The State of the Facebook Project

I thought it might be time for a sweeping website update. I've changed a bunch of stuff around here, mostly to reflect what all has been afoot. I also fixed the wiki! Sorry about that, it was down for a few weeks. You now need to create an account to contribute, it seems spam got the best of us.

If you're visiting this site for the first time I'd like to welcome you and say that we appreciate your interest. This site was started as a collection of resources between a few researchers interested in Facebook a few years back and remains today, largely inactive, but available for your use.

What you can find here:

• Some papers and publications on Facebook from a few years back, mostly by graduate students


• Some very limited datasets on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student population's use of Facebook


• A lightly developed wiki with a listing of other researchers, an outdated bibliography (early 2008 or so), and the framework for a sort of Facebookapedia.


• Some links to guides related to Facebook


• Some ideas for interesting interview & research questions


• A place to get your own work up online, informally published, but placed in a relatively high-profile position


• A partial log of email discussions I've had with people about Facebook research

What you cannot find here:

• An all-encompassing or large-scale dataset on Facebook


• A company, team or community of researchers ready to help you out with your thesis


• Any kind of official or formal affiliation with the Facebook Corporation


• Direct connection to any of the major professors, graduate students or company researchers interested in Facebook

So! With that in mind, feel free to explore or ask me any questions you might have. I'm happy to help give feedback on your research questions or interests, I just may not be able to respond quickly.

A Talk on Racism on Facebook

I had the honor of giving a talk on my studies related to racism and Facebook to Dene Grigar's students at Washington State University, Vancouver, recently. They belong to the Digital Technology and Culture program, which sounds like the sort of program I would have loved to enroll in as an undergraduate. In my talk I expanded on some of the topics touched on my two papers, The Missing Box and Social Capital and the Chief.

You can download a written version of the talk here.

Summer 2009: Return to Social Media

I think it's been just about every week that I've had a young aspiring graduate student contact me asking for advice on how to best go about researching something on Facebook. It's trendy, what can we say. But there's also a lot of opportunity in the folds of this well-worn social network. My greatest suggestion to those seeking guidance is this: get to know your social research methods. No I'm not just talking about how to conduct a good interview or run a statistics test. The makings for good research actually form before all of this. Often it's really easy to rush into a project without really fully thinking about why you wish to study something and what ultimate effects or contributions your research will have. Rarely are graduate students told that they should pick a data-collection method not just on account of its validity or generalizability but also based on how well it fits their personality, resources or available time. Also remember it's okay to mess up. Students are pressured to perform so much in graduate school that they often believe the stakes for admitting a mistake are higher than they might really be. It's better to acknowledge drawbacks and limitations (and learn from them!) than to present faulty research. You might start a project with surveys about behaviors and eventually come to realize you really wanted to capture meanings with interviews - that's okay. You're here to learn. Remember that and be confident.

Okay, enough dispensing wisdom, I'm like what, 25 years old? Figured it was time for a summer update. I get to teach a social media class next year! This means I'll probably start working with this site a bit more, but we'll see. Other than this I only have two major items of note:

I had the privilege of giving a presentation on Facebook and ubiquitous learning at the HASTAC conference at UIUC this past spring. You can see the PowerPoint or better yet read the paper (starts on page 7).

It's summer. It's my last 'break' summer before I hit the remainder of my classes, area exams and the loss of most of my free time. Now's perhaps the best opportunity to talk to me if you have ideas or questions about Facebook!

Spring 2009 : Transitions

Over the past couple of weeks I've received a surge of emails from various researchers interested in Facebook. Somebody important must have posted this site somewhere (AOIR?), because I've been out of the game for a bit. I figured it was about time for an update!

Jeff Ginger - I've found my way to a new area of study in Community Informatics but still maintain some interest with Facebook. I've come to realize just how handy of a resource this place can be for aspiring graduate students, so I've kept it up. Feel free to continue sending me questions related to Facebook research, if nothing else I can offer connections, perspectives and advice. I've managed to meet some of the big names (Cliff Lampe, Nicole Ellison, danah boyd, Fred Stutzman) and tell them about the site, so it's now officially "on the radar." I'm also happy to host papers and materials for open access here.

Jenny Ryan - Jenny Ryan is currently living in New York City, and is about to begin a new internship with the Berkman Center's Media Cloud project. Yet another unfortunate victim of our sinking economy, she's had ample free time to work on her first publications- a chapter on memorialization and commemoration on Facebook for a Stanford collection entitled The Psychology of Facebook, and another chapter on neotribalism and psytrance on Tribe.net for a collection entitled Psytrance: Local Scenes and Global Culture. Available for freelance social media consulting, she is also working on turning her MA thesis, The Virtual Campfire, into a book. While awaiting responses from several Ph.D programs, she has been channeling her energies into Webnographers, a wiki for resources pertaining to virtual ethnography- and would love for you to contribute!

Eric Gilbert - is a bit of a celebrity in HCI these days. He's managed to snag two Best Paper awards at CHI, and some of us are considering imposing term limits. He just pushed out a paper on measuring strength of ties (social capital) with the use of Facebook, which is pretty swank. Lately Eric and Jeff have been kicking around papers on HCI and CSCW in a weekly reading group, but with only a little emphasis on Facebook.

Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch - is freaking out over comps questions and her dissertation and hasn't been worrying too much about Facebook research recently.

New Papers - Kelin Kitchener and Matthew J. Kushin have added a paper exploring political discourse on Facebook. Alex Lambert and Stephen Bezek have a paper on enabling secure email with social networking, but we have to hold off until after CHI to post it up online. Contact me if you're interested in it.

Webnographers - Jenny now has a Webnographers wiki, dedicated to organizating the literature, journals, academic programs, people and other online resources that provide, in effect, a cyberanthropologist's toolkit. This is helpful for anyone interested in digital ethnography.

Connecting Researchers - I've added a section to the wiki listing most of the researchers I've come in contact with that have something to do with Facebook. Use this as a place

The Wiki - Hasn't really taken off, and the Resource Pool is badly in need of an update. If you check it out for sources, help to add more.

Jeff's Masters Paper Anthology - I plan to release a different (shorter!) version of my Masters Paper that overviews most of the research I've done to date on Facebook. This should come out in the next few weeks, if I can stay on track.

Fall Semester 2008: On Pause

Jeff has just recently begun a new PhD program in Community Informatics and unfortunately hasn't been able to afford a lot of time to continue Facebook research. He did find a way to fit a paper on Facebook into his distributed knowledge class recently, however. Jenny Ryan is also busy transitioning between jobs but you can still follow her blog; she's currently researching for danah boyd. As such we haven't had all that much new material here but Eric Gilbert expects to release a very cool paper on Facebook and Social Capital sometime soon.

For now we suggest you make use of this website as a resource. The wiki could still use your help. Jeff might even post up additional interview transcriptions if enough people find them useful.

Wikis and Free Datasets, and Interview Excerpts Galore!

So after some solid work over the course of this summer I'm now happy to say that The Facebook Project Wiki is operational. I've begun to outline items and will need help flushing it out. I will turn it over to the community soon.

Help me build the Wiki!

I also added a guide to the excerpts from my interview project, containing portions of 10 of the 26 interviews, organized by topic and question. Researchers can use it to harvest user perspectives and quotes or as an already completed set of interview data that covers a variety of topics.

Interview Excerpts

Beyond this I've released nearly all of my data for public use, read the documentation before you use anything:

Dataset documentation

Hope it's helpful. If anyone would be interested in helping to write Guides let me know!

Taking a Step Back...

Due to less than enthusiastic reception of the invitation and new website launch (and follow-ups) I'm just switching the original notion of collaborative efforts over to wikis and opening them to whoever is willing to help. I plan to make sure they're at least useful insofar as I can make them, if anyone else digs in, it'll be a nice surprise. I'll let the site continue to be a linking hub and still push my materials up online for whoever to use.

I'd be more upset about it but it's time I move on to Community Informatics anyway. Everyone has their own agenda...

Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?' "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be ant, you know?

-Waking Life