1. Liz Lawley on November 19, 2003 2:23 AM writes...

I was interviewed yesterday by a reporter doing a story on this topic, and I actually said that I thought the evite thing had a lot of promise. :)

At the end of the day, it comes down to whether people will see these services as having an ongoing value to them. To be able to find out more about the people going to a party or event is something that I'd actually see as a reasonable value-added service on evite, one that people (okay, one that *I*) might actually pay for.

I'm increasingly convinced that it's the services that have a strong local/location tie-in (like Meetup, and possibly Evite) that will be most successful in this space.

2. Ross Mayfield on November 19, 2003 3:37 AM writes...

My gripe with Evite is only the hype.

What's interesting is how some of the social networking services, like Ryze for example, were first created to augment real world parties.

3. Lee Bryant on November 19, 2003 4:56 AM writes...

Hi Ross,

By strange coincidence I had two long conversations with well informed people in the UK internet industry yesterday about this very topic.

The questions we were grappling with were as follows:

1. Online social networking is obviously fascinating, but will it make the transition (a) beyond early technology adopters to "ordinary people", and (b) will it work outside the USA?

2. Is the level (or direction) of social capital in a given society in inverse proportion to its propensity to engage in online social networking? Where levels of social capital are seen to be low or decreasing (e.g. US, UK), are people more likely to reach out online? Similarly, where levels of social capital are much higher (e.g. China, more "traditional" societies) do people want or need to make new friends online? In most of the world, peoples communities, "tribes", etc are given by birth rather than developed by mobility.

You are obviously thinking about this too, and are probably better connected with the US social networking industry, so I am interested in your insights.

As it happens, regardless of whether this stuff translates well outside the US, I think you are certainly right that diaspora communities are potentially a massive growth area of usage. The question is: can this need be addressed by large player or is it best acheived by smaller community-based companies. Sometimes boundaries are important...

4. Balazs Szendroi on November 19, 2003 8:18 AM writes...

> Note that wiw.hu doesn’t have a power-law distribution...

Hi Ross,

you might want to check this out:

http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/abs/cond-mat/0305580

It's a paper about wiw.hu, written about 6 months ago by my collegue Gabor Csanyi and myself. At least at that time, wiw.hu did actually have a reasonably convincing power law degree distribution (see Fig. 1. in the paper). We also modelled some aspects of wiw.hu, and the best model exhibited clear power law features.

5. Zbigniew Lukasiak on November 19, 2003 9:48 AM writes...

I'd like to comment the Liz comment by posting a link to my wiki page where I contemplate how SocialSoftware can be used in bars, clubs, pubs and all the other places where people go to meet strangers and have fun together:
http://artcom-studio.com/kwiki/index.cgi?MobileSocialSoftware
In short I find many possible uses for this, but the crucial point is that it were in real time.

6. Ross Mayfield on November 19, 2003 12:35 PM writes...

Hi Lee --

1) Yes and Yes. I think its already happening. The second Yes needs to be qualified, however, business networks will transcend first.

2) What a wonderful question. Says' Law applies: the market flocks to scarcity. Similar to how bandwidth is like a vacume. Networks are markets. Beyond the very human need to be social, in the absence of connections -- nodes are state attractors. With a dearth of connections and an abundance of options to connect, what's new is the search and transaction cost for forming connections plummets with these services. But that's just one theory.

What I am not certain of is if more traditional societal structures represent a more heirarchical form with untapped latent potential for the informal network.

Cultural norms provide barriers, such as arrangement or patriarchy, for non-traditional friendship and dating. But the backchannel of connecting online provides ample opportunity to arbitrage and circumvent, at least virtually.

A business network in a more traditional society would be more driven by preferential attachment to existing nodes of power. However, there are even stonger incentives to arbitrage.

You have got me thinking. Boundaries are self-selective. But even in the most traditional society boundaries are transcended from the bottom-up.

The theory of political integration that I subscribe to is neofunctionalism. You can't force large political institutions and societies to merge. But smaller localized decisions to cooperate eventually result in a e-mergent pattern.

Take the EU. First their was the Marshall Plan and former enemies had the technocratic task of distributing aid. These technocrats formed connections across boundaries, felt accomplishment and wanted more. Functional spillover occured from technocratic to social to economic to political and perhaps military realms (e.g. EMU->EU). Never underestimate the power of initial connections, of early adopters, of technocrats. Even overcoming culture or nationalism.

7. Lee Bryant on November 25, 2003 5:24 AM writes...

Thanks Ross.

I agree that business nets will make the transition first, because they also have a higher level of cultural commonality.

You say networks are markets, which for me is American political dogma. It is more correct to say that markets are networks, but the result is much the same ;-) Most networks are actually *not* markets if you look around the world at other communities and societies. Many people would baulk at the idea that their relationships represent some form of value exchange.

You are certainly right that online social networking will provide a backchannel for circumventing traditional barriers, and with the advent of globalisation few cultures are strong enough to resist this. That may or may not be a good thing.

Neofunctionalism is an interesting idea to throw into the mix at this stage. I am very interested in ways that divided societies and states can promote "healing" from below through gradual small steps of cross-boundary interaction, which is essentially a neofunctionalist approach. Now you have got *me* thinking about how to apply this in a conflict resolution / political development arena (which is my background)....

Anyway, aside from the obvious idea that business networks will be the first to translate across different cultures, my money is on online social networks for diaspora groups being one of the biggest areas of usage, but this needs boundaries - catch-all services like the existing YASNs won't do it because they have too few barriers.

Thanks for running with this. It's an interesting area.

8. Ross Mayfield on November 25, 2003 2:15 PM writes...

Yeah, its tough to talk of relationships as value to anyone that isn't an economist, but its a worthwhile exercise.

I'd say of all the facets of globalization that inter-personal relationships is a good thing. But that's beside the point, good or bad, its happening anyway.

Interesting you think that YASNs need *more* barriers

More on neofunctionalism...

For conflict resolution, one of the better approaches is de-politicizing cooperation. Start with something technical and acheiveable. Functional spillover is driven by parties accomplishing something that provides a basis for a relationships and then they will seek to apply that relationship towards increasingly political realms. Its analous to taking property-rights out of the picture to allow open source development to take root and then seeing those relationships being applied to increasingly commercial ends.

9. Lee Bryant on November 26, 2003 4:54 PM writes...

Totally agree that the development of inter-personal relationships is one of the benefits of globalisation. Not so sure I agree that the commodification of relationships implied by seeing them as just "value" exchange is necessarily a good thing, regardless of conventional economic nomenklature.

On barriers, it is accepted wisdom that fences help make good neighbours and I think it is often the de-limited aspect of real-life communities that give them a purpose or a focus. Also, in Dave Snowden's thinking boundaries and attractors are two key ways of influencing the behaviour of actors in complex systems, and I believe these concepts are also important in the development of some kinds of social group.

E.g. the kind of online "diaspora" communities we discussed are not just ethno-specific areas within wider more generic online systems such as Friendster, but rather discrete environments with certain implied or stated barriers to entry.

Obvioulsy YASNs don't need technical or usability barriers to entry, but in social terms the development of unifying characteristics is a basic feature of communities and groups. Maybe porous boundaries can play a role in strengthening identity in sub-groups. It doesn't mean that they should be unconnected to the wider group - just that they know where their "home" is.