Case Study in Social Networks: The Hive
I lead a large team, by anyone’s standards: 60,000 strong. And in my off hours, no less.
I’m a backyard beekeeper, and my tiny two-hive apiary produces about 15 gallons (or roughly 200 lbs) of honey per year. I’ve been at it since the mid-90′s, so, always being something of a geek, one of the first web sites that I built was a “Beekeeper’s Home Page“. This was back when Yahoo! was a hand curated list found at http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo, meaning mine was the first collection of links related to beekeeping on the web.
When blogging began to come of age, of course, I had to try that, as well, so, in early 2004, I started chronicling my adventures at Hive Mind Honey and have been somewhat consistently journaling and ruminating there ever since.
Well, round about last year, I noticed something delightful: perhaps due my perseverance, perhaps due to the mystery and magic that is SEO, my little blog had climbed to the top of Google’s ratings: if you Google “bee blog” of “beekeeping blog“, Hive Mind Honey is the first hit. Win!
But then something occurred to me: Google knows I’m searching from Seattle, and it knows that the blog content is relevant to Seattle: maybe the reason I’m coming out on top when I search is that I’m searching from the same place I’m blogging.
How could I find out for sure if mine is really the highest rated beekeeping blog on Google? Social networks!
Last night, I twittered my question:
And I waited.
No answer. Hours passed. Still no answer on Twitter.
Fortunately, my Twitter account feeds into my Facebook status, and, lo and behold, the answers started to pour in there:
- Rob from Philadelphia: (1) Hive Mind Bee Blog (2) Andrew’s Bee Blog (3) {ritzy bee blog}
- Felicity from Maine: Maine: Hive Mind Bee Blog, Andrew’s Bee Blog …
- Bill from Salt Lake City: 1) Hive mind bee blog, 2) Andrew’s Bee Blog, 3) {ritzy bee blog}
- Burvee from New Haven: Same as Bill in SLC, Rob in Philly and Felicity in ME.
- Valerie from France: using Google in English, the first two are the same but the third is different: Hive Mind Bee Blog, Andrew’s Bee Blog, the purl bee
- Ted from Panama City, Panama: Hive Mind Bee Blog, Andrew’s Bee Blog, the purl bee – the purl bee
…and Ireland, Berlin, England and Korea, all the same results! Hive Mind, FTW!
What’s wonderful is that I know all these people from high school, college, Washington, DC, Microsoft, Burning Man, but I didn’t know where they had ended up, or that they were so well spread across the globe. And I didn’t know that they’d be happy to open a browser window and run a quick search for me on a moment’s notice.
So that, for me, is the power of the social network, and the power of the hive: personal connections connecting us to help each other out, if just for a moment…and then on with what we were doing.
If you are walking down the street with friends, and you see someone you know needing help — locked out of their car, moving a couch, not feeling well — the whole group will typically stop and chip in to help.
Now, we are electronically able to do essentially the same thing — ask, and be asked, for help — over vast distances of space and memory. What drives the growth of social networks is the demand (perhaps pent-up over thousands of years?) for global-scale human connections like this. Which, if you think about it, says something really amazing about human beings.