My Real Life Social Network

Facebook isn't useful to me, and I don't think it's just a generational thing.

I want to connect to my friends and colleagues, I'm interested in what they're doing. I think I can share things that they'd be interested in, too. But Facebook's limited methods for organizing relationships don't give me any useful granularity, so I just assume anyone can read anything I post. A general "I'm in LA tonight, anyone want to meet for dinner?" would hit a much broader audience than I'd actually be interested in dining with. (Sorry, 'friends.')

In trying to understand this better, I came across Paul Adam's presentation, "The Real Life Social Network" (highly recommended and embedded below). Based on research he's done at Google, Paul outlines how we group our real-life relationships and how we interact with people based on how strong our ties are.

I considered mapping out my own social network by hand to better understand it. Luckily, LinkedIn just announced a tool to map my professional contacts, and TouchGraph takes a visually equivalent approach with Facebook. As shown below, the two maps look very similar after a bit of arranging and unified custom color coding.


My Facebook Graph


I have four major networks (PDI/DreamWorks, the Visual Effects community, the Venture Capital community, and Carnegie Mellon), all related to my working life. There are smaller groups of family, non-work friends and some random individuals.

My PDI and Visual Effects groups are tightly meshed, understandably, but outside of those there is very little overlap. I proceed cautiously when I intermix them - most commonly I am connecting my CMU students with my professional contacts.

On LinkedIn I have 402 connections and on Facebook I have 304. I'll cop to the fact that I've connected with people I don't really know that well, and I'd even agree that least 200 of my contacts are way out on the fringe. That isn't visible here, though - neither graph represents how close my personal ties are to each person - information which LinkedIn and Facebook don't really have. Many of the orbiting lonely people in my Facebook graph would actually be very close to me. That information would alter these graphs radically, making them much more revealing and useful.

I understand my social network a bit better now, but my communications problem remains unsolved - I'd like to be able to message just one group, or message just those people closest to me across groups, and I'd like to be the recipient of the same targeted and filtered information flow. For now, much of that continues on in email.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

Vision and BHAGs

In the class I’m teaching at CMU on entrepreneurship we talked about setting a long term vision for your company. I used Jim Collin’s research as a framework for the discussion, in particular setting a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and having a vivid description of what life will be like when that goal is met (See Building Your Company’s Vision). Among other qualities a good BHAG should be inspiring and take 10 to 30 years to accomplish.

Of course this got me thinking about PDI’s vision of making fully animated feature films. We set that as a specific goal somewhere around 1984, a good decade before it was possible. It served as an invaluable beacon for all the decisions we would subsequently make – doing character animation, continuing to produce our own short films, expanding into film effects work, and on and on. It also kept us from veering off track with opportunities to sell our software or do work for non-entertainment clients. It was a big, hairy, audacious goal even without an acronym for it.

The problem with a BHAG is once you’ve done it, then what? And that in fact is one of the reasons I ended up leaving PDI/DreamWorks.

For my class I tried to find inspiring example BHAGs from animation and effects companies. That effort fell flat. Even from DreamWorks and Pixar. They all basically said “We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing,” but with much more flowery language.

So I set out to determine what the BHAG is that I would set if I was running an animation company today, and it came really fast. Simply put: “Integrate our characters into people’s lives.” Granted, it’s a bit more obscure than “Make fully animated feature films,” so let me paint the ‘vivid description’: Ten or twenty years from now mobile devices as we know them will be non-existent. Instead you’ll be connected via some sort of head’s up augmented reality display. Maybe it’s a pair of glasses with little monitors in them, or maybe they are using a laser to paint on the back of your retina, or perhaps we’ll all have jacks on the backs of our skulls – it doesn’t matter to me, I’m just sure it’s going to happen. That display and adjoining audio input will be projecting information all over our environment. But you don’t want a Terminator-style view of streams of data in front of you, you don’t want web pages popping up or maps overlaid or floating arrows and words. You just want a companion to deal with all that for you. When you need driving directions you want to follow him down the street. Lost in the mall? He’ll take you where you need to go for what you want, and negotiate the best deal for you ahead of time. Reservations? Tickets? Check out payments? Just have your concierge buddy take care of it. This goes on and on with new ways to interface with your social network, read a book, watch a movie, experience music, create art…

What would this company do today to work towards that BHAG? Here’s a few things I’d start with:

• Interactive games with the characters.  Focus specifically on realtime 3D even though that’s not the trend right now. Small and fast to create, the point is to learn and iterate quickly. The characters should have to display some level of independent intelligence, not just avatars for the player.


• Augmented Reality apps – develop deep AR chops for putting characters in real environments. Again, lots of small projects that get released to an audience. Maybe games, but I’d probably focus more on “practical apps” to help people solve problems or get information. These should also be mobile to develop skills in working with an unpredictable environment.


• APIs, APIs, APIs. Use everyone else’s APIs. Google, Google Maps, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, etc. There are tons of companies out there with useful data you can start to take advantage of. What kind of fun app can be created with your characters that use more than one of these APIs? Build a zillion of those.


• Start building relationships with companies and research institutions working on all the harder problems, like the hardware side. Do projects with them.

The point of all of this work is not to build that company today, but to have all the talent and tools necessary to be ready for the market when it does exist. And if you do it right you'll be building a product catalog and loyal customers along the way.

BTW, If you know of a great BHAG from an animation or effects company please forward it on – I’d love to know it.