Imagine if Wikipedia customized answers for you based on your IQ. Now imagine if it customized answers based on your age or a poll of how attractive you were. Turning to social media to mine for data is a double edged sword, in some cases our personal networks are going to give better responses because our friends tastes are more likely to mirror our own than the tastes of the general public. However when it comes to factual information, limiting your search to people in your own circle may specifically exclude the expert opinion. When it comes to matters of opinion we are likely to have answers that support our own position rather than challenge it.
There is nothing inherently wrong in this as long as we understand it is happening. Where we experience problems is when we forget that our social networks represent the people we are connected to and start representing their responses as the world view.
This occurs frequently in David Pogue’s book “The World According to Twitter”. David repeatedly contrasts the Twitter universe to other online communities without making the distinction between Twitter as a whole and the people who follow and respond to him. In a book, largely for entertainment purposes, this is not necessarily a bad thing. As an exercise I leave it to you to imagine what “The World According to Twitter” might have looked like if the same questions had been asked instead by @oprah or @aplusk.
However, @pogue makes a serious mistake when he applies this same rational to a product review. In his coverage of Aardvark, a new IM based service for peer answered questions, he praises the service in the timeliness and accuracy of the responses. Unfortunately the value of the service directly relates to how many of your Facebook friends are already using Aardvark. In David Pogue’s case the answer was 54, in mine a measly 2.
I can ask the same questions of Aardvark and not receive any responses or worse yet I can receive responses that are incorrect without any way to assess the authority of the person who responded. It would be wonderful if we were all intelligent, witty and handsome enough to have great followers like @pogue. Until then I would recommend he, and any other reviewer, borrow someone’s social network and repeat your tests, break free from your ivory tower and see how the service works for us little people.