Clunky Flow

Read/WriteWeb have produced another of those really excellent “what has happened and where we might be going” articles. Its an exploration of the paradigm shifts that have occured and a look at what’s next after social networking.

I like it. It reminds us of a few things that are so blindingly obvious that they are very often overlooked.

The two foundational observations in the post appear to be:

1. Social interactions have taken over from search as the centre of the internet.
2. People are lazy

Social interactions are at the centre of the new web:

….since Facebook is already widely accepted as the next big thing, the new question is: what is the next “next big thing”? Is it already out there? To start with check out the graph below, summarizing the Web’s stages up till now and our vision for the future:

As you can see, the current trend is for social interactions to take over search as the pivot of the internet. But if you’re not convinced, here are a few examples of why:

• Google and Microsoft’s billion dollar ad partnerships with MySpace and Facebook respectively;
• Yahoo and Viacom’s bets on Facebook;
• Yahoo’s rivals.com acquisition and rumors of Fox offering to sell MySpace to Yahoo! in exchange for a 25% stake.

People are lazy:

Age #2.5 - On-demand Video
It’s a fact that humans are born lazy. Yes, we love spending time on the internet and interact with many things; but still many of us prefer spending our free time on TV and watching meaningless shows…

Age #4 - Joost ???
It’s hard to guess the 4^th phase of the web because we don’t even have the 3^rd one yet, fully. But what the past eras (see ages 1.5, 4 and 2.5) show is that we will end up with the rebirth of online TV. Since we are all born lazy, video on demand is the way to go. And what Joost is offering is higher quality content (thanks to their collaboration with big content providers), higher quality watching experience (thanks to P2P technology) and a legal hassle-free alternative to YouTube, which has already shown tremendous success

This post resonates with me cos it reminds us why we must never underestimate peoples desire to socialize or people’s inherent laziness. We cannot afford to overlook these facts if we want to have a hand in shaping the next paradigm. In fact, its imperative that we embrace these truths of human nature.

Of course, this has huge implications for anyone and everyone hoping to shape the next paradigm. Of course this has huge implications for the semantic web initiative. Any initiative that seeks to succeed by meeting real human needs will have to embrace the social forces that are the hunger for social interaction and the powerful inherent desire to avoid any effort. IMHO new initiatives have to lubricate sociability and interactive flow first and contribute to the commons as a poor but essential second. That is, contributions to the commons made by individual users ought to be mostly invisible to the users as they make them but also such that the users can feel the benefits of cumulative contribution without any particular sense of contributing effort in the first place. In short, quality and rewarding social interactions should be as easily and as readily available to everyone as the air we breathe. How to achieve that is another days post.

A post that will not only tackle the truism that people are lazy but also the truisms that people lie and are also often stupid.

In the meantime, for some well-crafted and entertaining thoughts on how human nature musses up well thought out schema see Cory Doctorov’s “Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of meta-utopia”

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Stephanie Booth’s report on Stowe Boyd’s recent talk @LIFT yesterday has hit on several of the themes I have been running with.

Some of those thoughts are based around what you could call the ’sociable blind eye’.  That’s the ‘blind eye’ that we tend to use in uncomfortable social situations.  The ’sociable blind eye’ allows us to minimise social discomfort and enjoyably participate in social experiences. (~We’ll have a look at enjoyably disrupting social experiences another day ;-)

Most of the time the ’sociable blind eye’ is so habitual, natural and automatic that we are not even aware that we are doing it.  We are only aware that we are enjoying company and thus we subconsciously learn these habits by positive reinforcement. 

In short, hosting and participating in a successful gatherings depends in some part on our ability to quickly turn a ’sociable blind eye’  at the appropriate moment.  Well that, and the possible availability of alcohol.

One side effect of the importance of the ’social blind eye’ in mediating pleasant social interaction is that our get togethers are richly packed with all sorts of absurdities and contradictions.  Observers embracing these absurdities and contradictions are rewarded with a rich and ever replenishing source of comedy material.  Those unfortunates that shun this reality, on the other hand, may be prone to suffer lifelong sentences of teenage existential angst.

So what’s this to do with building social applications? Well, social applications tend to be built in a rational manner, assuming rational desires and needs of their users, expressed and executed in a rational manner.  See also danah boyd’s “Autistic social software”.  Instead we need to be building social applications that embody the absurdities and contradictions that are essential to pleasant social interactions.  We need to be building social applications that embody the ’sociable blind eye’ and other key elements of social interactions and all that these elements entail.

 

Reading the report of Stowe’s talk at LIFT, it’s clear that he is beginning to form a list of some of these contradictions and absurdities in his basic design principles.

Bullet points are lifted from the report on his talk.

• One of Stowe’s pet peeves: Groups and Groupings
• Groupings are ad hoc assemblages of peope with similar interests (from my point of view). (My buddy list categorisation.)

My comments: Wasn’t at the presentation so don’t know what he was getting at here but it may be the (easily overlooked) fact that groups (and networks) only exist in a snapshot of a live vibrant emergent social systems. That is, they don’t really exist as entities with the permanency that we’d like to imagine.  We like to reinforce the idea that groups exist while the truth is that any defined group or networks are normally just a snapshot, a moment frozen in time. Even the most solemn of social partnerships such as marriage dissolve at a rate that indicates the ephemerality of most of our connections.  If we didn’t routinely work at countering this reality with positivity routines such as the teenage ‘best friends forever’ to the adult ‘this time I think I’ve found the one’ we’d have far lesser chance of achieving/creating/finding the reality we seek.  Hope really does spring eternal and enrich the lives of the many.  However, groups do not really exist as we’d like to think they do. 

• Networks are asymmetric, accept it. Everybody is not equal in a group. The groups are always to some extent asymmetric.
• Groups try to be symmetric.

My comments: Yet, we often like to act like everyone is equal.  Especially in informal social interactions. There may well be an explicit ‘pecking order’ in any get together but we tend to avoid acknowledging this explicitly or unneccessarily.  To do so can be something of a serious faux pas.  For example, it is common for an unwritten directive to exist that forbids any member of a get together from explicitly acknowledging one person as the leader of the group. And this directive often comes from the leader themselves.

• Power Laws
• Accept and work with the imbalance of power.
• There will always be people with more power than others, get over it. The recommendation of somebody with more swarmth should count more than that of one with no swarmth. But careful! The people decide who has more swarmth. And you need to constantly counter the games. Natural social systems are self-policient (sp?).
• ….

 

Building social applications: Moving forward 

We need to embody the contradictions and absurdities that are part and parcel of successful social occasions into our applications.

And, we need to do so in such a way as to continue to allow our users to remain wilfully blind to their existence.

That means that all of us building social applications need not to:

1. Perceive that which is habitually ignored by the “social blind eye”.
2. Accept those realities that we habitually and willfully ignore(As Stowe says “Get over it”)
3. Embrace and embody these insights so that they inform our designs in a most fundamental way.
4. Last but not least.  Make the explicit existence of these new design elements disappear once again from the user’s views.   

To expand and finish on that final point, if you want to engineer smooth social interactions it is imperative that your machinations are not too obvious. Social interaction is best lubricated by the conceit that everything is happening in a most natural, flowing manner.  A good host will typically go to every effort to make a gathering feel unforced and natural (less awkward and less clunky) and to conceal the planning and machinations involved in the arrangements.  And good guests will usually reciprocate in appreciation, cooperate and turn a ’social blind eye’ to anything that might expose such a conceit.  As builders of social applications we need to play our part in a similar almost analogous contract.  We need to facilitate social interaction by understanding what makes for good social occasions, provide the platforms for this interaction and then blend our machinations and designs into the background so that we can get out of the way and let them at it!

 

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