Or put differently, what value will one user bring to a social network itself or to a third-party application running on a social network platfrom?

Take Facebook – Adonomics evaluation renders an active user value at $270. This is how much value user brings to Facebook itself.

It is a bit more difficult with third-party applications running on social network platform. I have seen different views generally ranging from $0.30 to $1.

What do you think?

I have to admit I am fascinated by facebook poke. And for the very simple reason – poke is a very social thing that did not and does not exist outside of social network context.

Since poking developed inside facebook, it is important to understand mechanisms behind poke to understand how social network works.

When an individual joins the group, it has two basic ways to get around unfamiliar environment – “trial and error” and “imitation”.

Trial and error treats the group as a part of the environment and explores it from the outside. Individual learns by acting and measuring subjective feedback from the action.
Imitation is much more powerful and robust as a social interaction. User acknowledges being part of the group and trusts the group. Instead of spending a lot of effort to establish what is socially acceptable using trial and error, users start imitating other users. After all, we are natural born imitators – why don’t we do what we do best?

In every dynamic group there will be still a fair amount of trial and errors and most successful attempts will set new trends. But there is no truly social interaction and there is no truly social network without imitation.

Let’s take poke. After a new user joins facebook and acquires a few facebook friends, she will be poked. Outside of facebook being poked (whatever the equivalent might be) by a complete stranger is at least confusing. Inside facebook one quickly learns that poking is normal and acceptable thing. If poking is normal, is there one way to use poke?

Facebook informs that poke is a cool feature without specific purpose. The same page suggests to invent own meaning of pocking. So in a best social sense, poke has provided facilities and left the usage and interpretation to the users. Some users set trends and the others follow.

Reflecting the diverse audience, there are currently 500+ user groups around meaning and usage of poke on facebook, ranging from pancakes to sex invitations. To be fair the pancakes group only managed to get 252 users against 332 thousands of “sex poke” supporters.

However, there are hundreds of poke usages that are a little bit more useful than pancakes invitations. The beauty is interpretation is entirely dependant on your friends demographic. And it could be a good idea to check what poke group they are on before poking back.

But remember that sometimes a poke is just a poke.

So what is your poke?

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