Clunky Flow

Shelly Farnham is one of the most insightful professionals working with emerging social tools.  Most of her writing to date has been in academic publications, so she may not have the blogospheric profile of danah boyd or Stowe Boyd or Ross Mayfield.  But now, as cofounder of Waggle Labs, she’s blogging, and you will be missing out on one of the best in the field if you don’t stick her in your feed.
Here’s Shelly riffing on some of the possibilites for next generation social tools once we pay a little more attention to the underlying ‘taken for granted’ dynamics of everyday social interactions.

[Applications facilitating] complex social interactions, requiring not only interpersonal trust but also procedural assistance, are having a new hey day.

… these sites provide procedural templates for social transactions, while leveraging the advantages new web 2.0 social technologies afford by embedding these transactions in a rich social context (e.g., social networks, reputation systems, social tagging). Here is the formula: take any common interaction between two people that’s usually mediated by an authoritiative third entity, study its core elements, develop an understanding of the predictors of a positive outcome, create an online template wizard for the experience, slap it over a social network, add some crowdsourcing intelligence, and voila!

…[so] what common activities and transactions are still in the “chokeholdâ€? of authoritative entities such as specialized knowledge holders, bankers, and editors that could be freed by web 2.0 technology? A few come to mind: the real estate market, legal contracts, small claims court, insurance, education, astrology, psychology….the list goes on!

Just imagine it, an online small claims court where participants agree to abide by the rulings of their peers! Finally, taxpayers can stop paying for judges to resolve conflicts where most peers can mediate perfectly well

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