The Austin Chronicle has published my article about Facebook in its SXSW Interactive issue.
Are we watching a generation "slice in two," or are these sites making visible, and emphasizing, a division that already existed? Before the social Web, most of us didn't know we were part of social networks. We had friends, and we knew that our friends might know people that we don't, but most of us never thought to chart or analyze those relationships. Now we can make our networks visible and explicit and touch base with them every day through sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Are we any better off than we were before? Do we know the people in our networks any better than before? Can we manage more relationships than we did before? Looking at the darker side, will we be exploited by the operators of network platforms? Will everything we say and do actually, no foolin', become part of our "permanent record," tracked by Big Brother and his henchmen? Will the Internet become the next television, an instrument for programming consumers, pretending to be a channel for art and entertainment?MySpace Apps
Yes to everything. Yes, we're better off; there can be tremendous value in network exchanges and far more potential for productive collaboration and resulting innovation. We probably do know most of the people in our networks better; we can connect to them casually every day, like the Internet was a massive water cooler where everybody, and I mean everybody, can hang out. Can we manage more relationships? Sure, but that's deceptive: We have the technology to manage more, but that doesn't mean we can manage all the relationships that we "add" at any qualitative level. All the social-networking platforms caution you to add as friends only people you really know well. Real value depends on quality, not quantity, of relationships.
And yes, some people will be exploited, but network platforms that exploit will lose trust, lose users, wither, and die. Yes, everything we do online is recorded somewhere and probably retrievable somehow by somebody, and the intelligence agencies are probably crunching some of your data somewhere sometime. There's never been any real expectation of complete privacy online. On the other hand, it's impractical to think that Big Brother is watching. His eyeballs and his interests are constrained by an economy of attention, if nothing else. And the Internet's already become the next television, but it has a bazillion channels, many with ads, and many of the ads that do appear are unobtrusive. Austin tech consultant and entrepreneur Venki Iyer told me, "We all just need to get used to surveillance and practice good sousveillance [watching the watchers]."
Following Facebook's lead, MySpace is gearing up to accommodate third-party applications via the MySpace Developer Platform. [Link to MIT Tech Review article] [Link to Developer Platform page at MySpace]
Very interesting info from MySpace on the page that discusses their adoption of Open Social... tragedy of the commons:
While unrestrained CSS and HTML provided users with limitless ways to make their profiles look a certain way, it was JavaScript that allowed them to really plug into the MySpace experience. After MySpace launched, users began building JavaScript widgets that did anything from customizing friends lists to sending MySpace Mail. And applications they coded were not limited to their own profiles. Through a little known technology known as "cut and paste", users could "install" applications they liked on their own profiles.Jon L. at Social Media Club
Where did all this functionality come from? While no specific XML/JSON api was provided, users quickly wrote and disseminated scripts that used JavaScript to screen scrape the existing MySpace markup (in order to gather data), and to emit the proper http values to manipulate the data they gathered.
Of course, a completely open MySpace was a utopic ideal. The exploitation began. As nefarious people began perceiving value in having lots of illegitimate friends, causing mischief, and/or making a profit through spam, they began writing applications that broke the rules. While a well thought out, law abiding "send me a message" app would send messages only at the request of the user, an app built by a spammer would send as many messages as the user's bandwidth would allow.
As spammers propagated through the site, MySpace began blacklisting certain types of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We tried very hard to keep as much JavaScript as possible, but slowly and surely illegitimate users hacked away at our filters until finally JavaScript was banned entirely. That left third party application developers with only one dyanmic alternative: Flash. Sites like YouTube saw their birth as widely disseminated Flash decorations for MySpace profiles. Unfortunately, by this time such applications were completely locked out of the MySpace data stream.
I'll be presenting at the February Social Media Club meeting in Austin (third Thursday, February 21). Join us! [Link]
The politics of FacebookTom Hodgkinson at The Guardian explores the politics of Facebook's directors, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. First, he makes it clear that he doesn't buy the premise of Facebook, regardless. Then he explores the philosophy driving its evolution, especially Thiel's neoconservative positions. [Link]
Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian". . . . This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."
So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."
Read the rest of the article, there's quite a bit more. Is Facebook the Internet's version of television, i.e. a system that transforms a potentially worldchanging technology into a dumbed-down marketing machine? That's the thrust of Hodgkinson's argument... and it's applicable to other popular systems (I'm thinking Second Life).
I'm not feeling quite as negative and Hodgkinson about Facebook, and certainly not about virtual community – he despises the whole idea of online relationship vs alternatives, e.g. hanging out with friends at the pub or reading books. These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
Like any online community, Facebook will become what its users make it, regardless of the plans of Thiel et al. We're only susceptible to commercialization a la television if that's what we accept. I'm glad Hodgkinson's given us this background info to ponder, but it doesn't worry me. We get the communities we accept, just as we get the governments we deserve. If we don't make the effort to be better citizens, better community members, better people, that's our fault, and not the fault of manipulative neoconservatives.
I don't know Jay Deragon, but he's co-authored a book (with Scott Allen, an acquaintance of mine who's clueful about social network platforms and strategy) called The Emergence of the Relationship Economy that focuses on "relationship-driven commerce," a vision for online commerce that is similar to the approach Paco Nathan and I advocated via FringeWare, Inc. – in 1992, so this isn't exactly new thinking. Our vision for interactive commerce was buried in the industrial-strength broadcast-mode developments throughout the 90s, though the Whole Foods ecommerce projects I worked on had an interactive aspect. In fact, many ecommerce projects paid lip service to community, but they weren't what you would call "relationship-driven." I was part of a consulting team led by Casey Hughes earlier this decade where I strongly recommended just that approach – the company's model was an ideal fit – but I don't think they got it.
Back to Deragon – yesterday he made a post that asks the musical question, "Will 2008 be the Year of Social Commerce?" Social commerce, he says, is "the holy grail of economics." He's talking about commerce consulted on or via social network platforms. Okay, forget the tech platforms: do we ever see commerce conducted in social environments? Via social networks? When I was active with the now-defunct FringeWare project, I called it a street market in cyberspace. It made perfect sense that, with technologies that facilitate interaction, we could bring buyers and sellers closer together, which is how you would image markets have forming originally, as person to person trade, inherently social. We've been trending in this direction since 1991-92, when the web first appeared. These marketing folks (Deragon, Scott, and their other co-authors) are presenting this as a dramatic change, but to me it's old news, though we can certainly take it to another level given the evolution of the social web since 2000. My own consulting practice now is all about leveraging web presence and social network thinking to improve business and create targeting messaging and interaction, and though I don't see anyone else with just that approach, it doesn't seem new to me. But I'd like to hear more abut the specifics of "social commerce" – how do you sell through social networks? Does it mean, as I had suggested in the consultation I mentioned earlier, that members of a network sell to each other, and share the profits with the operators of the network? Or does it mean that social network platforms might be useful for the same top-down sales we all know so well – that the social network platform is a place to aggregate "consumers" so that they can buy the same way they've always bought. (This is where Second Life seems to be going.)
Blogger/Twitterer Susan Reynolds' bout with breast cancer created online community convergence and creative thinking about raising money - in this case for Making Strides, the American Cancer Society's breast cancer campaign. Connie Reece et al started the Frozen Pea Fund. What do frozen peas have to do with cancer? The answer's here. The whole story's posted at Tech PR Gems.
Thor Muller at Satisfaction has been researching the various reasons Facebook accounts are disabled, and has posted a list. Unfortunately Facebook is in a bit of a fix given its rapid growth – how to manage use and prevent abuse in a crowded, vibrant, rapidly evolving environment. They're disabling accounts without clearly explaining why, mostly to avoid the very real potential problem of spammers in the system. He notes that "you may be disabled for no clear reason at all," and posts this example from an Australian member:
"I was blocked for a little while because I was 'misusing certain features of the site' Naturally I closely examined their conditions of use etc for some insight as to what I must have done wrong. I couldn't for the life of me find anything...
"Upon request for clarification I was told that they were not at liberty to divulge which features or of course any thresholds of use. Then they warned me not to do it again or I would be banned permanently without recourse to reinstatement."
As someone in the comment thread points out, the Australian had mentioned that he was "poking a lot of people" – he evidently breached the poke limit. But the problem Thor's focusing on is Facebooks' termination of accounts without a clear explanation. He says that Facebook is listening, and he has confidence that they'll fix the problem. To me this represents the very real growing pains of a social system.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about group relationship management, "entity-based social networks," identity 2.x, p3p etc - thoughts about decoupling data about you and your social network from specific applications so that you an control it and use it across the web. OpenID was a start, a way for you to store your identity in one place and authenticate against that, as opposed to creating a new identity for each application. OpenID is a great step but not very robust.
Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook has been talking about the "social graph," which is "the network of connections and relationships between people on the service." So the social graph is the bundle of who you are/who you know data some of us had talked about making portable; now a couple of major players, Google and Six Apart, are going to move in that direction. This is significant; it takes us so much closer to the Web 2.whatever sense of web-as-social-operating-system. (Good news for my new company, Social Web Associates; it gives us more to work with in helping our clients establish and extend web presence).
Brad Fitzpatrick, formerly at Six Apart and currently at Google, published a problem statement that's a good summary of what's up:
There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.
Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.
Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there's a lot of hesitation in the developer / "Web 2.0" community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I'm not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It's a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn't own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.
Image: Brad Fitzpatrick's "social graph" sketch. Blogs
My latest Worldchanging column, Understanding blogs, has just been published.
Proponents of professional mainstream media argue the need for authoritative sources; they say that blogs don't fulfill that need because they're created by amateurs. I've discussed this at length with PR professionals and journalists, and I totally get their point. Journalism has a set of standards, practices, and ethics that supposedly ensure the authority of professional news sources. However if you've ever been close to a news story, you know that this is questionable. I've been close to many, and I've never seen a published account by a professional journalist that didn't include factual errors, and too often complete misperceptions. I would never argue against the very real value of and need for professional, tranined journalists, but I would never forget that they are human and inherently prone to error. I would argue that we should forget the myth of the authoritative source and consider the real power in having many voices, many perceptions, many records that are non-authoritative but that contribute to a clearer sense of the news. Our assessment of authority for the "truth" of any account will inevitably derive from the reputations of sources, and a professional journalist may be the more credible source, and the key provider of information and perspective. However bloggers, especially those who are experts in relevant fields, can make a signficant contribution to public perception and understanding of the world du jour.
Face to Face
Facebook has famously opened its platform to application developers; since then, the "social operating system" has picked up more than 2,000 apps for a target audience that "is, by its nature, viral and active." The various apps are so popular that Facebook has limited invitations you can send to ten a day to prevent the perception that the system's becoming a spamorama. Interesting to consider where this will lead.
Dave Morin, Facebook Platform's marketing manager, says that as the development of applications for Facebook matures, he hopes to see applications that are more deeply integrated with Facebook and provide mechanisms for deep and surprising forms of social interaction. Many applications, he says, forget to take full advantage of Facebook's News Feed--a system that notifies people about what their friends are doing. A concert application, for example, could post an item in News Feed telling a user, "Ten of your friends are going to the Smashing Pumpkins concert. Do you want to go too?"
At Polycot, Bill Anderson and I are the Facebook enthusiasts; we figure we'll incorporate it into our toolkit as an essential support for peering and social network development for consultants and small companies. LinkedIn is more focused on business, but Facebook is sufficiently robust to accommodate business and personal uses. I noted that one of my clients stopped emailing me recently in favor of Facebook messaging.
Visual Digg-ingDigg has been experimenting with interfaces that use data visualization. [Link]
Digg is a community of users, and the data produced is real-time information about that community's behavior. As the tools hold a mirror to the community's actions, Rodenbeck says, they may already be influencing the way the community acts, like a biofeedback machine. As the tools become more interactive, this effect is likely to increase and become easier to measure.
"There's definitely a change in behavior when you make that behavior visible, and you can see it," Rodenbeck says. "If a community can see itself and recognize itself as a community, that's a very powerful thing."
Open Facebook
Facebook (which isn't for sale, thank you) is becoming more of an operating system, opening to other companies who want to leverage the social network as a platform for their applications. The quiet guys are always the smartest. [Link]
Facebook aims to be a central clearinghouse for software developers, borrowing a few pages from the decades-old strategy playbooks of Microsoft or IBM, while retaining the flexibility of the new generation of Web-delivered services.
Thanks to Bijoy for the pointer.
Taking Twitter a little too seriously?Annalee Newitz suggests that civilization may collapse with a twitter, not a bang. [Link]
In other words, will maintaining ourselves in Twitter time -- constantly growing the population, constantly using resources -- kill us? Bettencourt and his colleagues say that's a very real possibility.Technopolitics panel
One outcome of their model proposes that a society in Twitter time will collapse when it uses up all its resources. The population will drop off precipitously, and as it drops our pace of life will slow exponentially. Of course, there's another way. An equally real possibility is that urban cultures go through phases of Twitter time, then slow down again for a while, essentially "resetting" the model.
I was part of the Austin Social Media Club's panel on social media and politics tonight. It was very good, and I made some new friends, including Chris Leonard, a great guy with a dry wit who's done a lot of social media work for the Republicans in Texas. Somehow I don't have many Republican friends (big surprise), but the ones I meet are funny and interesting, not at all evil. Take your party back, guys!
We probably talked too much about the impact of social media on elections, and too little about social media and participation in policy formation (which I did bring up toward the end). However no complaints - it was lively and well-moderated (by Mike Chapman, who's worked as a lobbyist/government affairs specialist and was a cofounder of the local SMC. I hope to see more of my fellow panelists.
Photo: yers truly, with Sam McCabe, Mike Chapman, Eileen Smith, and Chris Leonard.
Social Media Club: Social Media and PoliticsThis Thursday, I'll be sitting on a panel to explore the impact of social media on politics, organized by Mike Chapman for Austin's Social Media Club. I'll probably talk about advocacy vs democracy. [Link]
Speaking of the hRelease microformat (as Stowe Boyd does in the post I just referenced), Brian Oberkirch has a note about it, calling it a cow path:
The investigation of the need for hRelease is an entirely different thing. It cannot be confused with the social media press release. Microformats work by suggesting an incremental change to a widely established existing practice. People are lazy. Inertia is powerful. Want change? Let people add a bit more markup to the documents they already publish.
Microformats work by paving the cow paths. Now, anyone can suggest and formalize a set of semantic markup practices. The PRSA could do this; the business wires could do this. We’ll get much more traction by working within the microformats community and adhering to its process. To have agreement on a microformat (the brand is important) for press releases will help gain traction with tool developers, publishers and companies like Yahoo, AOL and MSFT which are already moving to support microformats. (The GOOG, a conspicuous absence.)
You simply can’t reinvent the press release and get a microformat for it at the same time.hRelease will be a semantic encoding of a data set suggested by the Social Media Press Release – which in its flat form is more of a checklist. Here's a link to a pdf of the SMPR template.
Stowe Boyd seems to've kicked up a fuss in a post about "social media press releases." I like this:
Please, please, please don't talk about audiences when you are theoretically promoting social media. As Jay Rosen has suggested, we are the people formerly known as the audience. Blogging is not just another channel for corporate marketing types to push their messages to markets, eyballs, or audiences. Social media is based on the dynamic of a many-to-many dialogue between people. Yes, people: that's the word that should have been used. Not audience.Also this:
I applaud any efforts, philosophically, that are an attempt to shake the corporate centroids into a real dialogue with us, the edglings. However, I don't believe in hedging, over-simplifying, or reusing outdated rhetoric in an attempt to make it easier for the poor, benighted corporate types to make the trip to the promised land without hard work. The core dynamics of webology can't be put aside for the sake of offering PR agencies' clients a baby step by baby step path into the new age of interaction. We are putting aside lying, so let's not even lie to the liers. Let's not perpetuate false and misleading metaphors, like "audiences" and "crafting messages for our markets".
Let's get down to the real basics. We are people. We are already engaged in conversation among ourselves. If corporations want to jump in, fine, go ahead. The water's fine. But you have to drop the old line model in its entirety, or you will have zero success. PR people who really get this, like Brian Solis, Mike Manuel, and many others, can be a great help to companies making the transition. But it serves no one's interests in the long run to make the transition seem easy, or to let the corporates approach the effort with an "as little change as possible" mindset. And those that do so are harming themselves, their clients, and their discipline.(I keep running into centroids who seem to get the edgling perspective, which is good.) Friending
danah boyd has a longer piece on friending and community in social networks (published at First Monday). danah's writing on social networks is authoritative (and she's probably very busy, since social networks are the fad du jour). Everything she writes is insightful. [Link]
Part of what makes the negotiation of Friendship on social network sites tricky is that it’s deeply connected to participant’s offline social life. Their choice of Friends online is not a set of arbitrary personal decisions; each choice has the potential to complicate relationships with friends, colleagues, schoolmates, and lovers. Social network sites are not digital spaces disconnected from other social venues — it is a modeling of one aspect of participants’ social worlds and that model is evaluated in other social contexts.(Photo by Jon L.)
Code-A-Thon
The League of Technical Voters' Code-A-Thon is under way. Kai Mantsch shot and edited a very cool bit of video of the first night:
I also shot a bunch of still photos, posted at Flickr.
Rethinking online social networksI've seen the article I'm referencing here in a couple of places with different headlines, the gist of which is that young people are having second thoughts about communicating online, but the real story is that they're losing interest in social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. A decision to drop online social networks in favor of face to face encounters isn't the same as a decision to "log off" entirely. As I've said before, online social networks that don't have some point other than hanging out with acquaintances aren't "sticky." Users soon become inactive if there's nothing in particular to do. People will keep coming back to sites like Flickr, where they can share photos; LinkedIn, where they can do business networking; or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, where they can quest together or kill each other.
The article says there are still many young people hanging out online, but they may be doing less, and not just because they're experiencing social ennui.
They are more wired than ever — but they're also getting warier.Who's researching social network sites?
Increasingly, they've had to deal with online bullies, who are posting anything from unflattering photos to online threats.
Privacy issues also are hitting home, most recently when students discovered that personal updates on their Facebook pages were being automatically forwarded to contacts they didn't necessarily want to have the information. Facebook was forced to let users turn off the data stream after they rebelled.
Increasingly, young people also are realizing that things they post on their profiles can come back to haunt them when applying for school or jobs.
Great reference: danah boyd is compiling a list of everyone doing research on social network sites. Goal: bring them all together at some point. [Link]
Gartner's high-impact technologiesGartner Inc. says some of the technologies that will have the greatest impact on business over the next ten years are in the Web 2.0-social software realm... e.g. social network analysis and collective intelligence (which they define has individuals working together with no central authority to produce intellectual content... which is commons-based peer production, aka open source methodology).
Other high-impact technologies: location-aware applications, event-driven architecture, and semantic web. [Link]
Socialtext OpenNews from Ross Mayfield of SocialText: today saw the release of Socialtext Open, the first commercial open source wiki. Ross says this is the final step in the company's transformation into a commercial Open Source business. The Open wiki's downloadable from SourceForge.
Enterprise MashupEverybody's doing it: now IBM's buzzing about "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise," with Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, saying
Customers I talk to are abuzz about Web 2.0 and the creation of popular Internet services that seem to quickly appear out of nowhere, becoming instant global phenomena that are enjoyed by the masses, including their employees. They want to apply that new paradigm to make their businesses act faster and grab new opportunities. There's no going back.An account of Smith's speech at the New York PHP conference goes on to say that he "unveiled a new Mashup prototype based on Web 2.0 technologies that applies to industry and business situations." It's called, simply, "Enterprise Mashup." Say what? It "blends external information and Web services (e.g., news feeds, weather reports, maps, traffic conditions and more) with enterprise content and services, instantly "mashing" them together to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific business needs. Mashup, derived from the hip-hop practice of mixing song samples, are a website or applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated user application using open technologies like Ajax, PHP and syndicated feeds (RSS or ATOM)."
New business model: hip-hop for the Enterprise!
In financial services, the Enterprise Mashup can provide a unique Web "radar" that enable users to create a dashboard based on the interests of friends, relatives or coworkers from their computer's address book. For example, a stockbroker can drop a list of client names into the wiki-based Mashup maker and get dashboard view of their interest areas with links to topical blogs, wikis and relevant news feeds from all over the Web. The dashboard shows which client interests overlap with other contacts in your address book. With this view, you can easily get up to speed on areas most relevant to your client's portfolios, read current news stories and find new resources on investment tips you can share. The view also shows how your contacts relate to one another in areas of interests (or investing), so you, or your clients, can make new business connections and expand your corporate network.wikiCalc
Smith credited early pioneers for their innovations in social networking technologies for driving this new capability, and suggested, "there is pent up demand for a new category of applications that until now have been unaffordable for businesses to build. We feel the Enterprise Mashup project begins to address this demand and will help evolve the way business collaboration is conducted in the future."
Cool bit of news from Ross Mayfield: his company, SocialText, is partnering with Dan Bricklin to co-develop wikiCalc, a "social spreadsheet." I'm already thinking of applications for this tool. Ross also mentions that the Open Source version of the SocialText wiki will be released soon. I've been using SocialText all along, and watching the wiki's evolution, and the company's. SocialText rocks.
[Link]
Crossposted from Polycot:
On the onlinefacilitation email list, Christopher Allen posted a link to his detailed post about Dunbar's number, proposed in R.I.M. Dunbar's paper Co-evolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size, and Language in Humans. Dunbar suggests that there is practical limit on group size for humans, generally thought to be 150 (as suggested in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and other books on human social networks). Chris sees this as a misunderstanding of Dunbar's work, which "suggests that a community size of 150 will not be a mean for a community unless it is highly incentivized to remain together." He suggests in the email that "there are at least two nodal sizes of non-survival groups, one peaking at 7-8, the other at 40-60." These numbers are relevant to online communities and virtual teams. Large online communites like the WELL actually tend to contain smaller communities (which on the WELL are organized as "conferences"). Observation tells me that communities may have more members than Allen suggests, but many are inactive or "lurkers" rather than active participants. At Polycot we see the Internet as a platform for a "social Internet" or network of many social networks, the molecules of which are generally within the limits Chris suggests, at least where active participation in any one network is concerned. You could build a social movement as a network of individuals and and smaller networks (hubs). Question is, how do you sustain affinity within a network of "small pieces, loosely joined"?
The boyd factor
Bill O'Reilly interviewed danah boyd about myspace.com March 30; danah's posted the video at YouTube. She does a good job explaining the myspace phenomenon - kids want to hang out at myspace with people they know, they're not there to meet strangers. In fact, they generally ignore adults and strangers, and avoid risky situations. O'Reilly mentions a 16 year old girl who was arrested for putting a nude photo of herself online, and danah says she might've been looking for a date or attention from adults, but something like that would be rare. (Oddly, O'Reilly says the girl put a photo of herself in an unregulated space, but the fact that she's been charged with a crime sorta contradicts this view of a "lawless" Internet where anything goes... but you knew that.) [Link]
Yahoo respondsMy last post, about Yahoo's supposed decision to give up on search market dominance, drew a quick response from Qi Lu and Eckart Walther at Yahoo Search, noting "conjecture and confusion" about "Yahoo's commitment to being the world's best search engine." Great point - the CFO's comment didn't say Yahoo had given up on being the best, but that "it's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search." Best and first aren't necessarily the same. Meanwhile Caterina Fake, now a Yahoo insider, posts about her irritation with bloggers who, she says, took the Decker quote out of context... accusing them of "piling on." I didn't read what others were saying, personally, but I can see where people might've read "abandonment of search" into the quote... but that's clearly not what Susan Decker was saying.
Its Q4 earnings report describes what Yahoo's up to:
First, we are expanding our content match services through the Yahoo Publishers Network to take advantage of the growing number of small publishers on the web. We plan to add new features to beta over the coming quarters including search and enhanced ad targeting. We believe the service will ultimately position Yahoo as one of the preferred advertising partners for small and medium-sized publishers.
Second, we are focused on improving RPS to better matching in relevance algorithms. While our matching initiatives will largely benefit coverage, were also focused on improving tools to drive higher relevance and click through.
And third, we are increasing the number of easy-to-use tools for advertisers and publishers, so they can buy more keywords, touch more creative and add more listings faster.
Meanwhile, to Caterina's point about bloggers and media getting it wrong, I think the bloggers were following media on this one (headline: "Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance"), and her real beef should be with Bloomberg, and not with bloggers like Steve Rubel.
Yahoo! capitulates, sort ofYahoo! doesn't "think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," according to CFO Susan Decker. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share." Indeed... this sounds realistic, and I have to admit I haven't even been thinking of Yahoo as a search company. I consider it more of a media aggregator. If Yahoo's smart, it'll move to the intersection of media and interactivity - more community-based. For instance, if I was Yahoo, I'd be trying to buy Salon and its online communities, Table Talk and the WELL. [Link]
Meanwhile Yahoo! says it's not giving up on search... just search dominance. I guess you could call that a capitulation.
Washington Post: No CommentsThe Washington Post turned comments off at the post.blog. According to Exec Editor Jim Brady, the comments included too many personal attacks. More than the Post could handle... though I wonder if they were trying to use existing staff to moderate? High-volume comment areas, like forums, generally need skilled moderators, or at least experienced monitors (monitors, unlike moderators, do little to drive conversation but remove posts that include trolls or personal attacks). It's economically difficult, though, for a newspaper to staff up with 24/7 moderators, who generally get $30/hour or more for their work. Hopefully the Post will find a solution; the interactivity is vital. [Link]
Google Earth spots a bomber
Interesting things pop up in Google's Earth's satellite views, such as a Lancaster bomber spotted flying over Stukeley Meadows in the UK. [Link to Cambridge Evening News]
Clear images available on Google Earth have sparked contests among users for spotting unusual objects such as the Lancaster. Other sightings include a ghostly apparition of Jesus in a Peruvian sand dune and military ships at sea.Feeding ads
Inevitable: marketers are beginning to plant ads in syndication feeds. [Link]
One attraction of RSS ads may be that feed syndication is still in the "early adopter" phase -- meaning that feeds' audience members are not typical Web surfers. For the most part, they have actively set up feed readers and subscriptions -- they've "raised their hand and said I'm interested'," as Ben Fox, senior product manager in Yahoos search marketing division, puts it. "You know from a marketing standpoint that they've invested in their content."Weinberg on Wikipedia
I've posted several items about Wikipedia as a work in progress that draws unfair criticism (and incidentally responds well to constructive criticism). David Weinberger has a longer piece, Why the Media Can't Get Wikipedia Right, (via Cory Doctorow.)
With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well.Spamato
UPDATE: Sad news: I had to uninstall Spamato; it was interfering with Thunderbird's ability to send mail. It was promising, but not quite ready for heavy-user prime time.
In response to my rant about spam, online friend and sysadmin wiz Bryan Venable sent me a few potential solutions, the first of which was a new GPL spam filter sysetem called Spamato, which plugs into several different email clients, including Thunderbird. It's beta, but works pretty well, certainly better than Thunderbird's own system. Spamato lets you choose any or all of several methods to filter spam, and sends all the bad stuff into a spamato mailbox where you can check for false positives. There's some overhead - you have to have Java installed, and you have to specify the location of your Java_Home (which sounds geeky, but clear instructions are immindently googlable). You have to enable for each install, and that takes a little time, and while it's happening you can't do much else. It also comes with annoying sounds turned on by default; you'll want to turn that off quickly. When I first turned it off, I missed the 'save' button for the sound configuration and thought it wasn't working - look carefully, it's at the bottom of the display.
Anyway, fingers crossed - I hope this is a winner.
Year-end #1: Web 2.0The year-end toptens and summary blusters are popping up, should I add to the noise? It's tempting to make a top ten list ('cause they're fun and they force you to pay attention to all the media that's piled up over the year... though I suppose it's odd for a web consultant to create a list of his top ten albums or films or books. The Austin Chronicle used to ask me to contribute top ten lists of technology stories for the year – since this year's been pretty rich where emerging technologies are concerned, I could do that again here.
One important tech story in 2005 lives somewhere behind the buzzword "Web 2.0," a label that suggests we've taken web development to the next level, though for some it means that we're looking for a way to bring the investors back to the table, and that aspect of the story is so perilous that a backlash has developed among those who'd just as soon keep the secret ("Investors - move on, nothing to see here...") After all, money changes everything, and the code phrase for web+money in the 90s was irrational exuberance. The origins of Web 2.0, though, are in the months following the implosion of the Internet bubble. Web innovators and content developers wanted to keep doing what they'd been doing, and since there was no money in it, they reverted to the gift-economy thinking of earlier years in cyberspace, and developed technologies – and approaches to technology – that fed into Web 2.0. Part of the impetus for Web 2.0 was Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a semantic web, which is "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."
Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly created the authoritative overview of Web 2.0, including several more or less related developments that have reached critical mass over the last year or so – but aren't new; e.g. "software as a service" has been around for a while as the "application service provider" (ASP) model, and what's new about the "long tail" is that it's acknowledged (via Chris Anderson's
article in Wired, and having been acknowledged and explained, it's better understood by more people.
The problem with "Web 2.0" is that the term doesn't mean anything specific, and if you haven't read the O'Reilly piece, the reference would be meaningless in the same way that other too-vague, too-general buzzwords are meaningless. "Social software" is another example. I thought it was a good label when I first heard it, better than "virtual community" or "online social networks." However in the minds of many the term was not inclusive of earlier "social" technologies, like forums, chats, and email lists. "Social software" was generally taken as a label for blogs, wikis, social network platforms (like Friendster/Orkut) and syndication (RSS and Atom).
Terms like "Web 2.0" and "social software" may be useful on some (very high) level, but when you're getting down to the nitty gritty of consulting and development, they're useless. You have to be very specific about goals and objectives, and the kinds of functionality that will be most effective in meeting them.
If I was setting out to write a top ten list, I didn't get past the first item, but that's okay. I have three days to come up with more stuff. *8^)
Not your grandfather's encyclopedia...
I've been talking a lot about Wikipedia lately. I don't consider myself an expert on Wikipedia, but I think I get some of the issues that are cropping up after the Curry and Seigenthaler flaps. In case you missed those, Adam Curry changed a Wikipedia item on podcasting and John Seigenthaler complained bitterly about a Wikipedia article that referred to his possible involvement in the Kennedy Assassination (which is absurd; this was evidently an ill-conceived prank). These flaps turned up the volume on discussions of Wikipedia's accountability for its contents. If bad facts appear in Wikipedia, who do you blame? In traditional publishing, you blame the publisher, and that's justified because the publisher has a system for collecting, vetting, and editing content before it's published. However Wikipedia has volunteer editors who review articles and updates after they're posted, not before. The actual contributors can be anybody, and until recently they could be anonymous (though generally traceable through their IP numbers). It's a decentralized system where no single person or entity is clearly accountable for what's posted, yet it works – you've probably heard about Nature's investigation showing that Wikipedia, overall, is about as accurate as Brittanica.
Wikipedia is now requiring authentication for new posts, though you can make still anonymous updates to existing content. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's fearless leader, has said he doesn't want to pursue strong verification of identity, and that Wikipedia should be assessed on the quality of the content, and not identity or reputation.
Is Wikipedia an authoritative source? The Nature study suggests accuracy comparable to Brittanica's – and what source of information will ever be wholly authoritative? Wikipedia actually has advantages: bringing collective intelligence to bear means more minds and more perspectives are represented, and this would tend to mitigate bias. Wikipedia is also more current, and has articles on subjects you would never find in Brittanica. However there's always going to be lag between publication and editorial review, and in some cases (like Seigenthaler's) bad information will find its way into an article and linger. I wouldn't consider Wikipedia a single authoritative source (though I often use it as a reference, and link to its articles).
(BTW, fans of Wikipedia should note there's a fund drive under way.)
EmailList-Managers FAQAnother useful link from Nancy: this is a web site for the growing army of people who start and manage email list. Email's is the Internet's killer app, and it's increasingly complex and demanding. This site also has a FAQ for list members, incidentally, as well as a General Tips and Info FAQ. The FAQs are actually blogs that allow comments. [Link]
Yahoolicious
Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us, which is cool, given that Jeremy Zawodny says Yahoo plans "to give del.icio.us the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community," as it did with Flickr. Yahoo now owns two of the most innovative services to've launched since the turn of the century. If you don't know what this is about, check out The Inuitive Life Business Blog's interview with experts on the subject "what's so cool about del.icio.us." [Link]
Visitors from CapeTown
Tony Carr, David Horwitz, and Stephen Marquard from the University of Cape Town's Centre for Educational Technology were in Austin for a conference, and dropped by Polycot for a visit with Honoria Starbuck and I today. They were in town for the Fourth Sakai Conference, so we talked about the Sakai Project, a Java framework for educational technologies. We also talked quite a bit about the effective use of blogs and wikis in educational environments. The meeting was a blast, We're looking forward to their online conference, Emerge 2006, next July.
CNN on Wikipedia and the wicked InternetCNN's web site has an article about John Seigenthaler's issues with a Wikipedia article's inaccurate statements. The article notes that the false statement was removed and a registration requirement added for posting new articles (though I didn't think that was new). [Link to the article]
According to the article, "The episode demonstrates the lack of accountability that often comes with articles posted by anonymous people over the Internet....Unlike content included in magazines, books and other traditional media, online material can be submitted by just about anyone, often without having to volunteer any identifying information." Ha! CNN's reporter managed to slip in a bit of FUD about the wicked Internet, where anything goes. In one sentence, anonymity is the problem; in the next sentence, it's the lack of editorial authority, the supposed vetting of articles in "traditional media," without regard to anonymity.
I could go on for hours about that one... the implicaiton that "traditional media" is more trustworthy. Think about Fox News, or Judith Miller. Journalists have a code of ethics and a methodology that I respect (I did time in journalism school, so I know how it's supposed to work). However years of experience have taught me that "traditonal" sources are often unreliable. It's better to get your information from many, often conflicting, sources, as you can find online.
What's really funny about this CNN article, though, is that it has no byline. It's anonymous.
Business Week on Generation @I can't think how many conversations I've been in with other consultants and online entrepreneurs who've predicted the imminent death of social network platforms (like Friendster, Google, Orkut, Myspace, etc.) – and I note here that I'm going to call them social networks hereafter for convenience, though I think it's important to distinguish between the technical infrastructure, what I call the platform, and the social network, which is not technology but intangible connections between people. (I make that distinction so that danah boyd won't slap me upside the head; excuse the digression).
There's just no business model, the smart people say. I myself have suggested that social networks lack real juice unless they focus on some object (or obsession), like Flickr with photos.
While we're having these academic conversations, though, the social networks just keep coming, and growing. Now Business Week has a cover story about social networks, focusing especially on Buzz-Oven, which is based in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. When you sign up, you have to choose a region in the DFW area – and there's no option to select a birth year before 1950. Buzz-Oven, like the incredibly popular MySpace, tends to attract a younger audience. In fact the article title is "The MySpace Generation," though later in the article, the author refers to "Generation @," which was clever.
In a way it's exciting to see new, rich online technology applications mainstreaming to the extent that many high school and college adopters take them for granted the way we took the telephone for granted in the last half of the 20th Century. In fact there may be no business model in the sense that some of my colleagues think of business, where the enterprise is distant from its customers, seeing them as "consumers" and "market segments" and knowing them by their statistical behaviors in aggregate. You can't operate communities that way.
I had a vision for this almost 15 years ago, when Paco Nathan and I built FringeWare, Inc. as "a street market in cyberspace." We realized that sellers and buyers had become abstract entities with no real relationship. Stores became soulless interfaces where the people selling the merchandise were clerks with little investment in the business. We figured we could change that by making a community of sellers and buyers, and take profits from the transactions. That's partly what we did, anyway... our vision of online commerce horrified the bankers we talked to. This was before the web existed and before there were secure methods for processing online payments; in fact we had to open a physical store before we were allowed to process credit cards. But, at least for a while, we were getting products from members of our community and selling them to other members. We also published FringeWare Review, a magazine with mail order catalog in the back pages. Through our email list and articles and eventual web site, our customers came to know us pretty well.
It's great to think that we can integrate communities and markets this way, and the potential's there. It can work even if many are strictly-business bottom-line about it, because all markets, including community markets, have people like that - they tend to glue things together. What could kill the goose, though, is greed. That almost happened in 2000, but we recovered because those of us who're passionate about online publishing, commerce, and community wouldn't stop what we were doing, even when we weren't being paid to do it (hence the blog phenomenon). Now we're getting paid again, and that's nice, but we don't have to become zillionaires, it's just not sustainable. A few million would be okay.
But I digress – or ramble – getting back to the Business Week piece... it wouldn't be much of a Weblogsky post if I didn't blockquote something:
Many youth networks are evanescent, in any case. Like one-hit wonder the Baha Men (Who Let the Dogs Out) and last year's peasant skirts, they can evaporate as quickly as they appear. But young consumers may follow brands offline -- if companies can figure out how to talk to youths in their online vernacular. Major companies should be exploring this new medium, since networks transmit marketing messages "person-to-person, which is more credible," says David Rich Bell, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.Podcast tussle (or hustle?)
So far, though, marketers have had little luck creating these networks from scratch. Instead, the connections have to bubble up from those who use them.
Another edit tussle at Wikipedia, this time over the history of podcasting. Adam Curry furtively removed a reference to Kevin Marks' role in podcasting's development, but as Kevin notes, he left an audit trail. Curry's site is down. Daniel Terdiman blogs about the fracas at news.com, saying Curry's been "podbusted." Curry says he "wasn't doing anything evil or posting that I had 'done it all. Merely participating in the process of Wikipedia to the best of my knowledge. Apparently that's not cool if you were a part of history." Depends on the changes you make... but we all know that none of these technologies can be credited to any one person, and the guy who does it first isn't necessarily the guy who does it best.
I don't think encapsulation of MP3 in RSS and the additional scripts that allow you to move podcasts automatically into your iTunes or iPod, wonderful as these breakthroughs have been, are the real story, anyway. You can find plenty of "podcasts" online that are really just mp3 files posted without encapsulation. The real news is that podcasting inspired broader understanding of the grassroots media potential of the Internet. (Thanks and a tip o' the hat to Ewan.)
"Intimate visual co-presence"Via SmartMobs: Howard Rheingold posts a pointer to Mizuko Ito's position paper on "intimate visual co-presence," where couples leverage the convergence of online photo sharing services and camera phones. [Link]
Just as text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, we can expect that pervasive photo sharing will lead to a new set of social practices that differ from what we have seen in the PC Internet space and the mobile texting space. I suggest that intimate visual co-presence may be one of these new social modalities.
Just as text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, we can expect that pervasive photo sharing will lead to a new set of social practices that differ from what we have seen in the PC Internet space and the mobile texting space. I suggest that intimate visual co-presence may be one of these new social modalities.
Map mashupsCNet has an article, "Mapping a revolution with 'mashups' ", that explores various hacks using the Google Maps API with other data sources. "Mashup" is a key convergence technology "...first used in pop music when artists and DJs began playing two songs simultaneously. In technology, it refers to a Web site or application that combines content from multiple sources but appears seamless upon use." One item that I would have included: Google's request to the creators of the Google Maps Wallpaper Generator that they take their tool offline. According to a comment at Google Maps Mania, "it's not that Google is being mean, it's that their license from DigitalGlobe doesn't allow that sort of activity, which could potentially interfere with DG's capability to sell data in to the commercial marketplace." It would good to know just what kind of hacks are not permitted.
Blog!I led a discussion with David Kline about his new book, Blog!, on the WELL. David and his co-author, Dan Burstein, interviewed several bloggers in several fields ... primarily politics, business, and media. (David also interviewed me on blogging and activism.) The interview and the book are full of insights about the state and future of blogging, and are a must-read for those who are trying to grasp the depth and breadth of the blogosphere.
Blogs won't change human nature. But to my mind, a world in which millions of people now have voices that can be heard is better than a world in which only the chosen few "experts" or "pundits" or media do.Microsoft discovers an elephant in its living room
True democracy is messy. And it's true, there's still a lot of narcissistic "talking at" rather than "discussing with" going on. But I liken that to the ego-centric stage that early toddlers go through. Ordinary people -- people who have no special access or reach -- are learning what it means to now have a voice. As we mature and become more confident that what we say is valuable, if only to ourselves and to perhaps a few dozen of our readers, then I really truly believe the "noise" will be pierced by ever-increasing dialogoue and meaning.
Civility comes from confidence and self-assurance that you do, in fact, have the right to speak. Early practitioners of the new social invention of democracy a couple of hundred years ago were not very civil at all. Per capita, there were probably as many nutcases and angry narcissists as there are now. But by the mid-19th century, the average citizen could think of no better form of entertainment and enlightenment than to spend 12 hours listening to a Lincoln-Douglass debate. These were common men and women who attended these events, who eagerly read partisan newspapers, and who lived peacefully with their neighbors who read entirely opposing partisan newspapers.
Does this save the world? Usher in a permanent era of peace? End war?
No. But at least the world increasingly becomes *our* world, a world that reflects the voices and concerns of many millions rather than thousands.
Yikes! Bill Gates has written one of his memos, this time acknowledging that web services (aka "Web 2.0") are a big deal. I thought we all agreed not to tell him?[Link]
Social Networking 3.0?As with previous memos, Microsoft is widely perceived to be late to the party. Mr Gates and Mr Ozzie have announced plans for Windows Live and Office Live, two products intended to become just the sort of free internet services that Web 2.0 is supposedly all about. But both are, in fact, little more than new names for Microsoft's existing offerings, and look feeble in comparison with services offered by its rivals.
This prompted yet another memo from Marc Benioff, the marketing-savvy boss of Salesforce.com, a leading proponent of the “software as a service” model. If Microsoft were serious about Web 2.0 and Microsoft Live, he suggested helpfully in an “internal” memo sent to the press, it should rename its traditional software “Microsoft Dead”. Web 2.0, he said, was not about old companies constrained by their legacy products but new firms such as, naturally, Salesforce.com, Writely, Numsum, Zimbra and Goffice. For his part, Zach Nelson of NetSuite, another software-as-a-service company, says he decided against writing a memo. Writing memos is cheap, he says, whereas “writing software is a whole lot harder”.
Since I've always thought that social network doesn't work as an end in itself, it's great to see heads turning in the direction of object-centered sociality, which is Jyri Engeström's term, it's good to see MIT Technology Review talking about Social Networking 3.0 as social networking that is "object-focused," i.e. "sites offering 'rich media' -- the big buzzword of 2005 -- by encouraging users to share their own content online, including photos, videos, music, and other digital files." However the article doesn't seem especially well-informed, focusing on Friendster and iMeem and ignoring the site that pointed the way, Flickr. Wade Roush would do well to read some danah boyd as well as the Social Software Weblog, good sources of background on social network platforms.
Warren Easton in ExileHere's something that takes the thinking behind the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and others like it to the next level: Warren Easton in Exile, a site that tracks everybody from the Warren Easton Fundamental High School of New Orleans. They're scattered over several states... and the site maps 'em with Google. There's also photos, blog items, polls, etc. Via Nancy White.
Kind of a Penguin Day
Spent today at Urban 15 in San Antonio, at an Open Source workshop based on Aspiration's Penguin Day events. Despite Aspiration co-director Allen Gunn's presence and leadership, we saw this as more of a precursor to a larger regional Penguin Day that we'll put together sometime after the first of the year, probably in February. Today's event wasn't far off the mark, though. We started with general explanations of Open Source for the diverse group that showed up, the discussed actual Open Source implementations such as the use of Webmin to manage the sites hosted by the Metropolitan Austin Information Network, the San Antonio Independent School District's use of Open Source content management systems to support school web sites, the Drupal-based Write On Austin! web site, and the Urban 15 project Nos Unimos, which hosts family photos from San Antonio's historic West Side. In breakout sessions we talked about content management systems, licensing, and Open Source history. We also had a speed-geeking session (where I demo'd WordPress via the "You're It!" blog). Check out a few photos.
Open Content AllianceYahoo and the Internet Archive are building the Open Content Alliance along with several other contributors "will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content." Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle says
The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further-- Universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable. Then the question became-- is it in the interest of enough people and institutions to get there? Some hang-ups have been around costs, rights, and guidelines for sharing. All of these things were worked out for their domains by Internet folks and open source folks in the last few decades. But how are we going build a system that has everything available to everyone?
Hence the Open Content Alliance, where "our guiding principle is to offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of the public domain." Brewster goes on to discuss copyright issues and potential resolution via Creative Commons licenses.
Technorati Tags: opencontentalliance, media
Web 2.0 visualizedVia Polycot I'm all over Web 2.0 in a very practical sense but not doing the conference circuit or waxing theoretical about it, for the most part. Who has time for theory when you're chopping the wood and carrying the water (or Kool-Aid)? Anyhow Nancy White pointed to a swell mememap overview at blog.forret.com, seen larger here, by Peter Forret. "Get/Remix/Deliver"! This is a better version of Tim O'Reilly's attempt, which emerged from a FOO Camp brainstorm.
Glocalization
Web 2.0 as seen by danah boyd is a negotiation between global and local – not so much geographically but virtually. "Think of it," she says, "as a complex tango with information constantly flowing between the global and the local, altered at each junction."
The complex relationship between personal, local collectives, and global must all be modeled in glocalized networks for Web2.0 to work. We need to break out of the global village model, the universal "truth" approach to information access. We need to situate information access in glocalized culture. Folksonomy is emerging as a dance between the individual and the collective; remix occurs as individual and collective responses to the global. They are forms of organizing and situating global information in a glocalized fashion.Flick Off!
Some members of Flickr, the photo sharing community, are threatening to quit the scene if they're forced to join Yahoo's network. Yahoo bought Flickr recently, and the requirement for Flickrites to join Yahoo next year is part of the integration process. Thanks, Emily!. [Link]
At stake is a new user-profile stipulation that reads: "We will be migrating all independent Flickr accounts to Yahoo's network in 2006. At that time, if you have not done so already, you will be asked to create a Yahoo ID (or link your account to your Yahoo ID if you already have one) in order to continue using your account."Wikiwyg
Members' photos will be deleted if they later drop their account with the portal and search engine, disappointing some.
"This comes after many of us have invested so much time and effort; it makes it a chore to do anything except bend over, grab our ankles and smile," said Dana Smith, a San Francisco-based Flick Off supporter whose photographs rank among Flickr's most interesting material.
"If Flickr was honestly concerned about anything besides bank account size, then there would be zero point or purpose to force us into an account we did not originally agree to," Smith said.
"Wikiwyg" is an even simpler form of wiki that's easy to use, I think. Then again, I thought wikis in general were easy to use, and I'm flubbergusted that so many people tell me otherwise. Give the demo a try before the link spammers show up.
Object-centered socialityOnline social network (OSN) platforms like Orkut, Friendster, Yahoo 360, etc. reputedly don't "work," though I can't think of one that's crashed and burned. However most people I know who join OSNs drift away more or less quickly. There's that initial surge of connection as you find or invite many people you know, but once you've done that there's often no compelling reason to stick around. There are exceptions, though, like Flickr, where the social network isn't an end in itself, but a means to another end, sharing and discussing photos.
In a private conversation, Ton Zjilstra pointed to a relevant post by Jyri Engeström on the case for object-centered sociality
the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (as I do) instead of social networks.This strikes me as something a kind of missing link in social network thinking, mapping, and discussions. It explains why Flickr and del.icio.us have vitality that's missing at Orkut or Friendster, though I would argue the latter have served an important purpose. They've been a laboratory of sorts for OSN experimentation. Technorati sold?
Word on the street is Technorati, David Sifry's innovative search engine for blogs, will be sold to "a large search engine company." You can count those using one hand; BL Ochman think it's Yahoo. I won't speculate (but if I did, I'd say Google). Then again, it's just a rumor.
Speaking of Sifry, he's posted an interesting "Blogs and Mainstream Media" chart (that speaks for itself):
This is the kind of data that makes Technorati so valuable.
Computer Mediated Double WhammyThe Journal of Computer Mediated Communication had a double issue in July, on Online Communities and Computer Mediated Collaborative Practices. Looks very rich. Thanks to Jim Downing for the pointer.
SEOYou know you're a real geek when you dream about Search Engine Optimization. I dreamed last night that somebody wanted to bring me in to consult on SEO, and I told 'em "You only need to know one thing: don't bury the lede!" This is journalist jargon, explained here under "structure." On the web it's not so much a question of getting the right lede as getting the right information on the page so that it'll turn up in relevant searches. Search engines don't focus so much on the keyword metatag, which ain't that important anymore (probably because so many people tried to work screwy metatag voodoo (reflected in this list of keyword myths compiled by Jono Craig).
Actually, I could never see myself consulting on SEO best practices since all you really need to know, you can find in online references like the WikiPedia page on subject. However I could imagine consulting on content development for SEO, or strategies to improve page ranking (by getting linked by other sites that already have a good page rank). But there's no SEO voodoo - you "optimize" by being very good at what you do.
Tagadelic interviewAdam Weinroth interviewed Clay Shirky and I about the future of tagging. [Link]
Google Moon
Giddy from the success of their earth maps, our friends at Google have mapped the moon and marked the sites of the Apollo landings. Be sure to zoom in full on the image. [Link]
OPMLOPML has been around for a while (Marc Canter was evangelizing OPML 2-3 years ago and you'll run into opml files used for import/export of syndication feed lists etc.), but there was a surge of interest over the last few days after Dave Winer demo'd an OPML editor at the Berkman blog meeting last Thursday. David Weinberger has posted a good summary of that session:
It lets you work in outline form, press the "save" button and the contents get posted to your blog. To update your blogroll, you open it in the editor, type, link and save. It has nested categories which, again, you edit using the editor. Press "Build RSS" and it does.(The OPML spec is here.) Fourth of July Post
It's OPML all the way through. E.g., the categories are an OPML file. Want to absorb someone else's taxonomy? Open up her OPML file. Want to merge feed subscription lists? Drag and drop. Reorder the way you want, as if it were an outliner...because it is an outliner. You can link an entry to another OPML file and it links in the appropriate content as if it were actually part of the document. E.g., You might link the "Florida" heading to an URL that has an OPML outline of towns in Florida. When you click on the "Florida" heading, you'll see the content of the outline of towns. [This makes it possible for an outline to contain multiple people's expertise. Very cool.]
Happy Fourth of July! My real July 4th post is here.
The vandals got the handlesThe LA Times' experimental "wikitorial" last week disappeared after pornographic images were posted there. [Link - NY Times, requires registration]
"Nothing bad happened really until after midnight on Saturday," said Michael Newman, deputy editorial page editor. At 8:32 p.m. Saturday, a posting on www.Slashdot.org, which bills itself as "news for nerds," directed readers to the Times wikitorial.Group Relationship Management
"Slashdot has a tech-savvy audience that, to be kind, is mischievous and to be not so kind, is malicious," Mr. Newman said. "We were taking stuff down as soon as it went up and staving them off. Finally we had to go to bed. Someone called the newsroom a little bit before 4 a.m. and said there's something bad on your Web site, and so we just took the whole site down."
In 1997 I wrote about a "nodal politics", a network-based alternative to the centralized, top-down efforts that have traditionally used members or supporters as sources of contribution and political power-through-numbers without empowering them to do actual political work. The Internet, a network of networks, seemed to present a model for organizing could be decentralized and, as Jillaine Smith, Marty Kearns, and Allison Fine noted recently, could push power to the edges. I had envisioned a network of groups and individuals that would share information and form ad hoc coalitions, but vision is one thing – making it work is another.
Recently my friends at CivicSpace Labs were talking about needing an API for groups, and I was thinking we need to define and understand social as well as technical group interfaces in the context of an evolving network society. There are projects focused on individual identity (Identity Commons, Identity Metasystem) and constituent relationship management (or relationship of the group to the individual, e.g. CiviCRM), but I'd looking for work on the relationship of groups to other groups as well as to individuals.
While taking a walk yesterday I sorted out some initial thoughts about a concept of Group Relationship Management. Some basic first thoughts:
Assumptions about individual and group networks:
- Individuals and groups are nodes in a network.
- Individuals connect to one or more individuals, and one or more groups.
- Groups connect to one or more individuals, and one or more groups.
- Groups include one or more individuals, formally or informally organized. (Organization is a primary defining characteristic of "group" in this context.)
- Individuals that connect to many individuals are hubs in a network of individuals..
- Groups that connect to many groups are hubs in a network of groups. (I don't think the group/individual relationship, i.e. how many individuals are in a group, is relevant in this context, though an individual group member may be the source of the connection to another group).
The problems we most want to solve:
- Discovery: how do groups and individuals find other groups and individuals that share affinity and are potential partners in ad hoc or sustained coalitions.
- How do groups share data about individuals, and how is data sharing constrained by privacy issues?
CNet just published "Five reasons social networking doesn't work", and I found myself shaking my head as I read it. (My pal Bijoy Goswami sent me the link, and I composed a response that took so long to write, I inevitably want to blog it...)
Starting with the title: we all know that social networking "works," but she's not talking about social networking. She's talking about technologies built to facilitate social networking, what we sometimes call "artificial social networks." And she's not really saying that they don't "work" so much as saying they don't seem to have a viable business model, that they're not profitable... though all she's really said is that Friendster seems to be in trouble. She never mentions Ryze or Tribe.net, both of which seem to be hanging in there pretty well.
As for her five "horsemen":
1) Nothing to do. I've always said that SNs make more sense if there's a targeted purpose, that the technology for identifying connections and relationships will find its way into a mix of tools to support business or organizational goals, rather than existing as an end in itself. That said, some of the SN sites do offer some set of community tools that some people are finding useful. There's a LOT of activity on Tribe, and there seems to be a lot on Orkut, too. And I'm constantly getting LinkedIn requests to help people connect, so it seems to be active and valuable to many of its users.
2) It takes too much time. I don't really get that one - it's not like you have to do anything on the sites, or use all the tools and functionalities they offer. The one SN site that takes a lot of my time is Flickr, but I love every minute of it, and I have friends who are active there though they never got into the other SNs. (This is an instance of the "targeted purpose" thing - showing and sharing photos).
3) Traffic alone isn't enough. Okay, but we knew that. Maybe Friendster thought traffic was going to be enough, but I think other sites are aware that's not the case. Ryze, for instance, has always offered premium services at $9.95 a month. I think Google gained quite a bit of intelligence from Orkut; I always assumed they were using it for load testing, and possibly to try out a few concepts.
4) Strangers suck. I always thought the point was to find your friends, and then possibly meet new friends through those connections. I think the real argument here is that the author didn't find value in networking tools she was using at some site (she doesn't really say which, though evidently most of her experience was at Orkut). But she seems to be speaking pretty subjectively... other people do use the tools, and they're finding more to do than "read profiles over and over." She also says " social networking sites pretty quickly and inevitably degenerate into cliques," - she doesn't cite evidence to support the contention, but I'm sure it's true, though I have an issue with the way she's framed it. Why doesn't she say "social networking sites pretty quickly and inevitably lead to group-forming behavior." That sounds less degenerate, no?
5) We already have the Internet. True enough, but the Internet has always been a network of networks, and the artificial social networks are just another way to leverage network structure and network thinking. It's a pervasive model, no? If you read some of the recent thinking on scale-free networks and complex systems, you find that networks are everywhere, it's inherent structure, in cells and molecules. We begin to consider that top-down social hierarchies may be anomalous, social networks were there first, we called them tribes.
Group Relationship ManagementI've been trying to find time all week to post about "Group Relationship Management," a label I came up with earlier this week in conversation with Allen Gunn of Aspiration Tech. I just sent an email to a list that puts the term in context... here's most of that text:
As far as personal blogs are concerned, I think it's a mistake to consider their value individually. The real power of blogs is in aggregate, and that's why it's important to build information networks to inform groups and individuals and organize responses at multiple levels.
We're seeing many groups emerge and adopt platforms like CivicSpace/Drupal as a focal point of their communities, which may be based on geography or affinity or whatever holds people together. We need to work on structures for identity management ("constituent relationship management") and more - I'm pushing for what I call "group relationship management" (hoping to discuss more at a couple of meetings this summer) - it's not enough to determine how groups manage their relationships with individual members, we also need to consider, in the activist/nonprofit realm, how groups manage their relationships with other groups, and this hasn't been addressed well that I can see. One aspect is how and what data is shared and the privacy implications wrt personal data.
Executive Challenge in the newsAustin's Enspire Learning made the Wall Street Journal with their Executive Challenge simulation, "a multiplayer business simulation focusing on leadership, strategy, communications, and team work." I haven't worked directly with the simulation but heard great reports from folks who used it at the McCombs Business School at the University of Texas. The description at Enspire suggests the richness of the simulation:
The Executive Challenges multiplayer format creates a high pressure environment characterized by the asymmetrical flow of information, rich strategic options, and decisions and tradeoffs that reflect the real world. Players must balance corporate objectives with personal ones, clearly communicate information to their teammates, and demonstrate real leadership.Personal Democracy ForumLearning in the simulation experience flows not only from playing the simulation, but also from interactions with teammates and team leaders, detailed debriefing and strategy sessions, and a board of directors meeting led by senior executives or business professors.
I posted my notes on last Monday's Personal Democracy Forum at Worldchanging.com: [Link]
Nirantar on tagging, and "You're It!"Debashish Chakrabarty of the world's first Hindi blogzine, Nirantar, has posted about tagging with quotes from Rebecca Blood, Ben Hammersley and I – if you read Hindi. If not, there's You're It! a blog on tagging, just launched by Clay Shirky and I and featuring a great "tag team" of bloggers.
Kissing portals goodbyeDeceptively short post from Don Turnbull summarizes the character of "web 2.0" and the obsolescence of the portal concept as we accumulate the tools we need to roll our own. This has intranet implications, too. [Link]
ORACLE’s recent buyout of Peoplesoft may not be so smart in the long, long run when every business unit, not to mention employee, can crank out structured data feeds, tweak simple logic to act on other’s sources and keep up to date with everything in the organiztion with just a few clicks on everyone’s favorite orange button:Thinking about the state of online community.
In a discussion on the WELL, someone questioned whether conversation-based online community has died in the era of the blog. We often argue that blogs are conversations and that blogs in aggregate work as platforms for online community, but they really are less conversational than dedicated discussion forums, so if you focus on blogs alone, it's harder to get the sense of community that you have in more traditional virtual spaces like the WELL. Here's the response I posted:
We're seeing more and more ways to connect, and no one mode is all of the story. The virtual communities I hang out within these days are more fluid and less enclosed than the conversations on the WELL, and you can't zero in on a single technology or mode that the typical community uses. They may have conversations via their blogs, collaborate via wikis, have realtime discussions via chat, do eamil and IM, have conference calls, find each other in social network sites, share bookmarks via del.icio.us and photos via flickr.com, etc. What's happened is that communities are no longer tethered to specific technologies or virtual places. They find many ways to connect, and they keep searching for more.I'm interested in hearing what others have to say...?
Technorati tag: Blogging
Dina's social softwareMy Worldchanging colleague Dina Mehta writes about social software tools, focusing on her own uses and experiences, and inviting others to post comments about their experiences with these evolving tools. (Includes a couple of quotes from yours truly, from an email exchange we had while Dina was writing the post).
WordPress ControversyOn a personal level, let me share a little blog moment I had. Two weeks ago I was at this small Korean eatery in Bangkok, enjoying a fantastic meal. Throughout the meal the young lady at the counter who was glued to her computer screen intrigued me. From her actions, I could tell she was browsing a lot, typing in stuff, then sitting back and reviewing it, and smiling. Then back to more writing. And smiling. I told my husband then that she looks like a blogger!
When we walked over to the counter to pay for our meal, I couldn't resist peeping at her screen ... and what I saw there looked so much like a blog ... except it was in a language I couldn't understand. So curious me asked her what it was that she was doing, and she said she said "blog" ! I was thrilled - there I was, a visitor from India in Bangkok, meeting a Korean blogger. So unexpectedly. She spoke very little English and I speak no Korean .... still we connected at some level, almost as if we were sharing a secret of sorts.
WordPress instigator Matt Mullenweg took advantage of his site's googlejuice to earn some funds for the project, hosting articles designed to game the Google Adwords program, as documented at waxy.org. My pal Jonas Luster, now the first Wordpress employee, has been handling the controversy that resulted while Matt's traveling. Matt's written his own detailed response now that he's back online. I wanted to add my two cents: Matt and Jonas are great guys, WordPress is a terrific piece of software. Putting the articles up was an error in judgement, but they've taken 'em down and they're being responsive. I'm expecting this won't be an issue for WordPress going forward. WordPress users who're concerned about this issue should consider the real message here: WordPress could use more seed money, so if you haven't so far, make a donation.
Population Density in the Online Global VillageThe ability to meet more and more people online and manage those relationships is a great and seductive thing, but there's a downside for social connectors who want to meet, well, everybody. Sooner or later you have a couple of databases that are difficult to manage - the one that lives in various corners of your virtual environment, and the one that lives in wetware, in brain cells that can grow only so far before your head explodes. Adina Levin writes a consideration of this problem...
Tools will surely be helpful. Databases have long helped salespeople remember the names of the children and pets of their customers. Tools can surely be improved. The Linked In form for passing on a reference request is a social horror -- it turns the pleasant, virtuous, social capital-building experience of recommending a friend into a guilt-inducing, bureacratic obligation.Somehow I think we just need to throw more parties and keep passing the name tags around. Activist Technology at SXSW InteractiveChris Allen also rightly points out that the problem isn't just in the interfaces, it's in the social situation created by online network exposure to hundreds of acquaintances; far more than the human capacity for close connection.
We'll also need novels, advice columns, tutorials -- as much or more than tool features -- to handle the social and ethical dilemmas of life in the virtual city.
We issued a press release today about the Activist Technology panels at SXSW Interactive. Nancy White posted the release here.
Marqui: Blog Business Summit
Weblogsky sponsor Marqui was also a cosponsor of this week's Blog Business Summit in Seattle, and the Marqui folks were liveblogging the conference. Some highlights:
In Robert Scoble's keynote, he says that "blogs are useful because they reveal – and enable &nash; 'passion concentrations.'"
Regardless of whether someone agrees or disagrees with the opinion of a blogger, if the topic is something readers are passionate about, they will migrate to and participate in that blog.
Robert says this is why so many journalists are keen on blogging; it gives them insight into what topics and trends seem to be most interesting to readers. Similarly, businesses can use blogging as a window into what customers are saying. No surprise there, but he went on to say that this type of "window" is now being used by some to predict how well a product will fare in the market based on feedback in the first 24 hours. For these same reasons, blogs can now dramatically amplify a product's failure or unprecedented successa la the Halo 2 phenomenon.
Janet posted more notes on Scoble's keynote yesterday:
The brave new world of blogs:
Opportunities: They'll come to you because of your passion and authority in this new world.
Ethics: The blogosphere will 'clean itself out' from lies or mis-representations quickly - usually, within hours. (Remember the Swift Boat Veterans hubbub?) Don't lie in a blog, there are smarter people in the audience than you are.
Momentum: Evangelize your product or service through 'connectors.' If there's a target blogger you'd like to reach in your area of influence, talk to the 5-10 bloggers around your target. They'll blog about it, and your target will notice. (It only takes five people talking about a subject to capture Scoble's attention.)
Fear: The fear of blogging and being exposed? (Or there's a worse fear - what if I blog and no one notices?) Blog. Then blog some more. Keep at it. Keep linking out, and people will pick up on your efforts.
And while we're at it, what if conflicts erupt? (I'm remembering being called "pond scum.") According to Scoble, humans love a good story. Go ahead and be provocative - conflicts between opposing viewpoints engage readers.
On day two of the summit there was a discussion of guidelines and recommendations for employees who are blogging for their organizations.
My compatriot Mitch Ratcliffe also posted about Scoble's talk, and Marc Canter/Chris Pirillo.
One size fits all?Harish Rao of echoditto suggests he wants to see a one size fits all system for progressives that is inexpensive, easy to use, and "does content management, blogging/podcasting, credit card processing/fundraising, bulk email management, event management, metrics & reporting, CRM, and voterfile management (yes, all of these things should be integrated) properly." Of course, CivicSpace has already been moving in that direction, and Polycot has been doing some CivicSpace installs for some clients where our usual custom development approach might be overkill. However I have a different perspective from Harish. I posted this comment:
I'm with Jason Lefkowitz on this. We've had several conversations over the last two years with potential resellers who wanted Polycot to build a one size fits all solution, however this is one of the very things we dislike about the proprietary/shrinkwrap approach to software: in trying to market systems that meet the demands of many potential users, they create bloat and incorporate additional complexity, and there are inevitably pieces of their systems that are below par.Tagsonomy and "out of control"What's great about working with Open Source tools is that you can find and integrate best of breed solutions - and rather than paying a huge sum to Microsoft for some suite of bloatware, a nonprofit or small company can pay a developer/integrator to build a custom system that includes the best applications to meet whatever requirements were defined - and the system can be focused on the specific needs of the organization.
Smart people like Liz Lawley and Clay Shirky (both blogging at Many2Many) have been talking about "folksonomy" or (as Liz labels the concept) "social tagging," and Clay makes a great point:
But this is where the acceptance half comes in. It doesnt matter whether we accept folksonomies, because were not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of publishing means the mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move. I think Lizs examination of the ways that folksonomies are inferior to other cataloging methods is vital, not because well get to choose whether folksonomies spread, but because we might be able to affect how they spread, by identifying ways of improving them as we go.Cory extends the metaphor to other aspects of the evolving net-driven media ecology:To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidily and monotonically down a route determined by the enviroment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction wre moving in.
These paragraphs could just as readily apply to changes in copyright, lossily compressed music, or spam: they are characteristics inherent in the ecology itself. The discussion needs to center around how to exist in their presence, not how to change them.One of my friends who'd done est once gave me a tape by Werner Erhard, and a comment from that tape stuck with me despite my skepticism about est in general: Erhard talked about shooting the rapids, and how you have to be "totally in control out of control." That's generally how to exist in their presence, I think. We can't control the evolving media or information ecology, but we have some control over our relationship with it, and that's significant.
Thinking about how this all relates to cointelligence , the wisdom of crowds, and extreme democracy. Also smart mobs. A common argument against democracy is about tyranny of the majority or mob rule, but there's some evidence that "mobs" can be more intelligent than their individual members. Perhaps what I'm calling media ecology is a social ecology, and the collective thinking/action that drives it is more intelligent than I often think.
Web 2.0 Spam Squashing SummitEver think that Google could take the lead in stopping comment spam by figuring out how to ignore links posted within blog comments? Since the purpose of comment spam is to create more links to sites and boost page ranking, ignoring those links would remove the incentive to spam. Yesterday Google announced a program to do just that, by working with blog software makers, who can modify their software so that links within comments get a rel="nofollow" attribute that will tell Google to ignore the links. Meanwhile David Sifry has called for a Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit.
Tags: spamsummit
Technorati has winners!Technorati, the system that tracks weblogs to show who's linking to what – and who's being linked – just ended its first developers' contest and announced winners, developers judged to have made the most innovative uses of the Technorati API. The big winner was Joshua Tauberer at GovTrack, which tracks bloggers' posts about legislation. (Congratulations, Joshua!)
Folksonomies R UsWhat's "folksonomy"? Wikipedia has a good definition:
Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace. This feature has begun appearing in a variety of social software. At present, the best examples of online folksonomies are social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, a bookmark sharing site, and Flickr, for photo sharing. Gmail's labeling system is somewhat similar to the use of tags, but it is not a folksonomy because users cannot share their categorizations. Folksonomy is related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.Louis Rosenfeld is critical of folksonomies, and Clay is critical of Rosenfeld. I think actual practice will prove Clay right:Folksonomies work best when a number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us, many people have bookmarked wikipedia (http://del.icio.us/url/bca8b85b54a7e6c01a1bcfaf15be1df5), each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular.
Any comparison of the advantages of folksonomies vs. other, more rigorous forms of categorization that doesnt consider the cost to create, maintain, use and enforce the added rigor will miss the actual factors affecting the spread of folksonomies. Where the internet is concerned, betting against ease of use, conceptual simplicity, and maximal user participation, has always been a bad idea."Larry Sanger's Knowledge Free-for-All"
MIT's Technology Review profiles Wikipedia co-creator Larry Sanger, a professional epistemologist who left the project, partly because of the "revert wars."
...theres a second complaint against Wikipedia that bothers Sanger more deeplythe fractiousness among Wikipedians themselves. Sanger says participants often become embroiled in revert wars in which overprotective authors undo the changes others try to make to their articles. He says hes afraid that this kind of behavior drives away academics and other experts whose contributions would otherwise raise Wikipedias quality.Salon meets flickrSanger may be speaking from the heart. He left Wikipedia in 2002 when funding for his position ran out and no longer contributes, in part because of the lingering sting of some particularly nasty revert wars. He now lives in a suburb of Columbus, and lectures in the philosophy department at Ohio State University, his alma mater. To build a public encyclopedia, you don't need faith in the possibility of knowledge, he says. "What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together."
Calling it "the Friendster of photo sites," Salon profiles the photo-sharing site, flickr.
On most sites, you create your own album or page of photos, and invite your friends to look at them. But on Flickr, you can mingle all your photos with similar images, creating an endlessly beguiling cross-pollination of photos that spark a host of unique communities.The Future of Affinity:
Living Networks with Social Software
Presented to the CenTex Chapter of the World Future Society, November 18, 2004
Thanks for inviting me. This is a huge subject, and I've tried to prepare an overview with some history, a sense of what's happening now, and thoughts about trends.
There are thousands of people thinking about and working on social software and they're all very smart, so every day brings new thoughts and new developments. This talk should give you at least a sense of what's happening.
The Internet is a social phenomenon. It's a communications environment that flows in many directions at once. The character of tools and applications built for use online is that they are interactive. Those of you who have computers that have persistent, always-on connection to the Internet: think how your experience and use of your computer differs from the experience and use of a standalone computer in the past, one that was not connected to others. Think how your relationships have changed since you got that persistent connection.
The killer apps for the Internet have all been about talking and sharing. We share artifacts that are formed from data, and those artifacts are exactly replicable and can be fixed in various media - a new reality that has rendered our concept of intellectual property obsolete. It's also changed the way we think about social relationships.
Blogging for goodThe New York Times has an article about bloggers who use their blogs to organize support for charitable efforts. The article focuses on Strengthen the Good, an organization with the tag line Using the power of weblogs for open-source charity. Don't just fight evil: Strengthen the good..
Now more than 200 bloggers are linking to Strengthen the Good, highlighting the causes that Mr. Nelson brings up. Most of the diarists have not heard of the charities before. But they do not seem too concerned about the groups' legitimacy. They are familiar with Mr. Nelson, and that's good enough.We're looking for people who like to BLOG!"You find someone whose opinions you share, and you're more likely to trust that person," said Meryl Yourish, a veteran blogger (yourish.com). "You consider it vetted through them. That's what Alan is doing here the legwork, to find what's worthwhile. And I trust him to do it."
Rebecca MacKinnon suggests that "we need to think more about how blogging tools and the blogging process can be used by the non-profit and activist community - not only in the U.S. but around the world."
In the final wrap-up session of Bloggercon III, I suggested that socially conscious members of the blogging community (of all political persuasions) might want to organize a "Blogger Corps." Through it, bloggers could donate their time to help poorly funded activists or non-profit groups to figure out what blogging tools are right for them, set up blogs, and develop effective blogging strategies.She's requested feedback in the comments section of her blog. I suggested this might be a project for the Activist Technology group a bunch of us formed during the presidential campaigns. Photomatt
Houston Press has an impressively long, detailed piece about Matt Mullenweg, aka photomatt, lead developer for the Open Source WordPress blog software. Matt dropped by to talk shop with my partners and I at the Polycot offices not long ago; he's a very smart guy, and we expect him to do great things in the future, including further development of WordPress, which is best of breed blog software – if Moveable Type is the Cadillac, WordPress is the Toyota of blog software. Quite a few Moveable Type users switched to WordPress when Moveable Type changed its payment structure, as described in the article:
It's unlikely that WordPress will ever charge users. For one thing, since the coding is available, someone else could just distribute it for free. That's the biggest reason for the explosion of users in the past several months. Several months ago, a competing (non-open-source) software, Movable Type, suddenly announced it would be charging its most active users. The Web exploded with posts about its developers, San Francisco-based Ben and Mena Trott, "sucker-punching the Weblogging community." Around the same time, the number of WordPress users spiked by several thousand.The article (which incidentally is quite clueful about blogging overall) quotes Linux Journal's review of WordPressWell-known blogger Mark Pilgrim, a big supporter of open-source software, wrote about the reasons for his switch on one of his 11 blogs: "This site now runs WordPressI've taken the $535 that Movable Type would have cost me, and I've donated it to the WordPress developers. It's not about money; it's about freedom."
"Over the past few months, we have looked at a number of different types of Weblog software. [WordPress] has a full list of features, many of which have to do with the clean, easy-to-use user interface. Even novice computer users and Webloggers can publish regularly with this software. Although the underlying code and technologies usedare not my favorites, the set of features, growth of the platform and the large community all make WordPress a winning choice."Matt's taken a job with CNET in San Francisco, and the deal he made allows him to devote 15% of his time to WordPress development. Social software loosely coupled
Adina Levin notes, in response to a post by Brian Dennis, that social software is loosely coupled, not within any individual tool, but in the combination of tools (and I would add that this includes tools that link or aggregate output from other tools). In a comment on Adina's post, I note that Nancy White made this explicit for me in a phone conversation a couple of years ago, in feedback on a presentation I was pulling together for an online conference. The emphasis is on the social, it's really all about communication. A good example of all this is Joi Ito's toolkit, which includes a weblog, a wiki, a chat room, and accounts on various systems that give visibility into social networks, including flickr, a site where you can share photos with members of your social network. People like Joi, Marc Canter, and yours truly (among many others) keep working and playing with a stew of social software products and innovations, picking combinations that work for us. When my company consults about communication or builds a site, we suggest a combination that we might build, or that might involve integration of tools that already exist.
This brings me to an important point about the evolution of software in general, especially in the Open Source world. We're getting away from the idea that you build one product to suit everybody, which is the Microsoft/shrinkwrap model, and it made sense when we didn't have the kinds of information networks we have now. You hear complaints about the bloat in Microsoft products, but that bloat is inherent in an approach where one product has to serve many different users with many different applications for that product. The requirements are crazy complex in that case.
However in a network environment you can have a bunch of coders building innovative products for very focused applications. Sometimes the products are built as a core technology, which software consultant-developers customize and integrate into fairly seamless systems to meet specific customer requirements. You can do that with Open Source (or applications where you can acquire access the source code, even if the license is not exactly according to Open Source principles).
My own company sees this as the wave of the software future, so in our consulting and developing, our approach is to do collaborate with our customers on very clear requirements and architecture, then determine whether to build new solutions, integrate exisiting solutions, or some combination of both. We think this is the wave of the software future. I've been working with like-minded consultants and developers in Austin to build an Open Source Business Alliance, and part of our intention is to educate potential customers about this approach. We can build custom systems with a high degree of efficiency and overall lower costs.
There's a community aspect, too. Nonprofits can acquire robust but still affordable systems, and find knowledgeable volunteers to support them. Open Source tools have many adherents throughout the world, in large and small communities, so you're more likely to find a knowledgeable local resource to install, customize or develop an Open Source package. And they can get at the source code and make direct changes, if necessary – something you can't do with proprietary, closed-source software.
Getting back to the question of social software as centralized vs. loosely coupled, the essential point is that it's both, and that's true of other kinds of software, and it's true of the social and political future, too, I think: we can be more decentralized in many ways, thanks to network approaches to social and political engagement, but we still need centralized approaches for some things. To build software that's effective and bug-free, you have to have some degree of centralization and management, but once developed the software can be loosely coupled with other pieces, and the ongoing enhancement, integration and support can be somewhat decentralized. And in politics, we can have decentralized activism, discussion, and debate, but when it comes to making decisions or managing government organizations, we need approaches that are more centralized.
History of Social SoftwareChris Allen has written and shared what strikes me as a first draft of a history of the concept of social software as well as the label (which seems to have been applied first ins the nineties, though not widely adopted before the last couple of years, applied especially to blogs, wikis, and connective tissue (syndication, i.e. RSS and Atom). It's probably useful to establish the history and understand the context for the "technologies of cooperation" (per Rheingold) that are forming robust communications systems in the 21st century. To me the term itself is marketspeak: those of us who do Internet-based communication consulting and develop technologies to support group-forming and interaction needed a label more apt than "virtual community," one that would address business as well as casual applications for computer-mediated communication. However communication is the key (and when I'm wearing the relevant hat I'm more likely to say that I do "communication consulting.")
I can see where Chris might expand his article into a book; hope he's giving that some thought.
Ethan on WikipediaIn my last post, I should have included a link to Ethan Zuckerman's post about bias in Wikipedia and the CROSSBOW project formed to deal with it. CROSSBOW is resonant with Ethan's other work to bring developing nations into the conversation. He says
While I think these are all valid directions, I feel the solution to systemic bias in Wikipedia is the same as the solution to systemic bias in open source software development and in the blogosphere: broaden the sphere of producers. Part of what makes Wikipedia great is that people write about subjects they're knowledgeable and passionate about. I think it's possible that CROSSBOW participants will become sufficiently knowledgeable about the civil war in Guinea-Bissau that they can write about the conflict... but I bet the article would greatly benefit from the perspective of someone who survived the conflict. I think CROSSBOW is mostly likely to succeed if it can recruit people around the world to participate in the Wikipedia project - in their own languages and in English - to help start filling the blank spots in Wikipedia and helping it reach its full potential.Ethan is doing other work (aka BlogAfrica) to make the blogosphere a worldwide multicultural phenomenon. Orlowski slams Wikipedia
I'm irritated with myself for blogging this, it's like feeding the troll. I think Orlowski (who is evidently a smart guy) likes to play devil's advocate to stir up controversy and attract attention (similar to Bill O'Reilly on Fox Network, only Bill O'Reilly isn't an advocate; I'm pretty sure he's the devil.) His latest target: Wikipedia, which he assails as the product of unqualified "wiki-fiddlers" (which he originally wanted to call "wiki-wankers," contributors to "the world's most useless encyclopedia."
Make no mistake, the small coterie of self-selecting wiki fiddlers have done a fine job of producing a hyperlinked encyclopedia that appeals to um, wiki fiddlers. Yards of text are devoted to things that interest, mostly, people who like to write online encyclopedias. It's very much a religious belief, the notion that good stuff will spontaneously "emerge". But what you end up with is a hypertexted junk where Eric Drexler gatecrashes the Buckminster Fuller section and where the entry for "memes" is as long as the entry for Immanuel Kant. (Needless to say, there's no entry for Mary Midgley. We could go on, but you get the general idea).When he refers to the notion that good stuff will spontaneously "emerge", it's Orlowski that's fiddling, or failing to address the real meaning and impact of self-organization. Wikipedia works because knowledgeable people collaboratively refine the entries, and the resulting entries represent a broader perspective than a single "authoritative" view. Those who pay attention to the collection, distribution, sharing, and perpetuation of knowledge – consider Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for instance – understand that "authorities" often constrain rather than expand our understanding of the world. Of course, Wikipedia will have some entries that are weak, and there's an ongoing problem with "edit wars" over controversial subjects, but in all, Wikipedia is a remarkable body of work, and a proof that emergent or self-organizing projects can yield impressive, if not always perfect, results. (Take a look at Wikipedia if you haven't already... maybe you'll be the first kind on your block to create an entry, or make a correction!) Dvorak vs social networks
John Dvorak of PC Magazine has gone out of his depth with a piece about social networks, where he ponders whether they're "Dead Already?". Sites that support social networks have their problems, but they're certainly not "dead." However Dvorak betrays his biases in his second paragraph:
I was getting an invitation to join one or more of these systems daily. LinkedIn seemed to be the most popular at the time. I demurred, since I'm not much of a joiner. But after being hounded and hounded, I reluctantly joined a few of these services and watched my personal network of associates grow.What's a good analogy? A hermit peers out of his cave and proclaims that communities are a bad idea, because he doesn't really like to be around all those people. (After which he's eaten by a grizzly bear, but that's another story...)
Dvorak seems to think that all social networks have the same goals and functionality as LinkedIn:
The idea behind these social/business networks is that with the Internet and these special services, you can put together and control a list of people who have qualified as your friends. These people in turn develop networks that you can access. When somebody from another network wants to get hold of someone in your network, you can forward the request as a kind of qualified lead. "This guy is okay because I know him," and that sort of thing.
He bemoans the fact that "A" list people like Larry Ellison and Hillary Clinton aren't present on these systems, just "B" and "C" list people - he sees this as a drawback, as though somehow the presence of generally unapproachable celebrities would some how make the systems more useful. Then he says
The first thing that happens is that you begin to notice that many, if not most, of these people have bigger networks than you have. You look like a total loser if your network is smaller. So you start to invite people to join your network to pump up the numbers so you won't look like a schmuck. Soon others do the same. Now it's a race. Okay, so I let the guy from Toledo add me so I can add him and get my numbers up. This factor alone ruins the usability of the entire scene, since nobody is qualified at all.Nobody's ever told me they felt like a loser because they had fewer contacts (might be a good research project in that one). And I can say from looking as many others' social networks that they don't seem to be padded in the way he describes here. People may do that, but I don't quite see how that "ruins...usability." I have a hunch Dvorak is talking about himself here, and I don't think you can generalize from one guy's experience, especially if he's already made it clear that he wasn't into the scene in the first place.
Dvorak explains a bizarre experience he evidently had with LinkedIn where he was limited in his ability to contact other members. He could only contact four, and three didn't respond. Since they didn't respond, he surmises that they were "bogus."
On Orkut, he says he "couldn't do the kind of search he he needed to isolate anyone," but he doesn't quite explain what he couldn't do - he's distracted by the thought that some Orkut members might have better looking friends than others, another point where he assumes people are competing. What evidence does he cite for this? None.
He says in his next to last paragraph that he sees "no evidence that any of these systems really work." I.e. he couldn't find a use for them, so how could anyone else find them useful? Did he ask around? He doesn't say. I suspect he didn't.
In the final paragraph, he says his invitations to the services dropped off. He doesn't really say what this is supposed to mean. To me it suggests that most of the people he knew who were likely to do the social network thing had already done it... but it certainly doesn't mean that no one is using the social networks. It's really not just about adding more and more people, after all. The idea is that you'll make use of your connections and communities in various ways, and there does seem to be a lot of that happening... at least to me, when I wander back to Tribe or Orkut.
Finally, he says
After about four months of inactivity, one lone person gave me an invite to LinkedIn, with a canned message that made me roll my eyes. It went on and on about how valuable the network has become for the person.Hmm - well, he's described the rather lame canned message that many of us got via Multiply, not LinkedIn, which has taken quite a bit of care to make canned messages subtle and sane.When I got it, I laughed.
There's a lot to say about social networks, but Dvorak's remarks are basically just bile, nothing constructive in 'em. What I'd really like to talk about is what you can do well with social networks, and how they might be more effective in a context where they are not an end in themselves, but serve another need.
Sell Side Advertising"Sell side advertising" is an idea that's been percolating for a while, finally articulated by John Battelle based on some thoughts blogged by Ross Mayfield, who talks about "Cost per Influence" or CPI. This is a micro-content/micro-payment strategy that requires a bit of technical thinking to create standards for complex secure tracking and validation. I wouldn't say it's an easy problem, but it's doable. The idea is that ads are shared. Scenario: I see an ad at Battelle's site that's a good fit for Weblogsky, so I replicated it at my site according to parameters that Batelle has configured, and when someone clicks through at my site, I share the payment from the advertiser for the impression with Battelle. Next step is for someone to develop the technology, figure out how to secure it, and build a clearinghouse. (Thanks to Joi for the pointer.)
StuckBobby Lilly just sent me a pointer to this article published by cnet last month. David Hornik talks about seeing one of many panels on blogging and social software and realizing they're all pretty much the same panel with the usual suspects. His take on the panel is pretty funny:
"Welcome blah blah blah relationship capital blah blah blah social contracts blah blah blah media businesses blah blah blah identify the rabid fans of the iPod blah blah blah utility media blah blah blah this is the future of the Web blah blah blah RSS blah blah blah spam blah blah blah killer app blah blah blah business model blah blah blah advertising model blah blah blah Is this a product or a feature? blah blah blah A feature doesn't make a business blah blah blah leveraging relationships blah blah blah decentralized system blah blah blah privacy concerns blah blah blah profiling people blah blah blah.But his real point is that we have to look past what we've built and start focusing on practical integraion of useful stuff. (Okay, I might be reading some of my thoughts into his comments, but I think that's what he has in mind.)"Social networking is blogging dumbed down for the masses blah blah blah tribecaster blah blah blah widget blah blah blah What is the connection between social networks and blogs? blah blah blah the most efficient media platform ever blah blah blah read-write, not read-only blah blah blah All software is about people blah blah blah put this stuff in context blah blah blah monetizing relationships blah blah blah a new dimension to the Web blah blah blah I met my wife on Match.com blah blah blah.
"Network diversity is good blah blah blah reputation management blah blah blah open standards and open platforms win always blah blah blah it's group voice blah blah blah social context blah blah blah The entire Web is a social network blah blah blah Join me in thanking tonight's moderators blah blah blah Goodnight."
In the last couple of weeks, I've been in several conversations about Multiply, a social network site that is new and slightly buggy. Judith Meskill told me she'd talked to one of the Multiply principals, and their intention is to create a social network space, not for geeks, but for average Internet users who want to share notes and photos. That's a reasonable focus. If they can make the site more useable, they might have some degree of success.
Otherwise there's not as much innovation as there could be. A couple of sites that do stand out: flickr, an excellent site for exchanging images as well as words, and LinkedIn, a site that focuses specifically on business networking.
But the panelists Hornik mentions are all doing innovative stuff, too. Marc Canter is working on Open Media, Dan Gillmor has just published a book on weblogs called We the Media, and Ross Mayfield is CEO of SocialText, a company that offers business class wikis to companies and nonprofits. Innovative stuff is happening, so I can't completely agree with Hornik's contention that the social software world is "stuck on itself" and not moving forward.
OSN 2004
I nabbed this from Emily Reich's weblog:
OSN2004 will be a summit meeting where you will have a chance to hear from and interact with many of the pioneers in the field of online social networks as well as some of the current trendsetters now exploring the latest technologies and applications.
Novice attendees will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience with some of the latest OSN technologies and tools in a series of safe, supported, activities and virtual field trips.
Experienced users will have the opportunity to engage in direct exchanges with developers and providers to co-create an agenda for new features, developments, and enhancements for the next generation of OSN applications.
Those with leadership responsibilities in their organization for communication, stakeholder engagement, marketing, education & training, outreach, and collaboration will get up to speed on whats new, whats important, and what you can use NOW to leverage OSN tools.
OSN2004 attendees will receive a CD with all the material shared during the event as well as additional directors cut materials you can use to create and support your own OSN applications from Rheingold Associates and Group Jazz - the leaders in training and consulting in the field.
Interested in presenting? Group Jazz and Rheingold Associates invites you to submit a session idea for the second Online Social Networks conference. Your session proposal should fall into one of the following three focus areas:
1. Online social networks in organizations - Who is using them and why? What challenges and opportunities do they present? What are the practical applications of OSNs?
2. Online social networks for personal social and business use - How are individuals using OSNs?
3. Online social networks in the political arena - How have political parties and politicians used OSNs to raise money, explore issues, and mobilize at the grassroots level?
Submission of proposals: no later than 30 August 2004
Notification of acceptance: September 2004
Interested in participating? Register online today!
[Please pass this along to anyone you think would be interested in presenting or attending! Thanks!]
Cliff Figallo is blogging his experiences networking via LinkedIn. Cliff was director of The WELL during its richest years as a virtual community, and has consulted on whole tons of huge online community endeavors ("social interaction on the net" - think AOL, or Salon's Table Talk). It's great to see him blogging away! [Link]
From the responses I'm getting, it feels like the enthusiasm that was dampened by the dotcom bust is building again. Seems like in my field - social interaction on the Net - there is renewed interest coming from many different directions. Organizations looking to get smarter, software developers innovating in the social networking arena.Multiply
I've been looking at a new "artificial social network" (aka "yet another social network") called Multiply, which allowed me to import my orkut contacts and invite 'em, something I thought was a little weird (should they have something to say about that? - well, maybe not, it's just an invitiation... but isn't orkut going to be pissed? probably.) I made the import anywhere, and over 80 people confirmed. Several others sent me messages - sick of social networks, don't like the canned but supposedly "personal" message, or just want to know if this is the one that'll be worthwhile. Bala Palai reminds me that it's not the utilities, but the people that matter, and I say that you have to be able to connect with the people, so if the system slows to a crawl at full load or the interface is gnarly, you don't find the other actual humans. What I do like so far about Multiply is that it was reasonable easy to create a phot album ... and photos are what make social networks cool, in my opinion, so the easier to upload and the easier to find and view, the better. (flickrmay be the ultimate photo site; it'll be hard for Multiply to beat it.)
Social Network Thanatos and Eros JiveNo sooner had I responded to John Barlow's invite to join the new social networked called Multiply than I got an LOL message from Adam Greenfield, who had just post-mortemed the social network thing. Adam refers to
the strongest indictment of all, which is something that I call the "so-what factor": you've spent all this time on your social-networking site of choice, building out a profile and establishing threads of affinity, joining groups and posting testimonials. So what? What's the return on your investment? What have you gotten for all that effort? In my case, the answer is clear - very little but headaches.Adam makes it clear that he's speaking for himself, and I don't share his well-articulated skepticism, though I can't say I get a lot out of the social network sites. Every time I register at one of these sites and look around, I find somebodies I've lost track of, and that can be a plus for me. I also find it cool that people post images – often very good digital photos, so my online life is increasingly visual. I've also formed a better sense of the working relationships among people that I know. That can be useful.
I guess I'm not disappointed because I don't have high expectations for social networks. I certainly don't see them as viable business unless they're placed in a specific useful context. LinkedIn is the one system that might make it as a business, because it's very focused on support for business relationships, and forming the kinds of connections that have value people will pay for.
Bloggerhood is Powerful!Large corporations are learning to pay as much attention to blogs as to other forms of media. According to Clare Hart of Factiva, quoted by the Guardian Unlimited,
After a doctor, the person we would most trust is the average person who's 'just like us' – a company CEO is eighth on that list. It's the same for news sources about companies. After specialist business magazines, we trust family and friends and colleagues; journalists are sixth.[Link] Have a Backup PlanSo it's a pretty shocking piece of research that shows we trust people who we feel are like ourselves and are not out to promote something. That is why blogs have such power. We trust them, and if we disagree with an opinion, we normally have the option of adding our say.
Genius consultant Nancy White sent the link below over the onlinefacilitation email list. It's a blog item by Tris Hussey about the importance of having a technical fallback when you're setting up an online meeting. She also suggests that Flash conferencing tools are emerging as a solid alternative to ActiveX alternatives. (I personally think multimodal alternatives are better and more reliable - e.g. conference call + chat + wiki. You could toss in a PowerPoint or other presentation which can be distributed in advance.) [Link]
"Autistic Social Software"Nancy White has posted several links from this year's Supernova conference at her great onfacblog. She's included a link to danah boyd's "Autistic Social Software". danah's got a great pithy manifesto:
Let's stop trying to dumb down people through technology. Let's step back and build technology that will make sense in the everyday lives of those who use it, that will empower them to use their evolved brain in a meaningful way."You are who you know"
Andrew Leonard of Salon has written "You Are Who You Know," the first of a series of articles on web software that enables social networks (or it might be better to say enables identification, tracking, and visibility of social networks). Social network web sites like LinkedIn, Orkut, Tribe, and Friendster attract a lot of users and have value that many folks don't seem to get. I've heard complaints that the only real value of these sites if that they make you feel good about all the connections you have, and that there's the down side of making you feel like a schmuck if you can't make a lot of connections or figure out what the connections are good for. I was also in a meeting specifically focused on LinkedIn where the question seemed to be, not whether the sites have personal value, but whether they can monetize the connections they enable and build a "real" business model... you know, the kind where you get rounds of financing, build from round to round, have an IPO, then exit the company with a bundle of money. That's the way entrepreneurs build wealth, one down side being that it's become dang near the only way businesses are built, and it's very a very focused and practical way to operate, doesn't leave a lot of room for experimentation. It could be that we really need experimentation to get our heads around the real value of social network software.
But I digress. Back to Leonard's piece – as usual, he's got his head around his subject and does a good job describing how social networks can be effective:
... the not-so-secret secret of social networking is that flimsy is good! Flimsy is where the action is. Seek out flimsy, and you shall be rewarded. As Mark Granovetter explained, for what must have been the thousandth time this year, the counterintuitive key to social networking is that its value doesn't inhere in linking up to your best friends and soul mates. You are far more likely, argued Granovetter, to find leads on a good job or a prospective date from the networks of people you don't know very well.(Thanks to Bobby Lilly for the pointer!) Remail, Identity, and MarketingYou are already probably familiar with the friends of your best friend, or spouse, or close office colleague. There's no fresh territory to plunder there. It's those people with whom you have "weak ties" -- the vague acquaintances, that guy or gal you once kind of knew, a little bit -- who offer a path into possibility that you didn't know was there. The essence of social software networks is that they are a clever way to organize access to the networks of people you aren't actually friends with.
People, especially in the business world, especially salespeople, have been trying to figure out how to do this forever. But it's a tough problem, because once you start dealing with a network that consists of the friends of the friends of your friends, you are confronting big numbers and big complexity. I have 50 "friends" on Orkut -- my resulting network has 410,000 members, and is growing by 20,000 every week!
Doc Searls posts thoughtfully about what RSS might bring to email, and he gets back to Andre Durand's three tiers of identity, where Andre talks about the "identity marketplace," a taxonomy of identity: T1 is a personal identity, owned and controlled by an individual. (You have to be careful here not to confuse identity with person – Andre's speaking in the abstract here. T2 is a corporate identity, or an identity that is assigned to us for some reason, and is conditional and temporary... Andre's examples being job title, cellphone, membership in United Mileage Plus, etc. T3 is a marketing or abstracted identity, like a marketing segment - 'frequent buyer' or 'one time customer,' etc. Doc's idea: maybe we can use principles from RSS to make email something he calls re-mail – relationship mail – using relationship to solve the email problem (by making our T3 email, i.e. spam, go away). Interesting thought - seems to me that's a lot like whitelisting?
Doc links to his 2003 slides for his keynote at Digital Identity World that attempt to redefine marketing in network environments as customer-driven. Paco Nathan and I were talking about this in 1992 when we formed FringeWare, which I called a "street market in cyberspace." Our idea later popped up in Doc's thinking, when he says markets are conversations, kind of the same idea. Early markets were face to face, localized, and set in the context of community relationships. As mass markets evolved, sellers and buyers were disconnected and marketing evolved as an abstract layer between the two. Buyers saw calculated marketing messages, but not people. Sellers saw abstract marketing segments, but not people. Mass media enabled this disconnect and the gap just got wider.
Paco and I saw a potential for the Internet to bring buyer and seller back to a more personal relationship in a community context, so we focused on community first. The business (mail order books and gadgets, what Paco used to call "a Sharper Image for freaks and geeks) ran in the back pages of our magazine, as a catalog or "magalog," and much of the energy channeled through our email list, the FringeWare News Network, which carried content a lot like the stuff posted on the boing boing blog (Paco and I had both been associate editors of bOING bOING, the zine. We caught on globally and locally, and FringeWare had a run of something like seven years, which ain't bad for an ecommerce company that can't do ecommerece (we formed pre-web, when the acceptable use policy of NSF wouldn't allow commercial activity across the backbone; when web technology appeared and the backbone was privatized we were set to do ecommerce, but the credit card companies weren't going for it because there was no standard way yet to secure the transactions).
After I left FringeWare, Whole Foods Market hired me as "Internet guy," their first employee dedicated to the Internet, and we tried a couple of ecommerce experiments. Recognizing that an important aspect of the store experience at Whole Foods was about community, that the store forms relationships with its customers, I pushed for a strong online community presence which we eventually built as part of an ecommerce site that was also information rich (as are the store environments). The experiment seemed to be working pretty well, too, though for various reasons it wasn't sustained.
It's hard to get away from the mass marketing paradigm because effective mass marketing can be so lucrative, and because mass market thinking is drilled so deeply into our world-view, which was shaped and conditioned by mass marketing messages over mass media. Whole masses of people forgot how to do the personal, having spent their evenings, not in conversations with others, but as passive recipients of commercial messages via television. Those messages are interspersed with programming much of which is calculated to feel like relationship.
The Internet is somewhat disruptive of consumer culture in that it's interactive and can be truly personal. The best attempts at marketing over the Internet leverage relationships (consider the community aspects of ebay and Amazon).
We still have a marketers to don't get it, though: the clueless spammers attempt to fill our inboxes with impersonal commercial messages that have nothing to do with who we are. I've always wondered how they could possibly be successful; no one I know actually reads the spam they receive; most filter it and toss it. Apparently they send so many messages that a tiny fraction of responses is lucrative enough to justify the ongoing deluge.
It's time to change our thinking about marketing, and Doc (along with David Weinberger and Chris Locke) authored an important prescription for change when they wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto. (I'm rereading the theses now...)
Love Minus Zero DegreesAlready tracking several artificial social network applications, I passed on Zero Degrees, one of the latest... however I ran across disturbing posts today about an unfortunate glitch in Zero Degrees' process. Evidently the site invites you to upload your contacts, then emails them without allowing you to make choices. Aggressive. Joi also notes how another SN application, Spoke, "Spoke takes all of your email address from your headers and makes a network out of them." On the one hand, sites that give visibility to your social network and allow you to manage and reference some part of it can be useful, as I've found wiith the several I use (Orkut, Tribe, LinkedIn, Ryze). On the other hand, the obvious business model for these sites is about bringing on as many "nodes" as possible, and it's tempting to find increasingly aggressive ways to increase the pool of potential users. I can't help but think this will backfire, it's pretty irritating. Links: Ross Mayfield at Many to Many; Christopher Allen at Life With Alacrity.
Aesthetic Socializing
Honoria posted a LiveJournal entry about our latest discussion of social software and aesthetics. Our goal is to create seminars and retreats on group-forming and group dynamics. We were originally focusing on technology, but I think we've realized it's better to focus on the social aspect and bring the technology in where it makes sense. She's created a great aesthetic exercise to support group-forming via collaborative watercolor. We need to talk more about how that fits our larger intention.
Speaking of social software, I sent a note to John Cooper, who organized the recent business discussion of social software I mentioned in an earlier post. I'm capturing a piece of this morning's note here for future reference:
It was valuable to hear feedback from a diverse, business-focused group. What I would have done differently is frame the discussion in the context of the weblog-driven social software movement that's evolved over the last 3-4 years, and talk more about the interest in evolving various standards for communication, collaboration, and data sharing, and how (or how well) the various SN systems leverage those energies. I also would've discussed the knowledge management implications of weblogs and wikis, and how SNs may be relevant as tools for discovery. (This would probably include a discussion of KM constraints, tacit vs explicit knowledge, knowledge as process, whether explicit is actually 'knowledge' in the active sense of the word, etc.)More on Social Networks
I was at a meeting this morning where several people who are involved in the Austin business scene gathered to discuss social software, with Matt Pardo and David Deans opening the discussion. Matt, who has a web development company called VelocityStorm, is a very smart guy – we've been working together on the Technology Committee for WCIT 2006, and I'm impressed with his organizational skills and his grasp of various web and social technologies. David and I met while I was working on the Wireless Future project. He's a polymath considering many aspects of technology, marketing, and entrepreurial endeavors. We exchanged email over the weekend about business models for sites based on social network technology, and talked a bit more about that today. The gist of the meeting, though, was what value, if any, is there in using web tools for social network development. I wasn't sure that the value is in development... my thought is that these sites help sustain and work with members of your social network. They're all beta to some extent, though, still experimenting with features, waiting to see whether people will hang around and whether there's a clear business model. We discussed how Ryze may actually be sustainable based on payments by gold members and revenues from non-virtual events.
Honoria and I met later in the day to hash out ideas for a social network seminar we've been planning for a couple of months. The technology, we realized, is beside the point. What we really want to do his convey the concept of social networks and their value, and help people find their way into productive collaboration based on relationships that may or may not be mediated by technology. I have to admit, though – it's hard for me to get the technology out of my head. (Meanwhile it's increasingly easy to find critics who're slamming the "artificial social network" meme as pointless. I'm not feeling the same cynicism – as someone said today, "friend of a friend" systems that help us define and work with our social networks seem an extension of the Internet, which is one big pile of social software.
Someone who reads my blog regularly emailed me today that she's uncomfortable with social network sites, that she sees them as a waste of time and an invasion of privacy. This is worth discussion some more, but I'm too hungry.
Microsoft Social Computing SymposiumDavid Weinberger blogs Microsoft's Social Computing Symposium, which was organized by Lili Cheng and Microsoft's social computing group and included many of the usual suspects. David blogs several observations, including Joi's - as usual I find myself most in sync with his thinking:
Joi denies that social networking tools necessarily diminish social lives and/or spirits. Blogs, he says, is publishing, but IRC is "hanging out." Changes in presence are events, and people should be able to know about those events. Social software like Friendster filter this: Who do you want to know about your presence, and at what level of detail? Cellphones give you presence, location and mobility, none of which we've had in computers, and that makes a big difference.
I also like Tim O'Reilly's perspective on the 'net:
Tim O'Reilly: We're in the early stages of building an operating system for the Internet as a platform. We need an architecture of participation. He's excited about Microsoft Wallop because it tries to find the existing implict data about relationships. We should be creating loose confederations that allow us to query distributed personal/social info (with the proper privacy and permissioning, of course). "We need to reinvent the user control of social networks using an end-to-end architecture..."
This morning I attend a meeting with a bunch of Austinites who want to learn more about social networks, and later this morning Honoria and I are going to work on our plan for an SN seminar. About technology for SNs I keep thinking "The map is not the territory, but it's good to have the map." [Link] Pros and Cons of Social Network Portals
David Weinberger has written a piece called Why I Hate Friendster in the latest (and last?) issue of his Journal of the Hypertext Organization (JOHO).
I just posted this comment at David's web site:
"The Internet is not a medium"
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.
David Weinberger notes that the Internet is not a medium, however often that label is misapplied.
The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care about it.Visionary attorney Lance Rose was saying the same thing at the 1998 Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. where he suggested that the Internet should be considered, not a medium, but an environment. A social environment, as Weinberger notes. As John Quarterman, author of The Matrix, recently mentioned in a private email, "The original purpose of the ARPANET was resource sharing, which was quickly extended from sharing computers to researchers communicating to discuss research, which was quickly extended to discussions about other topics, starting with science fiction. So not only has it always been social technology, but it was largely social pressures that caused the invention of much of the technology from the beginning."
Brazil, Texas
Ana Sisnett, Joe Straubhaar, Jim Brazell and I presented via online videoconference to a group gathered by Sebrae in Porto Alegre, Brazil today. Our presentations were coordinated through IC². We talked about social and community networks. Kind of strange, presenting to a roomful of empty chairs and a camera. We each did fifteen minutes, followed by a break during which they came up with questions which we answered in a final 12 minute session. How could online social networks be effective in supporting economic justice and helping the poor? My answer: use the social networks to organize more educated and affluent users toward the goal of working on specific social goals, such as training/mentoring, creating ways to provide access to information technology, and helping those served into their own effective uses of computer technology.
Technorati's New BetaOne of my favorite web tools, Technorati, had a new public beta. Technorati allows you to sort and analyze the blogosphere in various ways. Features include analysis showing what's in the news and what books and films are popular. You can also create watchlists showing the link cosmos for your sites (i.e. who's linking to you). I've been a member and follower of Technorati for many moons; it's great to see new development and refinement as its author, David Sifry, starts building it into a business. Technorati: Searching the World Live Web
SXSW: Aesthetics of Social Networks
I was on a panel called "Aesthetics of Social Networks" yesterday at SXSW Interactive, an idea that Honoria and I came up with while hypercaffeinating at Mozart's. Heath Row blogged the discussion at Fast Company, as did Knut Graf in his livejournal. Also note: many more images posted here, including images from the EFF/Creative Commons party at El Sol y la Luna. Should Bill Gates Control Your Email?
South by Southwest Interactive asked participants in the upcoming conference what they think of Bill Gates' idea of "a caller ID for email," which will soon become a feature of Hotmail. Rich MacKinnon of Less Networks, which provides a backbone for free wireless hotspots in Austin, posts an interesting response. Less Networks uses email for confirmation of registration on its system, an after quite a bit of research, Rich discovered that Hotmail users weren't getting the messages. Actually finding a Hotmail contact required more research; it wasn't clear from the site how to reach someone who can actually have an effect on this kind of problem. Rich did track someone down, and she said at first that Hotmail wouldn't dump email without explanation. After some tests, she changed her story: the Less Network Confirmation had been blocked by "a filter deployed to stop unsolicited email." Remember, this is a system that sends confirmation emails to people who signed up, i.e. it sends only emails that are explicitly solicited by the recipient.
How to get out of this mess? Microsoft is evaluating a third party "Bonded Sender Program," which means Rich could pay a fee and post a bond, and there would be a better chance that the emails would get through - but still no guarantee. [Link]
Okay, so after four weeks of dealing with user complaints and investigation, we are introduced to the Bonded Server Program. This is a program that requires us to pay an application fee, plus post a bond in case of infraction. These fees are not insignificant. Also recall that the emails in question are false-positives--they are being sent on behalf of Hotmail users requesting registration confirmation. Even worse, they are not being sent to a "spam folder", they are dumped. The Hotmail user never has the opportunity to screen them. The Hotmail person said there was no way to address the false-positives, so I had either pay for the chance to send email to Hotmail users or deal with the dumped email. How many thousands of Hotmail emails have been lost in other similar cases where the service providers or the users didn't have the persistence to track down this problem?"What's a Blog, and Why Should Nonprofits Care?"
Based on this experience, I don't have any confidence that Microsoft can launch a whitelisting product that is responsive enough to needed tweaking. Millions of communications will be lost while people desperately use LinkedIn to find someone who's knows someone who works in Redmond..."
Some time ago Ana Sisnett of Austin Free-Net asked Adam Weinroth of EasyJournal and I to help put together a training on blogs and social software. While Adam and I were still getting our time and our heads together, however, Zafar Shah, a very smart and motivated Vista volunteer for Free-Net, created and delivered the training, and Austin Free-Net, one of the oldest and most successful community network nonprofits in the U.S., had incorporated weblogs and wikis as a standard component of their organizational communications tech. Now Zafar's written an article on nonprofits and blogging for Nonprofit Quarterly. [Link]
When she encouraged her staff to blog about their work, Sisnett recognized another benefit of nonprofit blogging: She could now easily keep up to speed on her staff's work and the progress of various, concurrent projects. Soon, between the executive director, the technical staff and volunteers, Austin Free-Net had three staff blogs full of updated and archived information that could easily be incorporated into strategic plan updates, VISTA reports, press releases, newsletters and grants. When a colleague, a sponsor or even a journalist needed information about a project or issue, Sisnett could refer the interested party to a blog.Vote Links
Last year, when we talked about forming the Social Software Alliance around O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, one of our first long discussions was over the need for a standard that would allow you to specify whether you were linking to something because you think it's cool, or because you think it sucks. The Social Software Alliance never quite happened, nor did any final spec for "Vote Links." At this year's conference last week, Kevin Marks and Tantek elik pulled a draft spec together, posted here.
Orkutting Updana boyd posted a little diatribe about the knew social network site Orkut, a new Google project that feels like a beta test of concept and functionality to me. Marc Canter says he was banned from Orkut for reasons unknown; he suspects because he added 300 people right off the bat, but you'd think they would dig that, no?
To get on Orkut you have to be invited by a member, and people are auctioning invitations on ebay. Talk about easy money.
Back to danah - she doesn't dig Orkut for several reasons, including the invitation requirement, which feels elitist to her. I most dig her last three points:
5) Hell, haven't we learned ANYTHING? We still have articulation. But worse, now that everyone is paying attention to this, the network isn't growing naturally. You jump on. Fast. And connect to everyone you recognize. WTF? And what the hell are you supposed to DO once you get on the damn thing?6) And boy is it irritating that everything is broken. I know it's an alpha, but it's too popular to withstand the interest. Can't change picture on certain parts. Can't delete account. Can't get rid of picture. And what's up with the regular crashes?
7) And then there are the Terms that show contempt for academics. There's a blanket ban on robots, collecting information, reverse engineering, and other "unauthorized" use (hello, fair use). You can't even link from the damn thing (i.e. i can't identify myself outside of the constraints of Orkut... like on my own site or identifying a research project in which i'd like people to participate. Thus, i can't use a social networking tool to fucking social network). Of course, there's not much appreciation for anyone else either. THEY OWN EVERYTHING YOU POST!!! You CAN'T OPT OUT! Complete registration only.
And don't worry... they can modify the ToS without any notice.
But however much I see what danah's talking about and want to agree, I still find myself sneaking back and playing. Dean, Software, and Democracy
Mitch Ratcliffe and Britt Blaser have posted insights about the Dean campaign's recent primary losses and Clay Shirky's comments in his post "Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?" Clay has followed up with a post explaining that he wasn't dismissing the use of social software, just trying to understand why the campaign didn't sustain its apparent success in establishing early leads in the polls. My thought is that the campaign did very well using social software where it would be most effective - bringing people on board, creating a community of supporters, raising funds. However the campaign didn't organize effectively on the ground, and that's what mattered most in the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. In retrospect I don't think it was a good idea to bring 3000 strangers into Iowa to solicit support – Kerry focused more on locals, and made sure they had local support to get people to the meetings.
Whatever the case, it's clear that Dean still values the online campaign tools and will continue to use 'em. The Deanspace team's still working away. Social software and Internet communities promise to bring us closer to democracy by bringing more and more citizens to civic engagement. (Not everybody wants democracy - someone was telling me today that we are a republic and should hope to stay that way. Is a republic more practical and scaleable than participatory or direct democracy? Something to discuss....)
Joi: Blogging Panel at DavosJoi Ito describes the blogging panel he sat on at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "I think we all agreed that the ability for blogs to talk with and become one with the audience was key." There's some good ablout blogging in here, like Loic Le Meur explaining that blogging is like "open sourcing" himself. [Link]
What was interesting was the number of people from the mass media in the audience who still seemed to think that blogs were either just poor quality news or that bloggers were just wannabe journalists. One person from a newspaper said that she thought blogs would just become incubators for journalists. I (emotionally) asserted that the mass media and blogs were not the same. Many bloggers (such as myself) are blogging, not for the money, but for a passion which embodies what I believe is part of the heart and soul of journalism. We are not encumbered by the pressures of advertising, marketing and the burden of having to sell print media. It's insulting to think that all bloggers just want to be journalists for print media. I pointed out that big media had a role and that their ability to protect their journalists from litigation and to fund particularly expensive investigations and stories was something we can't do, but the notion that we're just little versions of them was absurd.Ross Mayfield on Wikis
Jim Cashel of Online Community Report interviewed Ross Mayfield about wikis, which are web systems for collaboration in relatively simple text environments which, as Ross says, "are deceptively simple, yet extremely flexible." Ross is CEO of SocialText, a company that makes social software for the enterprise. They've been evolving a wiki version that's easy to use and has rich features. I use SocialText wikis to organize and manage projects, and they're very effective once people get used to the idea that they really are simple to use. The simplicity actually throws people who are used to complex software packages. [Link]
They are also cool because they are the antithesis of traditional enterprise software with its top-down design the imposes process, ontology and structure upon users. By giving users the power to create, link and form groups it serves the domain of business practice, the unstructured collaboration that leverages informal networks. A wiki can serve group activities quickly, so a project can begin with conversation and prototyping instead of waiting for a tool to be created or implemented. Work done in a wiki creates its own usable archive, rather than requiring a side-activity or having designated experts determine what is of value. The bottom-up approach also produces a dense link structure that has its own emergent patterns, with the best content and expertise rising to the top, to inform decisions based on what your organization actually knows.Adina on Esthetics of Social Software
Adina Levin posted a note about the discussions between Honoria and I re. esthetics of social networks and software. Adina notes some criteria. Honoria and I have been looking at three aspects of the subject:
- social networks that form for esthetic purposes (e.g. mail art and network art)
- esthetics represented in the visualization of social networks
- an esthetic of social experience (e.g. harmonious and productive group-forming)
Honoria and I are assembling a panel on the subject for South by Southwest Interactive, along with danah boyd and Molly Wright Steenson. [Link to Adina's comments] Aesthetics of Social Networks
It's probably premature for me to talk about an aesthetics of social networks, which is a concept that Honoria and I came up with while riffing on ideas for courses or presentations related to social software, and thinking about her dissertation, which is about network art both physical (mail art) and virtual. As a result of that discussion, we've been preparing a panel for SXSW Interactive this March called Aesthetics of Social Networks, and we've been looking at it various ways, including visual aspects (network maps) and the concept of a social aesthetic (harmonious group-forming). We're not completely there, but I was thinking about it this morning while reading zephoria's blog, where she's responding to Cory's rant about social network apps that I mentioned a few days ago. Zephoria sez
i'd ask all technologists to consider not only what problems a technology solves, but what new ones could emerge. Start thinking like a writer or an abuser of technology. Imagine how people could misuse a technology to hurt others. Consider who gains and loses power from such technology. It's a fascinating exercise and far more fulfilling than just thinking about who benefits from something. And besides, then you won't always be thinking "but the users shouldn't do THAT with this technology."Joi responds
a lot of the consequences of technology are not predictable and emerge as the technology develops and is adopted widely. I think that in addition to trying to have a vision about the negative effects of technology (which I agree is important) and trying to design around the issues, I think that identifying tensions as they arise and providing feedback to the toolbuilders is important. One of the problem of commercial enterprise is that technologists are often forced to sweep these tensions or problems under the carpet for the better good of profits or commercial interests. Also the cost of changing a design or an architecture often makes such change difficult. I think designing systems to assume they will need to be changed is important. This does get difficult as technologies mature. This is why I think the social software / blog space is interesting. We can still change a lot of the basic architecture of this space. So although I agree it is important to call our to technologists to think, I think that the dialog between technologists and people like you and Cory is more important.which is a good point (i.e. it's important to leverage social networks while building technologies, including those we build to support social networks).
This got me thinking about the aesthetic approach, because it puts the engineering foo and project management wrangles aside for a moment, so that we can look at the process of technology development with new eyes, and think creatively about the project or app as an aesthetic piece. This kind of thinking (outside the box) would live under Joi's carpet where commercial projects are concerned; if I brought this up while wearing my consultant's hat I'd be shown the door. But we now have a world of noncommercial open source projects that people are doing for various reasons, and one of those reasons might as well be aesthetic, and might lead to innovation emerging from those parts of the brain we seldom bring to bear on project work.
Too-Weak Ties Mitch Ratcliffe notes that social network sites aren't as effective when relationships are overstated. [Link] Another Red HerringRed Herring has an interesting piece about social networks as software business. Some of the players are attracting venture capital, but some VCs see social networks as the making of another bubble, which, I suppose, means shiny, empty, and ready to burst at any moment.
The question seems to be whether there's a business model for social network sites, which build followings by attracting, not just individuals, but the networks of friends and colleagues they tend to bring with them. The sites offer various ways for members to find each other, interact, and potentially have productive association that extend relationships, whether in business, romance, or just friendship.
The Internet, which is a scale-free network, tends to support the formation of scale-free social networks. Using the Internet over many years, I know I've come to perceive networks everywhere more readily, evolving a world-view that focuses on links, connections, nodes, and hubs. In the Scientific American article linked above, the authors demonstrate that scale-free networks are pervasive, so the various business entities forming around social networks are finding ways to facilitate what's inherent and capture profits from the resulting numbers.
I've joined five of the social network sites, and I visit four of them fairly regularly. Though the broad premise behind each site is the same, each is a little different in its approach and functionalities. Since I'm kind of a mad networker, I know a lot of people, and each site has a different combination of people I know. There are a handful of people I communicate via Tribe.net, for instance, and I do enough business networking via Ryze to justify a gold membership.
I assume that people will use many such sites in many ways, and those of us who do communications consulting already suggest ways to leverage network effects within organizations using social as well as software affects. There's also political potential in social networks. The Howard Dean campaign has set up its own social network site, called Deanlink.
Meanwhile, come people just don't get it:
Ms. Lee (sic?) of Forrester Research says her main concern with social networking sites is their ability to retain users. Unless I am actively looking for a job or date, I have no reason to go there she says. However, theres more chance that people would return to the major portals if they had their own social networking services. Portals like MSN, AOL, or Yahoo are part of my daily habit, she says.
This is like saying the only reason you'd meet people and hang out is to advance your career or your sex life. The Forrester analyst misses the part where you do social discovery and interaction for the joy of it. (Which reminds me, my colleague Honoria and I are putting together a panel for SXSW Interactive on The Aesthetics of Social Networking. (Thanks to Ross for the pointer !)