Our Three Good Things application (3GT) is based on a positive psychology exercise that encourages people to record three good things that happen to them, as well as the reasons why they happened. By focusing on the positive, rather than dwelling on the negative, it is believed that people can train themselves to be happier.

Example 3GT tag clouds

Limited success for Word Clouds

When we interviewed 3GT users, we expected to find that the participants believed the word clouds helped them notice and reinforce trends in their good things. Results here were mixed. Only one participant we interviewed described how the combination of listing reasons and seeing them summarized in the word clouds had helped her own reflection:

“You’ve got tags that show up, like tag clouds on the side, and it kind of pulls out the themes… as I was putting the reasoning behind why certain [good] things would happen, I started to see another aspect of a particular individual in my life. And so I found it very fascinating that I had pulled out that information… it’s made me more receptive to that person, and to that relationship.”

A second participant liked the word cloud but was not completely convinced of its utility:

I like having the word cloud. I noticed that the biggest thing in my reason words is “cat”. (Laughs). And the top good words isn’t quite as helpful, because I’ve written a lot of things like ‘great’ and ‘enjoying’ – evidently I’ve written these things a lot of times. So it’s not quite as helpful. But it’s got ‘cat’ pretty good there, and ‘morning’, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve had a lot of good mornings, or I tend to write about things in the morning.

Another participant who had examined the word cloud noticed that “people” was the largest tag in his good things cloud and “liked that… [his] happiness comes from interaction with people,” but that he did not think that this realization had any influence over his behavior outside of the application.

One participant reported looking at the word clouds shortly after beginning to post. The words selected did not feel representative of the good things or reasons he had posted, and feeling that they were “useless,” he stopped looking at them. He did say that he could imagine it “maybe” being useful as the words evolved over time, and later in the interview revisited one of the items in the word cloud: “you know the fact that it says ‘I’m’ as the biggest word is probably good – it shows that I’m giving myself some credit for these good things happening, and that’s good,” but this level of reflection was prompted by the interview, not day-to-day use of 3GT.

Another participant did not understand that word size in the word cloud was determined by frequency of usage and was even more negative:

It was like you had taken random words that I’ve typed, and some of them have gotten bigger. But I couldn’t see any reason why some of them would be bigger than the other ones. I couldn’t see a pattern to it. It was sort of weird… Some of the words are odd words… And then under the Reason words, it’s like they’ve put together some random words that make no sense.

Word clouds did sometimes help in ways that we had not anticipated. Though participants did not find that they helped them identify trends that would influence future decisions, looking at the word cloud from her good things helped at least one participant’s mood.

I remember ‘dissertation’ was a big thing, because for a while I was really gunning on my dissertation, and it was going so well, the proposal was going well with a first draft and everything. So that was really cool, to be able to document that and see… I can see how that would be really useful for when I get into a funk about not being able to be as productive as I was during that time… I like the ‘good’ words. They make me feel, I feel very good about them.

More work?

The importance of supporting reflection has been discussed in the original work on Three Good Things, as well as in other work that has shown how systems that support effective self-reflection can improve users’ ability to adopt positive behaviors as well as increase their feelings of self-efficacy. While some users found benefit in word clouds to assist reflection, a larger portion did not notice them or found them unhelpful. More explanation should be provided about how word clouds are generated to avoid confusion. They should also perhaps not be shown until a participant has entered a sufficient amount of data. To help participants better notice trends, improved stop-wording might be used, as well as detecting n-grams (e.g. “didn’t smoke” versus “smoke”) and grouping of similar terms (e.g., combining “bread” and “pork” into “food”). Alternatively, a different kind of reflection exercise might be more effective, one where participants are asked to review their three good things posts and write a longer summary of the trends they have noticed.

Three Good Things supports a positive psychology exercise in which participants record three good things, and why these things happened. When completed daily – even on the bad days – over time, participants report increased happiness and decreased symptoms of depression. The good things don’t have to be major events – a good meal, a phone call with a friend or a family member, or a relaxing walk are all good examples.

I’m interested in identifying best practices for deploying these interventions on new or existing social websites, where adding social features may make the intervention more or less effective for participants, or may just make some participants more likely to complete the exercise on a regular basis. Anyway, feel free to give the app a try – you’ll be helping my research and you may end up a bit happier.

Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.

I think there’s an important corollary: adding more features and content types to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.

Recent concerns about Beacon are one example. Yes, the privacy issues of an opt-out tool that follows you around from site to site recording your behavior are huge. But there’s also the issue of having this content added to the Facebook at all. Even among my close friends, I don’t want a list of their recent purchases. It’s not something we do in person, and it’s not something I want to do online. A site, though, can cause the same problem by adding content that I share with some people, but not necessarily my current friends. Facebook users presumably friend each other based on the norms for sharing the content that existed on Facebook at the time, adding more content or just changing how Facebook shares the content already there can cause some problems. Some of the content Beacon tried to so forcefully share isn’t that much different than if LinkedIn suddenly started sharing relationship status: you don’t want software deciding to re-purpose one set of social ties into another. For now, Facebook is handling this challenge with extremely fine-grained privacy controls, but that’s a lot of overhead.

The de-placing of facebook
When Facebook was smaller and the bounds were clearer, users had less need of the privacy settings. Two years ago, I had a pretty clear distinction in my head. Facebook was for some social communication and sharing among my college friends and some friends from high school. It had a clear identity, and felt either like a place or very connected to my school as place. I knew who I would “run into” on Facebook, and I knew that the content would be related to college students’ self-expression, communication, and socialization. Within the bounds, it was possible to identify a fairly consistent set of behaviors and information that members were willing to share with each other. Not so anymore. As Facebook adds users and features, it undermines this sense of place. Anyone, including the creepy ex-coworker, might show up. With new features and new applications, I am also less able to anticipate Facebook’s content.

I’m not necessarily criticizing Facebook’s decision to reduce their placiness. Its leadership has decided to trade some of the sense of place for growth, instead becoming an application platform and contact/identity management system. That’s their gamble to take, but I am critical that they seem to be moving in this direction without clearly thinking through some of the consequences for their members.

Other examples of repurposing contacts
Facebook isn’t the only company that has recently re-purposed existing social network information to share additional content. This December, if you use Google Reader and GTalk, Google decided to share all of your shared RSS feed items with all of your GTalk contacts. Your GTalk contacts were already being added to from people you email, so for many users, this exposed their shared items to many people they’d emailed a few times. This decision seems to be based on the incredibly naïve assumption that if you share content with some people, you want to share it with everyone you email. One user reported that this “ruined Christmas.”

Unforunately, as Google and Yahoo increasingly leverage our inboxes to compete with Facebook, we can probably look forward to more of the missteps.

Pursuit of places
I do think it’s possible to grow while keeping a distinct sense of place. After purchasing Flickr, del.icio.us, and upcoming, Yahoo! kept their contact lists separate and retained the identity of each property. Some would probably criticize Yahoo! for not integrating their brand, but I think that time will show they’ve made the right choice. It’s also true that managing the separate contact lists is very similar to the overhead of Facebook’s privacy settings, but there are a some key differences: managing your Flickr contacts does not interfere with the sense of Flickr as a bounded place, and you can (at least currently) be reasonably comfortable that Flickr is not going to repurpose your Flickr contacts outside of the social norms for Flickr users.

This also makes me believe that social startups like dopplr and others can succeed by creating a clear identity as a place. Even if Facebook offered better features (and perhaps more convenience) for sharing my travel status and tips with others, I’d still seek out Dopplr for its characteristics as a space — it’s a much more pleasant experience.

One of the greatest things about having a claimID page is that you can easily provide people searching for you with a real picture of your identity. With claimID you can claim your blog, your website and news articles that mention your name into a central place. If someone is searching for you, they previously might not have found all of those important pages. With claimID, you can put your best face forward and let people see the identity you wish to present.

It’s an interesting idea, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out the right way to use it. I manage my online “identity” through my website, including this blog, and various sites including flickr, linkedin, upcoming, and even last.fm. Links to things about me can sometimes go on del.icio.us under the aboutme tag, but that’s something I try not to do too often. ClaimID, aside from providing an OpenID account, did not really fill a new enough a niche for me to continue using it.

Earlier this month, ClaimID added an OpenID and XFN based contact system. It is a first step, and in its current implementation the value proposition is pretty thin. The blog post announcing the new feature talks about the relationship between contacts and reputation — fair enough, but LinkedIn seems to have staked out that territory already. That does not stop me from being a bit excited about the feature and its potential, and it makes ClaimID’s territory a lot more interesting.

My optimism for OpenID + XFN is that it can enable a single-sign-on version of social networking. This isn’t a problem whose solution can be distributed as easily as OpenID style authentication — everyone’s OpenID server could start serving up a list of the OpenIDs of their friends, but with such a decentralized approach, identifying people that are more than one degree away starts to get very expensive — but it has its appeal.

Imagine an eBay or Amazon Marketplace style transaction, only know you know that you are a 3rd degree contact of the seller — someone in your network knows someone in their network. This changes the transaction experience. This is the basic idea behind LinkedIn’s hiring and B2B services sections. There are many web applications where knowing users’ social networks can add value, but it might not add enough value to get users to go through the process of adding their contacts. Importing social networks (privacy concerns aside) might also allow a site to identify n-degree connections between the site’s users, even if someone in the network is not a user of the site.

Importing social networks also can help handle the cold start problems on many social sites. Going back to the eBay or Amazon example, adding social information to a transaction may be most important for first time sellers and buyers, but these are also the people are most likely to need that added bit of reputation since they have not otherwise developed one on the site.

Of course, there are some challenges to this use of social networks that go beyond implementation details. My Flickr contacts are not my LinkedIn contacts, and I don’t really want them to overlap. I doubt that the current XFN profile offers users enough flexibility to manage who gets to be a contact on which website just by filtering values. This may mean that an OpenID approach to social networks may be limited to websites in which social social networks are not a central feature.

I’m not the first person to get excited about the combination of social networks and OpenID, and claimid is not the first OpenID service to manage relationships. It’s an encouraging sign of things to come, and I’m hopeful that there is some good momentum building in this direction.

When I first started looking at my friends’ Netflix lists, it felt a little creepy. The records of our cultural consumption (video rentals, library checkouts) have traditionally been protected by law. for all kinds of excellent reasons—tyrants, stalkers, mothers-in-law—so even though I’d been invited to look, my conscience kept telling me I’d crossed into sacred territory. I felt like an information-age window peeper, like I had dipped my toe into the shallow end of a pool whose deep end was Watergate. This feeling only intensified when many of my real-life friends refused to accept me as their Netflix friend. Though they’d talk to me all day about their DVD-watching habits—their three-month Buffy binges and methodical screenings of the entire Owen Wilson catalog—for some reason they wouldn’t let me see an actual list of the actual films they were actually renting.

This paragraph caught my attention. Like many people who find something interesting but are not actually knowledgeable about it, I will now proceed to climb on to my tiny digital soapbox and talk about it for a moment.

A few thoughts came to mind. Anderson’s initial reaction caused me to remember when I showed some colleagues last.fm this summer — they were first almost repelled by the idea that I and others would share our music history like that, but within a few minutes they started saying “show me that chart.”

Much like the Netflix’s Friends feature, last.fm profiles show a user’s actual behavior rather than a reported behavior. Compare this to what users list on Facebook or other profiles for their favorite music and movies. Those are representations users choose, and what people say they do is rarely exactly what they do.

I’m curious, then, if services like last.fm and Netflix friends will change how people express themselves in listing favorite music or movies. I used to think a little bit before filling in my favorite music or answering what track is currently stuck in my head. Music that I considered to be a guilty pleasure (generally music that is catchy but not necessarily of great critical value, c.f. some songs by Coldplay) would usually not make these lists. This all stopped one day when I noticed that my Facebook list of favorite music had grown a ways apart from my last.fm profile. This was partly by design — the same sort of decisions that people make when deciding what books to put on office or living room shelves — and partly because what I thought I listened to most wasn’t necessarily what I do listen to most. I decided to fix it by just copying over my last.fm reported top tracks.

My new method didn’t last very long. I started thinking that certain artists seemed to be missing, and quickly tack them back on to the end of the list. Sure, I’d rationalize it by saying “oh, she’s new,” or “well, they’ve only put out one album, so of course they get overwhelmed by more prolific artists.” The truth is, there was a discrepancy between what last.fm reported and what I wanted to list, and I felt a need to fix it.

Are tools that report our actual cultural consumption at odds with our ability to choose how we express ourselves? Does it matter?

I can’t say that I’m going anywhere with these thoughts (and I can say that I don’t know the first thing about self expression and identity), but I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a few days.