Facebook fatigue and Poke 1.0

In the heat of summer when I was an avid Facebook user, before the fatigue kicked in, I signed up for the Poke 1.0 conference, an afternoon conference on the topic of Facebook. I am pleased to say that despite my own fatigue with Facebook, the conference was definitely worth the train fare (and not just because the university paid for it).

For me personally the highlight (with just the one lecture still to go) was the initial (primarily quantitative) talk on the use of Facebook in the UK, basically according to Neilsen's Netratings whichever way you cut the cake its the UK's biggest social network. They provided many more details than is usually provided in the press releases of sites such as Compete and with the promise of slides and videos of the conference being placed on the London Knowledge Labs web site, it will be worth looking up.

Whilst the commercial speakers were giving quantitative details, the academics seem to be stuck with qualitative data. Stuck is probably a bit of a harsh term, after all qualitative is a recognised methodological choice. I do wonder however how much is choice and how much is the lack of access to the quantitative data. There seems to be a need for greater collaboration between different departments and between commercial organisations and academia.