Social Gesture Index

Social gestures have started to emerge from the most popular Web services. A critical mass of users can create a collective understanding of some new action that is often coupled with a product-specific term. Social gestures add context to content through our common understanding of each gesture and our relationship or perception of the people that express them.

I wanted to map out existing social gestures and what they mean so I made a list. It includes a description of each gesture’s stated function and in some cases an attempt to understand its implicit meaning. Gestures are ordered (very roughly) by strength, starting with strong positive gestures and ending with strong negative gestures.

I realize that every aspect of this list is highly subjective, not to mention incomplete. It is very much a work-in-progress but I hope it can provide some food for thought in the short-term and a marker that can be revisited, expanded and improved over the long-term.

Retweet

The act of republishing someone else’s tweet. What separates it from reblogging (below) is that users republish complete messages. Although, edits might be made to focus on one element of a Tweet or in order to add a comment and/or to fit the 140 character limit in Twitter. It is the most powerful gesture because users deem retweets important enough to insert into the feed of their followers.

Reblog

The act of republishing some or all of a blog post on one’s own blog or feed. This is more powerful than simply sharing a link because it inserts some portion of the content into rebloggers’ followers/subscribers (like retweet, above). It can and often does include comments by the reblogger.

Like

An explicit signal that indicates interest, agreement or affection for a piece of content. Present in some form in many social services. It is sometimes used to insert content into feeds for followers/subscribers which makes it similar to retweet and reblog. It is less likely to include comments.

Bookmark

The act of storing or publishing a link in a public place or within a feed of content. It’s not as powerful a gesture as reblogging, retweeting or liking because it does not push the actual content of the bookmark into a new stream. Bookmarks can be considered useful to the bookmarker or a recommendation for others but is less intrusive upon followers/subscribers and as a result it represents a less powerful endorsement.

@

A way of referencing another user directly with a comment, reply or more general message. It has spread beyond Twitter to comment streams but has not been incorporated into the fabric of other services.

Comment

A specific reaction, thought or piece of knowledge or advice posted in direct response to a piece of content. Comments occupy an odd space among social gestures. They are completely free-form and the gesture or ideas or opinions are included within the free text. Comments can express agreement or disagreement and anything in between. Because of the broad scope, it’s unclear what the individual act of commenting means. The aggregate number of comments attached to a piece of content often provide some measure of popularity or controversy and perhaps, as a result, relevance.

Follow

The act of opting-in to receive updates from a specific person or entity on a service. Following t is ostensibly the same as subscribing but services with ‘follow’ functionality usually result in content that is associated more closely to the author. Supporting other social gestures also increase the humanity of content updates over subscribing to a feed of content.

Subscribe

The act of opting-in to receive content updates from a website or blog, usually via RSS feeds but also via e-mail updates and dashboards if content ‘readers’ are integrated into the same service used to publish content. There is a often a weaker tie to authors’ identity.

Unsubscribe

The act of opting-out of receiving updated from a previously selected source under a subscribe system.

Unfollow

The act of opting-out of receiving updates from a previously followed source. Both unsubscribe and unfollow are somewhat private, or at least unnoticed acts although they do alter following/follower/subscriber numbers.

Block

The act of proactively preventing someone or something else from receiving your content updates. This is also a somewhat private act. I’m not sure how service providers use ‘Block’ data to filter out spam accounts and other inappropriate uses.

Report

The act of actually reporting another user for posting inappropriate content or using social media services in an inappropriate way.

Posted on July 27, 2009