After this morning HP Lab's media breakfast, I chat with Bernard Huberman (pictured), Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs whose purpose is to understand the interaction between social behaviour and information technology.

For Huberman, the problem with the Internet today is the information that used to be scarce and therefore valuable has lost its economic value.

"The only thing valuable today is yours and mine attention... People pay a lot of money to get attention, to themselves, to their web sites and so on. Actually I was at INSEAD when we did a very interesting experiment where we showed that people were willing to pay money in exchange of attention from a group that would applaud at them!".

Huberman's key findings:

- novelty and popularity are the main drivers to attention to web sites;

- public opinion forms on the web exactly the opposite way than offline.

"If you're going to write a review of something and people have already reviewed it 75 times, why bother writing another review unless you disagree with the prevailing view. Which is very different from the way we go to public discourse where everybody are giving opinions at the same time".

Social Networks are a fade. Back to the Village.

Although Huberman did not predict the demise of social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, the HP researcher did say they are somewhat an illusion and foresees the "dawn of the age of intimacy".

"We are going to start discovering that even though the Web will make us available to the world... the fact is we interact with very few people most of the time. So the interactions are becoming more intimate... Facebook is a phenomenon that eventually people will tire off".