Curating Smart Networks

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s relationships become more dense within a network, the network becomes more effective and more equitable in distributing information and resources. That matters because networks play increasingly important roles in shaping both our economy and our society. But network density, by itself, isn’t enough. For networks to be healthy and effective, they have to be smart. And that means they have to be connected in the right ways.

Why Are Living Networks So Smart?

A lot of people have studied the wisdom that emerges out of networks in nature. Do a search on “superorganism,” “emergence” or “swarm intelligence,” and you’ll find a nice trail of Wikipedia and other articles.

Most of nature’s living networks gained their intelligence through evolutionary processes that left them really good at creating and processing feedback loops.

Take ants, for example. Over millions of years, they evolved a clever mechanism for finding the shortest path between food sources and their ant hill. Each ant moves out in a random search pattern. Those that find food excrete a chemical pheromone trail to guide other ants to the food and back. The pheromone itself slowly evaporates over time, so that the shortest path between food and hill retains the strongest signal.

This approach to optimizing flow in a network is so efficient that software engineers have a name for it; they use the ant colony optimization algorithm in all kinds of applications from vehicle routing, to project management and even protein folding.

That’s the power of tens of millions of years of evolutionary tweaking – and the power of feedback loops.

Why Are Human Networks So Smart?

Humans excrete pheromones too, but that’s not how we communicate … online, at least. Instead, we “plus” and we “like” the little bits of ‘information nuggets’ farmed and foraged by our friends and fellow networkers on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

In other words, we just spent tens of millions of years evolving, and all we got were these lousy buttons.

But there is something different about the signals that we humans use in our networks. It’s not just instinct at work. We are conscious of the signals we send and receive in our networks, and use a range of cognitive skills to aid us in making countless micro-decisions about which content is most interesting to us.

For the most interesting content, we don’t just like or plus it; we comment on it and share it with our connections. Get enough of those signals on your own content and it won’t disappear quite so quickly in the social media stream. This is of course quite deliberate; our social networks now imitate the way ant pheromones evaporate over time to ensure only the content with the most feedback remains visible in our stream.

Our social networks are, in fact, brilliantly designed to concentrate signals within groups of people. They do that by drawing upon a new kind of aggregated human processing power. Every 60 seconds on Facebook, people post some 510,000 comments.

That’s a lot of signal feedback.

All this feedback requires an expenditure of energy; little bleeps of condensed intelligence in the form of three billion micro-decisions over what is – and what isn’t – interesting. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have engineered a way to tap this amazing aggregated intelligence in real-time.

It is truly a remarkable engineering achievement – not just in software architecture, but social architecture as well.

Curation

When you zoom in to look at what’s happening inside this massive swirl of content processing, what you see is a bunch of individuals organizing content, or what people in social media circles call “content curation.”

Content curation on social networks isn’t just about managing and adding value to content, though; it’s also about how that content is distributed. It’s about getting information to where it needs to be.

Curate:  (verb)
To pull together, sift through, and select for presentation.

Keep looking though, because, within these networks, we don’t just curate content – we also curate people. This is where network smarts comes into play – because it’s not just about more connections; it’s about more of the right connections.

How We Curate Our Connections

In order to understand how we curate our connections with people on social networks, it helps to first understand what constitutes an actual connection on these networks in the first place.

At the simplest level, we form a connection when we friend someone on Facebook, follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn. But just because you follow someone doesn’t necessarily mean you pay attention to them.

On Twitter, one of the common ways of more closely following someone’s activity is through lists. People on my “Focus” and “MVP” lists get more attention from me than other people do – more likes, replies and re-tweets – and that added attention helps keep their tweets higher up in the Twitter stream. I’m adding feedback to strengthen their signal, just like an ant to a pheromone trail.

It’s not just through lists that we tune our attention to people. It’s way more subtle than that. Just as with our offline, face-to-face interactions, there are just some people to whom we pay more attention. We tune in when they speak – and when we see their posts while scrolling down the social media stream.

Here’s the kicker though. Because of the way these networks are engineered, all that feedback you’re giving to people’s posts actually shapes the network itself. On Twitter and Facebook, when you stop paying attention to someone, their posts start to “evaporate” from your stream. These social networks use relevance (like Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm) to weight people’s importance to you. These algorithms continue to evolve, but essentially the way they work is that if you ignore someone long enough, that’s interpreted as a signal that the network uses to weaken your connection to that person over time. You then see less of their content, pay even less attention to them, and create a feedback loop that effectively prunes them out of your network – even though you’re technically still “connected.”

Why All This Matters

These countless bits of feedback shape our networks, making them better and better at getting the right information to and from the right people. It really is what makes our human networks so smart.

Most of us use social networks for social purposes. But increasingly, we’re also using them for work. There is a growing base of people who are quite skilled at using these systems to professional end. When you look at what these individuals actually do with their time on these networks, you see that they’re spending as much time curating their connections with people as curating their content. Investing in their relationships helps keep their content up high in our social streams, which in turn, strengthens relationships, and creates a powerful, positive feedback loop.

In other words, by investing in curating their connections with people, these individuals are shaping their networks to more effectively communicate their work to an increasingly networked world. And today, that network influence translates into real professional advantage and economic opportunity both online and offline.

We are still in the early phases of this new form of economic and social power. Much of it is currently concentrated in the big social networks, but these same dynamics will expand their hold in new ways as companies invest in online communities and other networking tools to connect with their various stakeholders.

The way we curate our connections shapes our networks in ways that affect their health and effectiveness. But because of the prominent role that networks now play in our economy, it also affects people’s access to opportunity. So getting this stuff right actually matters. It matters a lot.