Clunky Flow

Discussions of the unique challenges and opportunities that are part of social software design are making their way into mainstream discussion. This is nice primer for Gentry Underwood.

Here’s some excerpts:

The problem:
“…for all of the press and fanfare, most social software is, well, socially awkward. ”
“…design is profoundly awkward for more nuanced social interaction. ”
“…most social software tools are clumsy and ineffective at smoothly facilitating interpersonal interaction.

The opportunity:
“…From an historical perspective, we are still in the early days of social interaction design.”
“…social software is pretty far from mature”
“…there is ample opportunity to produce something truly new.”

Success requires:

“…different skills than those employed traditionally in software design.”

“…a deep understanding of the unseen elements of relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules in social systems.”

Here’s a link to the original article

And here’s a video of him giving a talk based on that article:

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via Ina.

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From here:

The problem that I’m seeing with most of the current social networks is that 90% of the time spent on those social networks is work that is done in order to maintain currency, keep content fresh, and continue building a sprawling network of friends and raise popularity.

So, what does that mean? What it boils down to is this: If you are working for your social network instead of your social network working for you, you my friend, are standing on top of a classic MMO-style treadmill grind.

I have bobbed in and out of various social networks and there is something that every single one of them had in common: for me to gain any value from that network, I had to go out of my way to perform repetitive, out-of-band tasks just to gain any value from the network. Having been the victim of many a MMO treadmill grind, I recognize an infinite loop of horse poo when I see it, so I bailed.
I have yet to find a measurable value in Facebook or any of a dozen other social networks I’ve played with.

At some point, someone is going to get it “right”, and there will be a social network that gives us tremendous value without us having to sacrifice for the cause, and all of the apologists using MySpace, Facebook, and the others who don’t know they’re apologists will flee to the new network in droves.

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O’REILLY CAPTURES IT IN A NUTSHELL

Conference blurbs usually drop me into a coma with their schmarketing speek. But not from O’Reilly Media for the Web2.0 conference.

Web 2.0 technologies are empowering us in ways we could only have imagined even just a few years ago.
We’re able to… connect more, have more fun,…and do it all faster.
But as the pace…accelerates, separating signal from noise, useful from annoying…becomes increasingly challenging.

How can we provide a more meaningful experience … have a positive impact on the world we live in?…deliver relevant information…increase conversation and collaboration?

Right on the money. And a word perfect context for explaining…

What MAKES RELEVANT MEDIA UNIQUE in the Web2.0 ecosystem.
In a nutshell:
Relevant Media works ‘with reality’.
Rather than working with ‘models of reality’.

All existing social tools begin by capturing something of real life into a model of some sort. Social networks, for example, try to create an online model of your real world social network. Recommendations engines create a model of what to recommend based on the expression of your tastes by you and your friends.

The problem with models:
The problems with models is that by definition they only capture aspects of the real thing

And this in turn leads to instances where the model and the reality clash. For an example you can take any problem peculiar to online social networks. And I include all those problems related to breakdowns of privacy, reputation, identity and trust. All result from incidents where there have been unanticipated breakdowns or clashes between the model and the reality.

Reality bites:
What is needed are tools and platforms that support, merge and coevolve with the dynamics of social reality

Relevant Media’s tools and platforms couple and coevolve with the emergent and dynamic characteristics of real life social interaction as opposed to trying to capture reality and shoehorn it into a model of the real thing.

This is what gives us a unique ability to better answer all those questions raised by O’Reilly for the upcoming Web2.0 expo.

If you are there, make sure to look me up here on Crowdvine and come over for a chat.

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From today’s New York Times

Kids played Dungeons and Dragons in basements instead of socializing. Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator� TV show. I mean, so I hear.

Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.

This diverse evolution from [Dungeons and Dragons] goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

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via Valleywag:

After he left Facebook, Nipon Das wanted the social network to erase his personal information from its servers. Eventually that happened. But only after two months, a lengthy email exchange and — ultimately — threats from a lawyer. “It’s like the Hotel California,” Das told the New York Times. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Facebook PR flack Amy Sezak claims the company is doing users a favor by making it easy to come back to the site after they quit. 6,000 members of the Facebook group “How to permanently delete your facebook account” don’t seem grateful.

Jean Burgess is deleting her account partly because of all these facets of her identity are collided together in an unnatural and unmanageable way on facebook. Which illustrates the point that faceted identity does not scale well and on facebook many people have discovered that it has been stretched uncomfortably out of shape.

Too many worlds colliding, too many invites to vampire garden pirate fishtank zombie kissing applications, and yes, I ended up with kind of too many friends from too many different spheres of my existence (not that I don’t love them all, really) for it to be non-complicated and fun.

And check out what your facing if you want to really remove yourself from Facebook…

Oh, and by the way, in order to delete your Facebook account, apparently, you have to not only deactivate it, but also delete every single item you have contributed to the site (messages, wall posts, posts other people have written on your wall, photos, links to contacts, profile information) and then email customer service and request they delete your account completely. Oh, and also, in order to delete absolutely everything, I’d also have to re-add every single one of the applications I’ve ever had installed, and then go through and remove the content, and then delete the applications again. Because when you delete an application, guess what? Your data is still stored there somewhere.

That’s not just meanness, but I’m pretty sure it’s also not just to be helpful in case you’re quitting in a fit of pique like this one and might decide later that you want to come back. It’s also because of the way the business model works: Facebook and all the marketeers who sail in her pretty much just want you to visit as many ad-bearing pages per visit as possible (that’s what all those applications and invites are for), and having lost your eyeballs, they’d quite like to keep the data that can be mined from those activities. So they’re going to make it as difficult as possible to scrub that data out of the system. Can you guess how much that softens my heart toward the company?

Mark Evan’s compares his relationship with facebook as a kind of ‘amour fou’ that has run its course.

At first, the romance was hot and heavy…It was a lusty, unhealthy affair that made me crazy but you know how lust consumes you…You know that awkward feeling when you’re dating someone, and the romance starts to fade? …I feel that way about Facebook these days…Truth be told, I’ve found someone else - younger, sexier, more streamlined: Twitter. Yet, I’m not as enraptured with Twitter as I once was with Facebook, which is a good sign.

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via Ina

Social network is a terrrible metaphor
If you’ve ever talked to me, I have probably taken you by the pin of your collar and blasted something like this in your direction: ‘Social networks!? Don’t talk to me about social networks! I despise the term. Not only is a terrrible metaphor for reality. Its dangerrous and damaging as well”

We must start using the social cloud
If you didn’t manage to escape at this point, I’d have continued “We need a new metaphor, such as a social cloud, that recognizes the esssential fluidity and dynanism of social relationships. Only then can we hope to build platforms that don’t direct people into autistic-style interactions that plague these so-called social networks”

At which point, I’d generally point up to the sky and get a far away look in my eye. Which was also your cue to slip away unnoticed.

Its not just me…
Well, I think its only fair to warn you that there’s more of the same coming. You’ll no longer be able to escape by simply avoiding me. Other people are starting to say the same thing. Normal people. Respectable people. Using almost exactly the same words. But unaccompanied by the wild-eyed look.

Skip the first 14 minutes and watch to the end.

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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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We’ve known the future has been coming for a while but we never really expected it to come so soon.  Recently, we saw traffic to Bebo overtake traffic to Google in Ireland.  Now, we have this report from EContent matter-of-factly presenting a compliation of expert opinion stating that social networking sites ‘are replacing search as the interface to content’.

Just as search has become the de facto interface to content on the web, so have social networks become the entry-point to a much greater and richer internet experience. The Hitwise study revealed the impact that social sites have had in driving traffic to other destinations on the web. Shopping and classified sites, for instance, received 2.4% of their visits directly from MySpace in September 2006—an 83% increase since March.

Against this backdrop, social networking has become a significant force on the web and a part of users’ daily lives, observes Outsell’s Doctor. “The sites are replacing search as the interface to content.”

And, 

Despite the variety of [user generated content] flourishing on the internet, the range of business models and strategies is limited by a lack of imagination and vision.

The basic concept and architecture behind online social networks like bebo, myspace, facebook etc are indistinguishable  from one another and fundamentally indistinguishable from the originals like sixdegrees and friendster.  Some have said that if sixdegrees and friendster were the invention of the automobile, then myspace et al. would be equivalent to the model-T ford.   

All of this leads one to suggest that there remains a lot of opportunity for the innovative in this space. 

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At etech 2006, danah boyd gave what Kathy Sierra called an astonishing talk.  It ended with this definition of an intriguing problem.  

Is anyone aware of any solutions to this problem going public in the last year or even in the near future?

 

Provide the cultural environment where people can accidentally connect with strangers over meaningful things without being forced to face everyone on the system. Let users privatize or wall off access to only certain people for their own needs. Let users see the values of being public. Of course, balancing privacy needs with public possibilities with the lack of interest in dealing with the *whole* public is quite tricky. Anyone who can solve this design challenge with a robust system will win the hearts of users and investors.

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