The Future of Affinity: Living Networks with Social Software

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.

Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, p. 15: "The Internet was deliberately designed by hackers to be an innovation commons , a laboratory for collaboratively creating better technologies. They knew that some community of hackers in the future would know more about networks than the original creators, so the designers of the Internet took care to avoid technical obstacles to future innovation. The creation of the Internet was a community enterprise, and the media that the original hackers created were meant to support communities of creators. To this end, several of the most essential software programs that make the Internet possible are not owned by any commercial enterprise - a hybrid of intellectual property and public good, invented by hackers."

Rheingold emphasizes the collaborative and community aspects of the early development of the Internet because that had a lot to do with decisions about its structure. It was built for collaboration, for community. Since then, more than anything, the Internet has been a tool for community and for social engagement.

A few key technologies have evolved to make today's Internet what it is:

• The Internet itself, which we call a network, but that's wrong: it's a network of networks, where they can form new kinds of relationships to each other, and as Michael Schrage has said, New kinds of relationships between networks create new kinds of relationships between people.
• Email - the first killer app, it was a defining technology, especially when email distribution lists found common usage.
• File Transfer Protocol - the original file sharing, though how would you know where the files were located?
• WAIS (Wide Area Information System) - an early way to find documents on the Internet.
• Archie - search system for files available via FTP
• Gopher - menu-driven system for document retrieval.
• Veronica - search system for gopher
• Usenet - distributed newsgroups that became public conversations
• Online forums - asynchronous interactive discussions similar to bbs systems
• Chat - realtime interactive discussions
• Instant messaging - applications that support one-to-one realtime messaging; some IM software supports chat sessions for a limited number of users. IM was originally just social, but is finding more an more business use.
• World Wide Web - a system for publishing online including support for text and graphics as well as page description
• Content management systems - sophisticated systems for publishing web pages
• Search engines - increasingly sophisticated systems for finding data on the web.
• Weblogs - simple content management systems for personal (and sometimes professional) online publishing.
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) - machine-readable format for syndicating weblog and other content for aggregation by web sites and "news reader" applications
• Wikis - text-based collaborative workspaces
• P2p systems - decentralized systems for sharing files
• BitTorrent - a system that supports the efficient sharing of very large files, e.g. music and video files.

If you look at the prevailing trends in the evolution of Internet technology, they're not ecommerce or publishing, though both are important if not necessarily as profitable as we expected during the madness… er, the 90s.

The prevailing trends are what I mentioned earlier: more talking and more sharing. Ultimately it's about relationships, and those relationships can be represented conceptually as networks: social networks, where people are nodes in the networks and their relationships are the connecting links.

Earlier today I ran across quotes from Michael Schrage, in "The Relationship Revolution" (for Merrill Lynch), where he makes an excellent point about the social uses of technology:

"To say that the Internet is about 'information' is a bit like saying that 'cooking' is about oven temperatures; it's technically accurate but fundamentally untrue."

"A dispassionate assessment of the impact of digital technologies on popular culture, financial markets, health care, telecommunications, transportation and organizational management yields a simple observation: The biggest impact these technologies have had, and will have, is on relationships between people and between organizations."

The traditional economics and established markets for human relationships are yielding to new cost/benefit equations enabled by new media. The coin to this new realm isn't data and information; it's the value and priority that people place on the quantity and quality of their relationships."

What are the latest trends relevant to social software?

• The growing presence and impact of weblogs (blogs), and the evolution of the weblog from a tool for publishing to a platform for conversation and knowledge-sharing. (Trackback)
  
  
• The appearance of sites like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn that give visibility into social networks, your own and others'. These sites can support ad hoc group-forming and collaboration. Expect to see this kind of technology integrated with other technologies for targeted niches. That's where they really belong. (Brazilians on Orkut)
  
  
• Sites for sharing home-grown multimedia: sounds, images, and video. E.g. flickr.
  
  
• More and better technologies for conveying and evaluating reputation (called reputation management). Examples: Slashdot, Ebay. When you're building tools to support affinity relationships, trust is key. Reputation management helps establish trust before you know much about the other person.
  
  
• Standards for conveying personal information, like FOAF, a protocol that allows you to store and selectively share your personal data. Ideally you should own and control data that's about you.
  
  
• Combinations of modular tools like weblogs, Wikis, chats, conference calls or voice over IP to get sophisticated environments for meetings as well as for sustained communication. These will have a relatively light footprint, as opposed to heavier 'one size fits all' tools.
  
  
• There's also the impact of wireless, which brings the possibility of increasing mobility into the mix. Wireless Future project for IC2: If we consider that the web puts the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, then wireless devices that access the web put all that knowledge in the palm of our hand, and we can take it wherever we go. More relevant: It puts the visibility and management of our relationships in the palm of our hand, and supports our ability to sustain computer-mediated collaboration wherever we go.
  
  
• There is a trend away from proprietary applications, toward Open Source solutions. It's important to understand the meaning of this trend: it's about transparency. Proprietary solutions are "black boxes," and you have no choice but to run them as they were built. There is an increasing demand by knowledgeable users to know how software is built, and to have access to modify the code that controls what the software does. And Open Source is generally supported by communities of programmers in collaborative relationships, like the early developers of the Internet Rheingold mentions in that quote from Smart Mobs. To that extent open source is always social software, because it is a product of social process.
  
  
• We hear a lot about "knowledge management," where the idea is to manage, retrieve, and make sense of knowledge stored in documents. Is that really knowledge? I think knowledge is not just information, but information plus process - and if knowledge is dynamic, its management has to address more than its static form. I think some of the tools we've discussed tonight will point toward ways to share an manage knowledge in dynamic computer-mediated environments. Challenging, but promising.

So I've given you an overview of social software, and how it supports various forms of affinity relationships. I'm sure I've missed a lot, for instance we could spend another whole evening talking about political applications of social technology. Thanks again for having me, and I'd be glad to take questions now.