my bag, I then proceeded to click on checkout, and get this screen:

Checkout Process - No Prefilling with FB info?

Granted, the email address I used when registering at JC Penney’s may or may not match the one I used as primary at Facebook, so it is a good idea to not assume they are the same, but why not request my email from Facebook and prefill it for me, so that I don’t have to start from scratch? More to the point, why do I need to register at all? You can check out without registering, and the only difference seems to be associating an email address and password with the account. But given that I’m logged into Facebook and granted the application permission to access my info, why not just allow me to then use my Facebook identity to later access my account? Why do I need yet-another-password at all?

Assuming I didn’t already have an account at JC Penney’s, and clicked Register, I get this (after an initial screen for email and password):

Billing Address page for Checkout

The only thing defaulted here is the USA, which I think is not because I’m in the USA but because it is the only allowed option. On to payment then, let’s use a credit card:

Credit Card Info

To me this feels very much like ecommerce circa 1999 – multistep checkout with a broken back button, no useful defaults (couldn’t we at least assume the name on the card might be usefully prefilled with the name I gave two screens ago? Editable, sure, but blank?), and changing look and feel – note that the buttons on the credit card screen are suddenly blue where they’ve been (somewhat) consistently red or grey.

My larger point, though, isn’t just to critique the usability of the application. First to market doesn’t always mean best-to-market, and I’m sure the usablenet solution (which simply translates the existing store, requiring no significant platform effort on the retailer’s part) offers a compelling time-to-market advantage.

My point is that we need to question the very purpose of Facebook stores: Why is it supposed to be useful to me as a consumer to browse the entire catalog and make a purchase inside Facebook?

I get that retailers want to be where the audience is – and I’m a big proponent of distributing your digital footprint throughout the web. But what such stores fail to do is customize the experience to its context. What the user wants to do in Facebook is not the same as what the user wants to do on JCPenney.com, and (equally important) what the technology enables is different.

What retailers need to do in looking at Facebook as an opportunity is innovate: create opportunities for user experiences that take advantage of the Facebook ecosystem, both in terms of technology and user expectations. Just as mobile application developers have come to understand that what makes sense on a phone or a tablet isn’t exactly the same set of functionality that makes sense on a web application designed for desktop browser use, F-commerce developers and designers need to prioritize and understand that subset (or maybe it is a superset, entirely new) of functionality that makes sense in context.

We need, in other words, applications actually designed for use in Facebook, not more retailers putting their whole store in an iframe-based application just because they can. I think this is why virtual goods based applications have so far proven much more successful than real-world goods in Facebook: they’re native to the platform, and designed directly for it, not “adapted” to it.

Email Invite from Sears.com

When I got the above email from Sears inviting me into a new social shopping experience, I hoped that they’d found a way to combine MySears and Sears.com together more contextually and pervasively, letting me move easily between the “get advice before you buy” approach of MySears.com (with its action verbs being join, explore, and connect) and the shopping focused Sears.com.

They haven’t, but what they have done is introduce more social functionality into the shop. Visit sears.com and in the utility navigation right underneath the multi-brand bar (Sears, Kmart, Crafstman, Kenmore, Lands End, etc) you should see an option which toggles between “visit our social site” and “leave our social site.” Clicking on “visit our social site” and you’re greated with this splash screen explaining the new experience:

Sears' New Social Experience

It seems Sears has added a bit of social networking functionality as an overlay to the shopping experience, letting you “message” and “follow” other users, seeing their (on site) social activity. You can view profiles, see who other users are following and followed by, get badges, join groups, and do many of the other activities we’ve come to expect in the era of Facebook and Twitter.

The Bearded One - a Sears Associate and one of the public profiles on Sears.com Social Experience

What’s more unusual is the relationship this new social site has to the existing store and community. MySears.com continues to exist on it’s own tab, suggesting a separation between the researching activities (“get advice before you buy”) and the shopping activity of Sears.com. But the new social site is essentially a kind of layer over the regular shop.

Social Site Version of Product Detail Page

Non-Social version of Product Detail Page

Look at these two cropped product detail pages. Both are of the same product in the Sears.com product catalog – a Blu-Ray DVD player. One image is from within the social site (note the toggle says “leave our social site”) and the other is from outside the social site (“visit our social site” being the link). The language suggests that the social site is a separate place (one you visit and leave) but the experience suggests that social is more like a layer you turn on and off – like the virtual reality overlay in an iphone application which adds review information to your camera view of the street on which you’re walking.

In other words, there’s only a few rows of difference, mixing some social activity (Q&A) in place of specifications, adding a product wiki, and repeating the social network information (people in your network who like/want/own the item being viewed) again later in the page.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of empty social areas at this point – not many items that lots of people in the network have liked/disliked/wanted/owned. It also seems like asking a lot to require users to now find new folks to follow, rather than importing and matching their social graph from Facebook, Twitter, or an email address book search. You can invite people via email, but I didn’t see any easy way to build a new network.

My Network is not very robust - nor I suspect will most user's be at first

What do you think of what Sears is trying here?

I love the idea of activity streams (and the standard for syndication of them) in the context of shopping (see Swipely, Blippy, and Shwowp), but I’m not sure how Sears will get enough critical mass built up if users have to specifically choose to follow each other, and their activity is only visible inside Sears’ own walled garden.

Like Automattic, they’ve essentially avoided the Facebook “like” button in favor of their own – but will users go to the trouble of liking a product in multiple places, or will Sears just end up with a quiet network where the only active users are associates?

The goal of the presentation- a sanitized (client references removed) version of one given to a client this week – was to talk about:

• Social Media (and specifically how to get started with it)
• Facebook (and other social network applications)
• The iPhone (and other mobile platforms)

It certainly loses a bit in not having the voice over – sorry I couldn’t record it but much of the discussion was really client specific and less useful outside their context – if I get time maybe I’ll do a walk through and record a voiceover.

I tried to place the requested agenda items in the context of what we’ve been calling “The Assembled Web” for the past couple of years, connecting the specific social computing initiatives in a broader framework, one which involves:

1. The convergence of content, commerce, and community – as they grow out of the previous web eras
2. The notion of the Digital Footprint – taking your brand presence (across all three Cs) to where users are, and engaging them throughout the Internet

I hope you find it useful – please do comment here or on SlideShare.

Building on the momentum of all the (OpenSocial based) applications they added a few weeks back, LinkedIn is now rolling out events. In this video, Christine Wodtke demonstrates how the application leverages your social graph, showing who in your network is attending various events:

Its a great idea, and I’ve already found or created events for all my conferences coming up. (I’m tempted to create events in the past, as a way of adding conferences where I’ve presented to my LinkedIn profile. The “add an event” flow doesn’t seem to prohibit that, though I haven’t followed it all the way through yet).

I wish the recommendations (which events they suggest you might want to attend) were a bit more precise, but I guess that’s a result of relying on things like “industry” set in your profile (mine is set to “Internet” which must be hard to match on), or job title (“Next Generation Internet Strategist” is not on many event planners’ lists of target job titles), or even education (my educational background is pretty varied and not neatly tied to what I do now). I think it’d be great to allow me to configure the app to add some tags of interests – and maybe let me choose how recommended events get sorted (date, distance, relevancy, or some combination thereof).

It would also be good to have a simple way to get an event’s URL – for now I’ve been to the event’s “page” and clicking on the “Share” link, then pulling the short url out of that message. That results in a url looking like this: http://events.linkedin.com/pub/12514
Rather than one looking like this: http://www.linkedin.com/osview/canvas?_ch_page_id=1&_ch_panel_id=3&_ch_app_id=30&_applicationId=2000&appParams={%22from%22%3A%22my_events%22%2C%22go_to%22%3A%22events%2F12514%22}&_ownerId=2757022&completeUrlHash=gXn-

I assume the nasty url is a result of OpenSocial, in the sense that the hosting site needs to know which application to load and then pass info to the application – but since they are already creating url aliases, why not expose them more directly?

These suggestions aside, it’s a welcome addition which makes LinkedIn much more useful, especially to those not in job-seeking mode.

(If we’re not connected on LinkedIn and should be, here’s my profile).

I think it’s a very useful concept, pointing out that people’s decisions aren’t binary: it isn’t a single yes/no decision but an active, ongoing negotiation, which determines which services you use and don’t use.

You can also think about the barrier to entry of a new user in a similar fashion. Any time you try out a new application or service there are a few barriers, and whatever the application developer can do to lower those barriers the more users will get over that threshold.

(One of the key benefits of open source, from my point of view, is the relatively low threshold of entry it makes possible – no need to negotiate an enterprise license, sign up for 2 years of support, and get lawyers to agree on terms – just download, install, and try out).

In social web applications, the barrier to entry is generaly sign up – authorization and authentication. Applications running inside containers like Facebook have the benefit of bypassing the authentication problem – by relying on Facebook to determine that you are appropriately logged in to your own identity – but still need to get authorization from you to “install” themselves to your profile.

The problem is that Facebook (or Facebook application developers, guided by the Facebook API) seems to treat this experience as a binary choice: you either install the application or you don’t. From the application’s point of view, you are either a user who has installed the app (in which case you’re in) or a user who has not yet installed the app (in which case you’re out).

Why should I have to install an application in order to be able to see the message my firend sent me using it?

Jonathan Terleski, from Google’s User Experience Team, posted a movie today showing a better way: allow users to experience the application and then – after they have determined it has some value to them – ask for the install.

What do you do, though, if you’re outside the environment of an open social container or the Facebook API? Use OpenID and OAuth.

Keeping the barrier to entry low:

1. Let people have a decent sense of the experience before “creating an account” (or whatever language you use to describe registering). Let ‘em try before they buy, as much as possible.
2. Use OpenID. Enable people to log in to your new service using their existing identity elsewhere. With Yahoo! and AOL on board, and the directed identity features of OpenID 2.0 (which let users click a button marked “log in with your Yahoo! account” rather than remembering a URL) we should see end user adoption of OpenID take off. (It may be “unaware adoption” in the sense that people don’t know it is OpenID being used, but that’s actually a good thing).
3. Leverage their data from elsewhere, using import via Google’s Social Graph API, hCard profiles they may have on other sites, XFN or FOAF notations from sites like Twitter which markup links with microformats, and OAuth to access third party data.

I’m looking forward to seeing more detail on the Ringside Social Application Server next week – looks to offer a very compelling path to bringing social networking features into applications without imposing a high barrier to entry. See also DiSo, Noserub, Shindig, and the Appleseed Project (which may need to change its name to avoid the other Appleseed Project).

Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed.

The problem is that their only talking about allowing users to *add* activities into the news feed, not to take their facebook news feed and take it elsewhere. As TechCrunch put it:

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

But why is this even an opening up of Facebook? I can’t take my news feed and add it to my lifestream or use it on another site – all I can to is add data to Facebook’s walled garden.

Marc Canter, in the middle of his video about Data Portability, makes the point that our web based applications need to learn to spit as well as to suck – his choice of terms might be a bit visceral, but it does get the point across.

The scheduling application for SXSW (sched.org/sxsw2008) spits, but doesn’t suck. You can export your schedule in an iCal format, and group multiple sched.org calendars together (like this) but you can’t import an iCal schedule in, even to add events not in sched.org’s database to your calendar. (Though I guess you can pull both out to something like Google Calendar and get your unified view there). You also can’t, as Chris Messina pointed out, login with an OpenID.

Fire Eagle, right now, seems all suck and no spit. It can get my status from Dopplr, or from certain phones, but for now at least I don’t see any way to get it out. The site help says:

There are many applications that can use your Fire Eagle location! For example, you can use Fire Eagle to update your location on your Facebook profile; or embed a badge on your blog or MySpace that shows roughly where you are. Many more are coming. If you’re an engineer then maybe you could write one!

But when I go to the application directory, it looks to me like they are all coming, as in not available now.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Fire Eagle is a great concept, and gets a lot right – specifically the granularity of different privacy settings, in terms of how precise Fire Eagle can be in sharing your location. I’ve been looking forward to it since Marc Davis talked about at the Futures of Entertainment conference last November.

• Joshua Porter on the Bungee Line Podcast
• Chris Brogan’s Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
• Forrester Report from Jeremiah Owyang on Online Community Best Practices

Joshua Porter of Bokardo, has a book coming out: Design Social Applications (Voices That Matter). He was also recently interviewed by Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger for The Bungee Line podcast: Social Design with Joshua Porter. It’s a great interview, ~45 minutes, covering many of the themes covered at Bokardo: social software as modeling the real world, personal value before social value, and data driven design. I look forward to the book.

Chris Brogan also recently published Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points, a quick, concise, eBook focused on how companies can get started in the world of social media, especially with the concept of encouraging employees to blog or otherwise connect with online audiences. Key takeway: don’t obsess about “corporate blog policy” – take your corporate email / web terms or policy you already have (don’t reveal corporate or client secrets, don’t post pornography or copyrighted material, etc) and treat your employees as adults.

Finally, Jeremiah Owyang‘s first Forrester Report (Online Community Best Practices) is out and it’s a good sign of things to come. Unfortunately this one isn’t free, unless you have access to a Forrester subscription. (If you do, get the report from the Forrester site). The report doesn’t exactly break new ground – as the “best practices” in the title suggests, it synthesis and summarizes the core ideas enterprises need to hear as they think about creating online communities. As I read it, I found myself nodding vigorously, and recognizing mistakes people make that result directly from skipping some of these best practices.

My favorite part is the section on “A Taxonomy of Detractors” which lists these types:

• Legitimate complainer
• Competitor
• Engaged critic
• Flamer
• Troublemaker

And then describes ways of dealing with those detractors, ranging from “engage rationally” to “remove from community.” I like that it doesn’t oversell the fear of bad actors in a community (which can scare companies away from engaging in social media) but also doesn’t ignore it – just notes that there are clear ways of handling such problems.

Matt and co. at Automattic released Prologue, a WordPress theme (GPLv2) which creates a twitter-like experience based on posts to a WordPress blog. (It’s already been updated once).

Check out the Prologue Demo Blog for a sense of how the theme works. This could easily be used to create a kind of workgroup twitter, and given the number of different plugins / mechanisms for creating a blog post it could be extended to mobile, IM, and other integration points. The important difference, of course, is that you’d be hosting your own experience, not relying on Twitter – though that also means you’d need to build your own audience.

The folks at SixApart released the Activity Streams plugin for Movable Type which

lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web as well as a list of your profiles on various services. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web. And of course, you also have full control over showing and hiding each of your actions. The Action Streams plugin, by default, also publishes your stream using Atom and the Microformat hAtom so that your actions aren’t trapped in any one service.

You can see a great example of this on David Recordon‘s site (he’s the Open Platform Lead for SixApart) and in a group context on the Movable Type Activity Stream page.

Both of these represent significant advances toward an open source, open standards, portable data approach to social networking and lifestreaming.

Since the implementations are open source, expect similar functionality to be ported across platforms.

Good video interview (about 20 minutes), if you can get past the conceit (in the rhetorical sense of the word, not the egoism sense) of the self-interview.

The Existential DiSo Interview from Chris Messina on Vimeo

Only part I really struggled with was about 16 minutes in when he starts to talk about the “Gestapo like tactics” of Facebook. I’m a huge supporter of what DiSo is trying to do, but I don’t think closing people’s accounts for terms of service violations passes into the realm of the Gestapo (Remember Godwin’s law?).

Mentions at one point the goal of having a working demo by SXSW – I look forward to seeing it!

It’s an important and powerful critique, though one with which I ultimately disagree. Greenfield essentially argues that:

1. Social networking applications must, necessarily, oversimplify human relationships: they couldn’t possibly represent the complex and dynamic nature of any graph connecting a pair of individuals, let alone the mesh of a whole community.
2. As a result, they inevitably create emotional distress, anguish, and pain for users (and sometimes even for non-users)
3. Therefore, we should not use them.

The problem, as Greenfield sees it, is that we’re allowing technical architectures to intrude upon the pre-technical, social space of human relationships. We’re allowing the web of human relationships as-modeled-by-software-systems to reduce, pollute, and corrupt the web of human relationship as modeled in the human psyche and history of culture.

Here’s one of the critical paragraphs of the piece, though you should read it (and the comments to it) in full:

What these commentators do not or cannot admit, though, is that the whole milieu in which these concerns of openness and portability are contained is broken – and not just a little broken, but badly so. All social-networking systems, as currently designed, demonstrably create social awkwardnesses that did not, and could not, exist before. All social-networking systems constrain, by design and intention, any expression of the full band of human relationship types to a very few crude options – and those static! A wiser response to them would be to recognize that, in the words of the old movie, “the only way to win is not to play.”

Greenfield takes apart the XFN standard, noting that it prohibits, by design, “negative relationships,” and goes on to assert that negative relations are critical to the social fabric. However, it is important to be able to keep some of those feelings (and their dynamic nature) to yourself:

social comfort and coherence require that by far the majority of actual feelings regarding the people in our lives not be made explicit. In my experience, any degree of smooth and compassionate human concourse absolutely requires plausible deniability, and a certain degree of dissembling regarding your actual, operative feelings for the people you’re engaged with, however much you love them.

Finally, Greenfield concludes:

I believe that technically-mediated social networking at any level beyond very simple, local applications is fundamentally, and probably persistently, a bad idea. From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with.

It’s almost enough to make me shutter my Facebook account, but then it’s my move in Scrabulous.

My issue with Greenfield’s account, however, is that he assumes that simply not playing is a viable answer. Like Bartleby‘s “I would prefer not to,” Greenfield’s renunciation of all software-modeled relationships risks a slippery slope which ends in renouncing all online participation.

After all, doesn’t blogging software also create social discomfort and awkwardness which didn’t exist before? (Didn’t you read my blog post on X? I can’t believe the comment Y left on Z’s blog!)

It is vitally important to remember that there is (and will always be) a reduction inherent in transforming the complex and dynamic mesh that is human relationships down to a “social network” as understood by Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like – but I have to disagree that the only appropriate response to that reduction is to take my ball and go home.

Where social networking applications cause emotional pain we need greater education and contextualization. I don’t know about your teen years, but I was certainly familiar with artifical indicators of popularity and mechanisms of exclusion in mine.

This is not to say the mechanism of bullying, exclusion, and oneupmanship aren’t different in an online social networking world, but that we need to learn to understand, explain, and mediate those differences, not ignore the social networks and hope they go away.

No embed code, so you’ll have to go there to see it.

Unfortunately I missed the original broadcast, but I listed to the audio of it. It’s great to hear Carvin balancing between the “this is all just frivilous fun” and “this is radical revolutionary potential” campes – he manages to acknowledge the activities one might call frivilous but also point to the more significant impact these networks can have:

For a lot of people, social networks are just a place for socializing – catching up with friends, flirting and the like. But that’s just scratching the surface.

Some of the examples he mentions in passing:

• TakingITGlobal
• The Digital Divide Network
• The I Heart NPR Facebook Group

While you’re at it, check out Carvin’s blog or follow him on twitter.

Also on the show was Christine Rosen, author of “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism” which was published in The New Atlantis. (Rosen’s a “fellow” at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which describes itself as having been created “clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues” and which Right Web describes as “a leading player in the early effort to discredit the secular humanist tradition in the United States. The center is one of several institutes and programs established by neoconservatives to promote an increased role of religion in public policy.”)

She focuses on the collecting of friends for status as a problem – that we’ve turned cultivating friends into collecting friends. Carvin nicely handles the discussion, pointing out that this is just one aspect which a certain percentage of users latch onto, but it isn’t the primary goal.

On the topic of online communities undermining offline communities, Carvin also does a solid job – noting the evolution of online communities from some of the more locally oriented early communities (The Well, local BBS’s) into global internet based communities, but with a return visible at the edges in the direction of localism or communities of interest.

He also points out that the culture of narcisissm can hardly be blamed on online communities.

It’s worth a listen, even if some of the callers fall pretty squarely into the stereotypical NPR “these crazy kids today with their interweb tubes” demographic.

In the last segment, Rosen trots out a Brigham Young University study which found folks felt less connected to their communities when they were heavy users of online social networks – she’s careful to point out it was too small a study to be meaningful, but nevertheless draws the conclusion from it as though it were a truth.

Anyone know the study? I couldn’t find a good reference to it in a quick search – in the article cited above Rosen writes:

Researcher Rob Nyland at Brigham Young University recently surveyed 184 users of social networking sites and found that heavy users “feel less socially involved with the community around them.” He also found that “as individuals use social networking more for entertainment, their level of social involvement decreases.”

but there is no citation to the study – the only Rob Nyland I find is a recent graduate – maybe he did this survey while a student? Nothing wrong with a student doing a study, of course, but Rosen makes it sound like a formal study performed and published by the university not something an undergrad did while working on a paper.