Why designing a carpool site is so hard

For the last 8 months, I’ve used MARTA to get to Georgia Tech. Let’s just say that it’s not the best-respected mass transit system and leave it at that. Still, I can get to work in 35 minutes and spend my time reading papers rather than fighting traffic. I don’t have to own a second car just for commuting.

But I would much rather carpool. It’s cheaper, faster, cleaner and safer. So when Georgia Tech announced their new arrangement with the ride-sharing site Zimride, I was the fourth employee to register. Carpooling is a very hard social site to get right.

Schedules. A commuting schedule is at the heart of any carpool site. If I don’t tell you when I want I a ride, how can you pick me up?

But I don’t want everybody I work with to know exactly when I arrive and leave everyday. I like to see my daughter before she goes to bed at night, and here Zimride makes me write it down. (Tenure committee—if you’re reading this—this is only an example. I never leave.)

I took my first Zimride a few days ago, and five minutes into it my driver explained how they often run late to take their kids to school in the morning. It’s not reflected on the Zimride schedule. It could be. The interface permits it. But people usually don’t want to be so literal with their schedules, especially when their colleagues can see them—something backed up by classic CSCW research.

Incentives. Let’s back up. Why should I do this at all? I don’t have a commuter car, so I stand to gain a lot from carpooling. But for somebody who could simply drive alone, why bother? My driver adds 7 minutes to their commute because I’m along for the ride. Zimride thinks it’s for the money.

When I tried to work out the money part, my driver shrugged it off. Honestly, they probably make quite a bit more money than me. Plus, it’s just plain awkward to hand over money in a situation like this. Sure, it’s great to offset your gas costs, but not at the social cost of ruining what would otherwise be seen as a good deed.

Identity. By partnering with Georgia Tech, Zimride forces you to authenticate as an employee or student at Tech. That’s a start. They also encourage you to use your Facebook identity on Zimride. I think this is a great move, and I would rather Zimride make it mandatory. If I’m going to get in your car, I should be able to see your Facebook profile. In fact, I should get to see much more of it than some random internet user. I want to learn what you care about, how snarky you seem in your posts, and whether you seem angry, right-wing, or hopelessly hippy. I’m about to put myself in a small, confined space with you: these things matter. But this isn’t Zimride’s fault. There’s no “getting to know each other” setting on Facebook.

p.s. Hat tip to Amy Bruckman for putting this topic in my head last week.

Social Translucence

This semester I taught one of my favorite papers, Social Translucence by Tom Erickson & Wendy Kellogg. It’s more than 10 years old—pretty old in this field. I’m writing about it now because I think it can still do lots of good.

“Socially translucent systems [make it] easier for users to carry on coherent discussions; to observe and imitate others’ actions; to engage in peer pressure; to create, notice, and conform to social conventions.”

Erickson & Kellogg argue that we should look to what makes communication work in the real world when designing social media. For example, what makes a crowded city street work? New to the neighborhood and want to find a good restaurant? Follow the people who seem to know what they’re doing. Why don’t people throw one another to the ground when the train door is about to close? Because I know the rules, you know I know the rules and everyone around us is watching. The authors call it visibility, awareness and accountability.

A lot of this has been implemented in popular social media. But not everywhere, and this is where I think practitioners and founders will find it useful. Shine social translucence in some places and you’ll often be surprised. Take email. Did you get my message? Do you have time to read it? Am I bothering you? I know it’s my vacation pictures … oh you immediately hit the delete button? … oh. It’s ten years later, but the theory still provides ideas for building new stuff—things to imitate what we accomplish so effortlessly IRL.

The internet has always been social

I do research on social media (aka social computing). I look at ways we might build social media differently and what we can learn from massive datasets online. When I tell people what I do, many well-meaning people say “that’s a hot topic!” Inwardly, I always grimace a little. “That’s hot” has a hint of faddishness to it. Fads go away.

For most people I meet, the phrase “social media” evokes post-2004 web technologies: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, … (The phrase came into widespread use around this time.) But since its earliest days, the internet has been a very social place. I love the following quote from a SIGCOMM review of ARPAnet, a precursor of the internet: 

“The initial goals in creating the ARPAnet were to promote more effective use of geographically dispersed computing facilities, and to develop the underlying packet switching technology that might later support advanced military information networks … A new use emerged, however, with the realization that the network could also be exploited as a medium for intercommunication among its human users … Network message service was an immediate success. Message flow grew in volume to become the most visible (if not the heaviest) traffic on the network.” (Henderson & Myer 1977) 

It’s easy to forget about little old email, perhaps the internet’s first social medium. Today’s status updates and location-based services recall the UNIX command finger. The many-to-many, instant-chat idea behind Google Wave made me think of the talk commands, dating back to the 1970s. If you give us something we can use to socialize, that’s what we do. We tell stories. We check each other out. That’s not going anywhere.

comp.social lab is founded

I’m Eric Gilbert, a new Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. I work on building and studying social media, and my new research lab is called comp.social.

I’m looking for bright students who want to build fun, daring social media systems or analyze them in surprising ways. (Or both.) In the past, I linked emotion expressed online to the stock market. I also built an experimental application called We Meddle. These are examples of what I want to do in comp.social, although we’ll swing bigger now. You can learn more by visiting the comp.social site. (My email is also posted there).

p.s. The name “comp.social” refers to the structure of Usenet. Social media may seem new, but it’s as old as the internet itself.