Ah, I'm glad this is here. The email I wrote you in response to your piece about social networks was my lame attempt to make a point. It was lame because I'm having trouble articulating the point, which works in my head but doesn't quite play through my fingers as I type.
I think the term "social network" is throwing you, and I don't think you're alone. In fact sites like Friendster and Tribe and Orkut are not social networks, they're social network *portals.* Though it's obvious that social networks are not technologies, I think the combination of social networks and network technology can throw even very smart people a conceptual curve, resulting in map/territory confusion.
When you look at the abstraction of a piece of your social life on any of these networks, and think "this is MY social network," that could be depressing unless you're an avid networker like Joi Ito or even yours truly and are accustomed to devoting some part of your life to the cultivaton of connections anyway. These sites can be a real killer app for people who do a lot of networking just because that's who they are. In my own case, figuring out how to build effective goal-oriented online social networks is a big part of my professional life and consulting practice, and the idea of portals that give visibility into my own and others' social networks is promising, but my experience readily tells me that the views I'm getting are inherently limited and, though useful, incomplete.
The way I see these sites is that each gives me a set of tools for identifying and working with actual social networks. One thing I do professionally is consult about online best practics and environments for collaboration and community, and I'm finding that the social network sites are useful and compelling aggregations of tools for group forming and (potentially) group work. So to me the best of these sites are an important part of the evolution of social software.
Comments
Jon,
I think that the current social networking sites do not do a lot for "group work", but they all do offer some compelling ideas and overall effect, of getting people to think about, visualize, and perhaps activate their networks is a great thing.
We're going to cover this aspect of Networks, as well as many others at MeshForum later this year, I invite you to stop by the site (http://www.meshforum.org) and offer your comments and feedback - we're very much still evolving what MeshForum will be.
Shannon
Posted by: Shannon Clark | March 28, 2004 10:34 PM
Thanks, Shannon. Just found this... I'm on my way over.
Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky | April 24, 2004 11:28 AM