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March 31, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Nicklas Lundblad's paper on Privacy in a Noise Society (pdf, via Politech) provides an interesting framework for thinking about privacy in policy and tool design. He contrasts the collective vs. the individual expectations of privacy. If both are high, the result is Privacy Society (e.g. EU legislation), which has high costs of administration and interpretation of privacy laws and investments in privacy enhancing technologies. If both are low, the result is a Surveillance Society (think Orwell), which has high costs of collection, classification and structuring of data and archiving, format conversions and storage. Because information is abundant, he believes that the costs are so high in both cases that a collective privacy border prevents pragmatic policy.
The conclusion is that we are in a Noise Society, with a high expectation of collective privacy and low individual privacy, which pragmatically suggests policies the focus on abuse of abundant information:
An analysis of cost structures gives evidence that seems to imply that we live in a society that is neither a privacy nor a surveillance society. Peculiarly we seem to be living in a society that is a mix of both. The reason for this is simple: the cost of amassing data on individuals is significant to any attempt of mapping large populations. We live in a society where it is possible to chart the life of anyone, but not the lives of everyone.
In a Noise Society, the suggested guiding principle is to avoid attracting attention, or anonymity loves a crowd, which implies avoiding use of encryption and explicit resistance to the system using tools that help blend into statistical norm or generate noise. I find this bothersome, not only because it disrupts community dynamics and discourages diversity, but while a policy that is based on enforcement of abuse rather than constraining regulation -- the social costs are too high.
The fourth quadrant is discounted far too easily: For the sake of completeness it is also possible to include a strange and unusual kind of society where the collective expectation of privacy is low, and the individual level of privacy is high. He suggests this is the relm of science fiction (with a wrong example of the Borg as having high individual privacy) or saunas.
A Network Society of low collective and high individual expected privacy would represent the emerging decentralized structure of the web as Invisible Villages. The policy implication is the same as with a Noise Society, regulate abuse, not design, for enforcement and cost containment. For tool design, the implication is fulfilling the demand for user control of expression of identity, relationships, group formation and information shared. Now that's the strange and unusual kind of society we should strive for.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
I just published a piece called situated software, about a pattern of software creation I think I'm seeing among my students at ITP:
We've been killing conversations about software with "That won't scale" for so long we've forgotten that scaling problems aren't inherently fatal. The N-squared problem is only a problem if N is large, and in social situations, N is usually not large. A reading group works better with 5 members than 15; a seminar works better with 15 than 25, much less 50, and so on.
This in turn gives software form-fit to a particular group a number of desirable characteristics -- it's cheaper and faster to build, has fewer issues of scalability, and likelier uptake by its target users. It also has several obvious downsides, including less likelihood of use outside its original environment, greater brittleness if it is later called on to handle larger groups, and a potentially shorter lifespan.
I see my students making some of these tradeoffs, though, because the kinds of scarcities the Web School was meant to address -- the expense of adequate hardware, the rarity of programming talent, and the sparse distribution of potential users -- are no longer the constraints they once were.
It's a set of observations about a change in programming practices and costs, but also about building software that is situated in an existing community, and takes advantage of that community's behavior in a way that impersonal Web applications can't.
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March 30, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
So all my friends and advisors are at the MS Symposium and I'm crashing the backchannel. During a talk on Activism and Dating, I had to ask if there was a YASNS for dating your political representative or seeking activity partners for activism. Was joking, but then Danyel pointed out Act for Love: because activists need love too....
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Liz has a great post on mamamusings, Confessions of a Backchannel Queen about a back- backchannel. Our story in brief -- during a social software conference yesterday, The Usual Suspects convened on an irc backchannel. At one point, T.U.S. began criticizing one of the presentations as being pitched at novices, which got us an online shushing by one of the organizers.
Liz, rather than meekly staying shushed, then started a back-backchannel, a second irc channel for the snarkiness, which included about a third of the original irc channel but none of the organizers.
But when the snarkiness left the original backchannel, there were some interesting side effects. First, the original channel nearly died. The level and quality of content dropped off significantly as the most high-energy participants shifted their action to the new channel. Second, the level of “bad behavior” in the new channel escalated dramatically. By drawing attention to it, and pushing it out of the mainstream environment, it was focused and amplified. That’s not necessarily a good thing. There were times when went a little over the top, to the point were people were noticing the ripples of laughter at times when laughter seemed inappropriate.
Read the whole thing.
There was an interesting observation during a presentation yesterday about the tension between informality and inclusiveness in online tools. New tools like email and IM get dragged into organizations by the employees, who start by using personal email or IM for business, and prizing it for its informality.
Over time, the tool becomes both inclusive and vital, becoming a core function, and the appearance of business expectations undermine the informality. That is happening now with the backchannel -- if a few connection junkies are creating a backchannel, you can ignore it, but if the backchannel includes half the room, the tension between the informality and control breaks out in the open.
And so we draw behind a semi-permeable membrane, the pattern of the era.
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Posted by Liz Lawley
Over on Crooked Timber, Eszter Hargittai has posted an updated graph showing use of the words “weblog” and “blog” in English-language daily newspapers.
“Blog” outpaces “weblog” in 2003, 687 to 389; that’s a big change—in scale as well as preferred term—from 2002, where the respective numbers were 270 and 274.
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March 28, 2004
Posted by Liz Lawley
I’ve caved.
After all my rhetoric about reading blogs au naturel, I’ve switched to using an aggregator. But while I’m pleased as punch with my new setup, I still have serious reservations about aggregators as tools for “the rest of us”—at least right now.
After reading Cory Doctorow’s description of Shrook—in particular its ability to display a post in the context of its original web page, using the Safari rendering engine to show it with all accompanying styles and presentation—I decided to give it a try.
The result? I’m hooked. There’s no question that it’s streamlined my time online, reduced my at-times overly obsessive checking of favorite sites, expanded the number of sites that I’m able to monitor for interesting ideas, and improved my ability to search for, mark and return to thought-provoking items rather than losing track of where I saw them.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Liz Lawley
Stuart Henshall Dave Pollard asks:
Skype was one of the Top Technologies of the Year in Business 2.0’s list, and it’s wonderful, and free, so why isn’t everyone using it to extend the relationships they develop on blogs?
and…
Why do so few people take up my (and others’, from what they tell me) invitations to call them, Skype them, IM them, to allow the iteration (back-and-forth) that is the essence of true conversation?
While I agree with Stuart’s Dave’s overall message in the post—that we need to find more seamless ways to interconnect our various communication tools (blogs, IM, email, etc)—I’m always surprised when I see people making these kinds of assumptions about what the “best” tools are for individual communication. And the “why aren’t people using Skype” question seems like a no-brainer to me.
...continue reading.
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Posted by David Weinberger
Bob Frankston introduces his new Enemy of my Enemies social network.
(Note: Bob says I dislike the social networking phenomenon, referring to a piece I just published in my newsletter. The piece actually tries to get at the bad reasons I react negatively to artificial social networks, although I do begin by listing what I think are some good reasons to be wary.)
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March 27, 2004
Posted by Liz Lawley
Just found a relatively new blog—Raindrop— being maintained by members of the Social Computing group at Microsoft Research. Interesting posts from some really smart folks. Worth watching.
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Posted by Liz Lawley
This is the kind of thing that makes me very nervous about the future of blogs as a “grass-roots” information medium. From the San Jose Mercury News comes this announcement of a forthcoming blog search service from Microsoft:
Microsoft became the first big Internet company Friday to say that it would create a special search Web site just for Weblogs.
The company said MSN Blogbot will debut in the first half of the year, along with MSN Newsbot, a search site devoted to news.
The service will not index all blogs, just the ones that MSN determines provide the most useful information, a company official said.
“We will look at credibility and popularity to get people the information they’re looking for,” said Karen Redetzki, a product manager for MSN. “There are some blogs that may not be relevant to people. Those blogs we may never index.” Somehow, the idea of Microsoft—or any other corporate entity—deciding for everyone what blogs are “relevant to people” is not reassuring to me. The potential for marginalization of interesting, provocative, or unique voices is enormous.
Why not simply index them all, and let relevance be decided through filtering mechanisms? Either algorithmically, a la Google PageRank®, or via real-world intermediaries (like, say, librarians) who provide a selection of recommended sources based on situation-specific user needs.
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March 26, 2004
Posted by Seb Paquet
Three posts below, Clay describes the civility problems that have grown over at the kuro5hin community as being a result of unhealthy scaling, invoking Shirky’s Law — “The advantages of anonymity grow linearly with the population; the disadvantages grow with the square of the population.”
Actually, Shirky’s law probably doesn’t explain what’s happening there. The active population at k5 has arguably declined, as traffic is down about 40% from last year.
Rusty, the site’s founder, writes, “we simply aren’t the only game in town anymore. There’s a lot more personal blogs, niche communities, and overall things like K5 than there were before.” I think this is a more convincing pathway to an explanation.
This commenter hypothesizes that a change in demographic is actually responsible for the problems, which makes sense if you assume that the more mature/experienced users will eventually gravitate towards more autonomous modes of publishing.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Dan Gillmor is reporting that Zack Rosen, leader of the DeanSpace effort (itself build on the open-source drupal) is now building an easy-to-use open source groupware toolset.
Rosen tells Gillmor his goal is
To establish a permanent foundation that can spearhead social software development projects for nonprofit organizations. Unless an organization is committed to hiring full time engineers to do Web development, the only and most frequent solution is to pay tons of money hiring firms to provide proprietary 'black box' Web application products. These firms a have conflict of interest -- they live off the monthly checks so they have a huge interest in owning the organization's data and locking them into their services.
We want to create a much cheaper, open, and powerful option for these kinds of services. [...]
This is huge. Since the Dean organization was more movement than campaign, the lessons from its use of social software are more broadly relevant than to just political groups.
I can't tell you how often I talk to people who have a sense that there is some set of collaborative tools on beyond email that could help their organization, but don't know where to begin. Part of it is confusion -- they think they want weblogs for conversation, BBSes for shared document creation, wikis for personal publishing, and so on -- and part of it is standard-issue tech anxiety -- can we install it? can we maintain it? how much will it cost? and so on.
These conversations tend to be long and meandering, starting with a plaintive "Where do I even start?" If Rosen achieves what he's setting out to do, it will be a great pleasure to be able to short circuit that conversation by saying "Here. Start here."
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Spring is at last in the air in New York City, and a couple of times in the last couple of weeks, I've seen a curious sight: two women, one sitting on a bench in some picturesque setting -- Cobble Hill park, busy East Village street -- and the other taking her picture.
These weren't photo shoots -- neither the photographer nor the camera were of the professional variety -- but they weren't just snapshots on a fun outing either. The first time I saw it, I didn't know what what going on, til my wife clued me in: Match.com. The next time I saw it, I recognized it instantly -- once you know what the pattern looks like, it becomes obvious. And, like everything interesting about the social uses we are pressing out tools into, it was two parts technology to seven parts humanity.
It was interesting that the photos were being taken outdoors -- the message seemed to be (at least interpreted from the Guy side of the aisle) "If you want to see my apartment, you'll have to wait til I invite you in, even if it's just on film."
The other commonality was that at one point, the subject threw herself into a faux glamour-girl pose, acting out some of the tension of being photographed for anonymous and distributed judgment and channeling some of the images of womanhood that saturate our lives. And of course, the Vargas pose was a cue for both model and photographer to collapse into giggles.
It was sweet, really, a new ritual of friendship for our little corner of the 21st century, when it isn't just models and performers who need to worry about mediated representations of themselves.
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March 25, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
If there were a Shirky's Law, it would be something like "The advantages of anonymity grow linearly with the population; the disadvantages grow with the square of the population." After decades where the native design assumption was that anything that minimized user flexibility was A Bad Thing®, we are in an era where the disadvantages of complete user freedom in communal settings have become too high to bear, whether from anonymous flamers, spammers, trolls, or whatever else.
One solution that seems to be emerging is the addition of semi-permeable membranes, which raise some threshold to participation, as with Six Apart's proposed TypeKey service. Now Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin has added his version to the membrane pattern, adding a "Managed Growth" pattern, similar in spirit to LiveJournal's "Get a user to invite you" pattern of growth.
Says Rusty, characterizing the problem:
So the question is, how do we make it more difficult for obnoxious people to disrupt the site, without barring the gates altogether? And from a wider view, how can a large community like this continue to grow in an organic way? I think part of the initial success of the site was due to the word-of-mouth nature of who showed up to use it. Now that half of our pages are result number one for some google search or another, it seems like a lot of that person-to-person growth, and the sense of community that comes with it, has been lost.
I'd like to propose a strategy for this with four parts. The overall ideas behind it are first, to create more of a barrier to entry and thereby make losing accounts more of a hardship, and second, to recognize that some administrative oversight of who stays and who goes is necessary, while making it as accountable as we can to the wishes of other members (without, hopefully, turning it into a game itself).
He goes on to describe new ways of handing Sponsorship (creation of new accounts), Guidelines, Warnings, and Feedack, as well as some speculation about implementation.
As with everything Rusty does, it's both interesting and well-written, and true to Kuro5hin form, the comments are fantastic as well. Read the whole thing.
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March 24, 2004
Posted by Seb Paquet
On the venerable nettime mailing list, Geert Lovink interviews Ken Jordan, one of the coauthors of the ambitious Augmented Social Network white paper. Jordan and collaborators have been thinking about the issue of self-representation online for a long time, and he highlights quite clearly many of the key issues in this area.
The ASN is a blue sky vision for the future of online community. It stakes out some conceptual territory, presenting a civil society vision of how the Internet could evolve — particularly addressing the issues of Identity and Trust (two packed terms that have a pretty specific meaning in this context). It provides a clear alternative to the dangerous direction the Internet may well be heading in — a corporate/government panopticon. But it’s not enough to stand against digital disempowerment and control; we need to stand for something. The ASN shows that by coordinating the writing of standards and protocols between several different, previously separate technical areas (persistent identity, interoperability between community infrastructures, matching technologies, and brokering) you could add a layer of functionality to the Internet that would be greatly in the public interest.
Jordan enumerates shortcomings of current social networking systems such as Friendster:
- They are non-interoperable walled gardens.
- Profile info is thin, not nuanced; it isn’t context sensitive (the boss and mother problem).
- The profile information is static, not effected by your actions elsewhere.
- You have limited control over your own profile information (“It calls for a new class of services: identity brokers”; you also want a “digital bill of rights” that enables you to exert control over access.)
- The sites are exclusive, invitation-only clubs. [Note: I believe this is the exception rather than the norm].
I can’t help but notice how close weblogs come to fitting the bill - apart from restricting you to a single context and making it difficult to control acess, everything is in there. (See Dina Mehta and Lilia Efimova on blogs as SNSes .)
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March 23, 2004
Posted by Seb Paquet
Here’s a short NYT essay by Clive Thompson that presents evidence and speculation regarding the thesis that people are actually more honest online than in person. The article makes two observations that may help explain why: first there’s the feeling of being on the record (“On the Internet […] your words often come back to haunt you.”), and second, cyberspace seems to bring about disinhibition (“There’s something about the Internet that encourages us to spill our guts, often in rather outrageous ways.”).
Thompson seems to really believe in the thesis, and towards the end of the essay foresees the emergence of a reputation society: “As more and more of our daily life moves online, we could find ourselves living in an increasingly honest world, or at least one in which lies have ever more serious consequences.”
While I’m not sure that things are quite so simple as “The internet makes you more honest”, the online world certainly makes it difficult to say contradictory things, even across contexts (assuming that you tie everything you say to a single identity, which not everyone does).
It’s a chewy question. I wonder if the “online vs. in person” aspect is essential. Couldn’t the whole issue be simply reframed as one of writing versus talking?
(link via Cynthia Typaldos )
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March 22, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
There were two immediate and strong criticisms of my RELATIONSHIP post of last Tuesday. The first, and broader, criticism, by Ian Davis, suggests I've misunderstood both the relative newness and the general flexibility of the work -- multi-variate relationships can be expressed in multi-variate terms, and missing characterizations can be added, and so on.
The second, in a comment by bardia, says that all the objections I raise and more have been discussed by the people on the FOAF list, and that if these were fatal problems, that group, smart as they are, would have caught them.
I want to deal with these in turn, but first, I want to re-state my views on the subject, because Ian in particular seems to have misconstrued them as practical objections. For the record, I do not believe that RELATIONSHIP suffers from practical problems; I do not believe that it is underdeveloped, or that there are missing but critical implementation details. I believe instead that it suffers from a philosophical error, and one that cannot be fixed by any future iteration of the current line of reasoning.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Find boyd rant, set off by Eric Schmidt's "Find the problem for the tools we have" notion of social networking software:
The thing is that social network representations require nuance. We can either try to solve the nuances universally (not going to happen) or try to figure out what problems we're trying to employ social networks in and figure out how to negotiate them there IN A CONTEXT. The latter is going to be far more successful. Haven't we already learned that each YASNS models a different social network anyhow (and no, FOAF is not the answer here because the different models are often because people are segmenting their networks differently in order to represent different facets).
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Posted by David Weinberger
ICQ has a Flash-based, browsable visualization of social networks. Very Flash-y, but I haven't had time to explore it. (Unfortunately, there's no way to try it without joining.)
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March 20, 2004
Posted by David Weinberger
All my life, I've been "David," except to my older sister who calls me "Dave" or even "Davey."
If you call me "Dave," I won't correct you, although if you ask me my preference, I'll say "David" without hesitation. If you ask me why, I won't be able to give you a meaningful answer other than that my family called me "David."
Now, at age 53, I find I'm becoming a Dave. About half the time.
The explanation is, I think, simple. These days, most of the people I meet aren't introduced to me by someone who — one or two or six degrees ago — I introduced myself to as "David." Because we meet via the Net, these new friends and acquaintances have to take a guess, and "Dave" sounds less formal than "David." So, "Dave" it is. And since I don't correct them (see paragraph 2), "Dave" has begun reinforcing itself.
I'm guessing that this doesn't happen as much in the world of print publication. If I were to write to John Updike, I wouldn't start the message off, "Hey, Johnny!," even if I were sending email. Likewise, I doubt readers wrote to Ernie Hemmingway, Jackie Steinbeck, or Aggie Christie.
But, much Web writing feels so immediate, so personal, that even though the architecture of the relationship is one-to-many, and thus is formally like the broadcast architecture, it's more like the one-to-many at a party where a group of us are telling stories, giving each other the floor.
Furthermore, for much of Web writing, especially blogs, the distance between the author and the work is erased. We are who we write. In responding to my Web writing, you're responding not to the work but to me. I suspect that some people call me "Dave" precisely to announce that they're talking to me, not to an author of something. "Dave" drives a wedge between the by-line and the person.
(By the way, I still prefer "David.")
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March 19, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
From Joshua Schachter, inventor of memepool, Geo URL, and del.icio.us and Maciej Ceglowski of Idle Words and the Web crawl, comes LOAF, a way of sharing address books without disclosing their contents, so that groups of LOAF-enabled users can build social networks on top of connectedness metrics, without needing central servers or full disclosure.
When you receive an email from an address you have not previously written to, LOAF checks to see if the email address is known to any of your existing correspondents. This essentially sorts incoming email into three categories:
- Mail from complete strangers
These are people whom you do not know, and who are also unknown to your correspondents.
- Mail from partial strangers
These are people you have never sent email to, but who have gotten email from at least one of your own correspondents. [...]
- Mail from people you know
This last category consists of people whom you have written to before. Presumably this is email you're most interested in, unless it's another forward from your mom.
Mail in category (2) can be further classified by counting how many correspondents you and the sender have in common. If the originating email appears in the address books of several of your correspondents, this may indicate a person with whom you have many connections. Insert standard social network theory here.
Also, don't miss the discussion of LOAF attack strategies, including the Dictionary attack, Me Too attack, Ex-Girlfriend attack, and Marc Canter attack.
Both Josh and Maciej are geniuses, in the older and rarer sense of the word, so this should be well worth playing with.
UPDATE: Kellan has pointed out another LOAF in the comments, which is a bizarre and elaborate joke, with verbose but uninformative language and a long list of fake implementations. (The Python implementation of that LOAF consists of the single command 'pass'.)
The two LOAFs (LOAVES?) are unrelated -- I doubt Josh and Maciej knew about the joke LOAF in naming their project.Update to the update: The real LOAF is named after the joke LOAF. Maybe we can retrofit the acronym to mean List of a Friend?
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Posted by Clay Shirky
From Wired: Dogging Craze has Brits in Heat: "Dogging is the broad term used to cover all the sexual outdoor activities that go on," says the dogging FAQ at Melanies UK Swingers, a popular dogging site. "This can be anything from putting on a show from your car, to a gangbang on a picnic table."
[...]
Dogging sessions are usually organized through the dozens of dogging sites and message boards that have sprung up in the last couple of years. Photos are exchanged and meetings arranged by e-mail or mobile phone text message.
At the meet, cell phones and text messages are used to confirm meeting places and, crucially, identities. Cameras and videophones are increasingly used to record what goes on.
"Technology is vital and is the main driver (of the dogging phenomenon)," said Richard Byrne, a lecturer at Harper Adams University College in the United Kingdom who produced a survey (PDF) last year that found dogging to be a widespread and growing problem in Britain's country parks.
It is leading, predictably, to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases...
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March 18, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Interesting articcle, Can Social Networking Stop Spam?, about the work of UCLA researchers on social clustering as a spam detector, using the latent social network as a filter: "When you get an e-mail from Alice with a 'cc' to Bob, you put a link between Alice and Bob," Boykin explained.
Examining six weeks worth of e-mails from Bobs, Carols, Alices and others, Boykin and Roychowdhury were able to identify the "components" of their burgeoning e-mail network.
"A component is a set of nodes which can all reach each other in the network," Boykin said. "It turns out that spam components and non-spam components are easy to distinguish" in a large enough network by examining so-called "clustering coefficients."
"In social networks, if A knows B, and B knows C, A often knows C also," Boykin explained. "Clustering coefficients measure this relationship."
In comparison to random networks, Boykin said he and his co-worker discovered that "non-spam components have high clustering coefficients, and spam components have clustering coefficients equal to zero."
the catch seems to be a large, readable population of email users -- the article doesn't make it clear how many people need to be involved to get to the claimed accuracy.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
LinkedIn will launch LinkedIn Groups next week at PC Forum. The first group is PC Forum attendees, which can use the group as a filter to search for attendees. When you find one, you can request contact without going through an intermediary, as though the group was helpful node.
I have already received requests to meet at the conference in this way, a great use case.
Also, their Outlook toolbar helped doubled the amount of connections for beta users.
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March 17, 2004
Posted by David Weinberger
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Stuart Henshall, Social Networking is BrokenFor the life of me... When is IM not a social networking device? (Have you ever seen a 12 year old girl reconnect her buddies after taking a new name?) That looks like social networking to me. When are introductions by e-mail not social networking. Or a speakerphone call? It's time to put a stop to categorizing these "things" as social networks. Call them "Associative Networking Tools" or "Structured Association Tools" or something similar. Then you can create a bucket for them. The reason there is no real business model is they are just part of / or component towards building our capabilities to enhance "presence" and connectivity.
As we say around here: w00t!
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March 16, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
So with all the talk of SXSW having blogger-unfriendly policies, I thought I would point out something quite the opposite.
For the second year in a row, we are providing a Socialtext Eventspace for PC Forum:
Just like last year, its open to the public. A great way for remote participants who can't afford a C-level conference or can't make it this year to interact with attendees and benefit from the self-organizing content of the event. We get to build off of last year, which is already providing some interesting perspective on what has changed.
This year the conversation begins before the show, with controversial discussions on Offshoring, spam and business models for online content. Chime in with your thoughts on these issues now.
One of the greatest things about an Eventspace is provides first time exposure to blogging for some people. Writing on the Web isn't a new thing for these kinds of attendees, but conference blogging alongside others provides just the kind of social feedback to get people going.
More as the event unfolds...
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Posted by David Weinberger
I'm sitting in a chair backed up against the wall in the large room where Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, gave his keynote address to the sxsw conference. He'd left the room about ten minutes earlier, but I was still there, blogging and checking email.
He comes back in. The way the seats are arranged, his path leads past my seat. He notices me. A look of almost recognition passes over his face. He quickly scans my name tag. "Oh, um, hi," he says, each syllable more tentative.
We've never met. But when he breaks his stride and looks at me, I have an author's egotistical moment that maybe he's read something of mine. Maybe he's heard of me. As his syllables lag, I see that he's realizing it's a mistake: My face rang a bell, but the name tag damped the bell's sounding.
"Hi," I say, in the tone of voice of a stranger who wants to follow up with small talk or a question.
"Hi," he says. Opting, quite reasonably, to take this interchange of greetings as concluded, he walks away.
"Is Jonathan Abrams your friend. _Yes _No."
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Posted by David Weinberger
Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Friendster, is giving a keynote at the SXSW conference. Unfortunately, I missed almost all of it because lunch went long. Here's what I heard...
Real vision of Friendster: Experience the Internet with your friends. That goes beyond dating. In 2004, we'll see lots of other applications.
Everything is different when you look at the net as social, using your social network as a filter. I look people and tell them I know someone who knows someone who knows you, and people are fascinated. [Seems irrelevant to me.]
He says Friendster is hiring. [If you're looking for an introduction, I have a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who works there...]
Q: Was Six Degrees an inspiration?
A: 90% was addressing problems I and my friends had. But Ryze was an inspiration also. Another guiding idea: To reduce the level of stupidity on the Internet to the level of stupidity you have generally. I can't stop people from being an asshole. But on a computer, with the anonymity and without seeing reactions, people act that much stupider.
He says people want a "break up alert."
Q: You dispelled the rumor that you're a CIA front, but what branch of government do you represent?
A: There are bigger databases with more interesting information in them. What your favorite movie is really doesn't interest the government. [Unless it's The Battle of Algiers, etc.]
Q: What about fakesters (i.e., fake personages)?
A: We've been so busy with scaling that we haven't add functionality. But we'll be doing that now. We'll provide the features that some people use fakesters for (e.g., Burning Man, Stanford Alumni).
Q: Are you going to open up APIs?
A: I'd love to, but we have to deal with privacy and security issues.
Q: Politics?
A: Various politicians are using Friendster. Kerry, for example. Friendster is looking at allowing rock bands, etc., to be available on Friendster so you can link to them as a supporter. [Ah, mission creep!]
Q: Are you really only for the youngsters?
A: Right now our users are first adopters and skew young. But Friendster is for anyone who has at least one friend. If you're over 50 and are looking for a date...[Hmm, the dating purpose seems central to his thinking despite saying that it's about more than that.]
Q: Privacy?
A: We won't sell your info. We will use it for targeting ads. And remember, you can delete your account at any time.
At the end, he gives out swag: Free Friendster condoms.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Behold RELATIONSHIP, a vocabulary for describing relationships between people.
I don't know if I'm the one to shoot these particular fish in this particular barrel, since both mme. boyd and Herr Weinberger are more eloquent than I on the subject of of making the tacit explicit, but this thing is self-critiquing.
Here, just in case you were wondering, is how you should be characterizing your relationships with one another:
friendOf, acquaintanceOf, parentOf, siblingOf, childOf, grandchildOf, spouseOf, enemyOf, antagonistOf, ambivalentOf, lostContactWith, knowsOf, wouldLikeToKnow, knowsInPassing, knowsByReputation, closeFriendOf, hasMet, worksWith, colleagueOf, collaboratesWith, employerOf, employedBy, mentorOf, apprenticeTo, livesWith, neighborOf, grandparentOf, lifePartnerOf, engagedTo, ancestorOf, descendantOf, participantIn, participant
Describing relationships with a controlled vocabulary can sound credible right up to the moment you see the vocabulary, but this thing is a mess.
...continue reading.
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March 15, 2004
Posted by Liz Lawley
So I’m one of those people that conference speakers hate. I sit in the audience, 17” Powerbook open in my lap, with IRC windows, AIM chats, blog entry screens, and web pages drawing my attention away from their faces.
The thing is, they really don’t have any less of my attention than they used to, before I started multitasking in meetings. It’s just more visually obvious now.
Believe it or not, I really can type and listen at the same time. And often the typing is directly related to the listening. I’m taking notes by blogging the session, or I’m asking questions about the presentation of the conference IRC channel, or I’m pulling up web pages that the speakers are discussing.
...continue reading.
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March 13, 2004
Posted by David Weinberger
As someone at breakfast today pointed out (damn, I have to add RAM to my own little name space), Americans dealt with the shock of 9/11 generally by going into our living rooms and turning on the TV. The Spanish have responded to 3/11 by going into the streets, 11 million strong.
It's a telling point, but what exactly does it tell?.
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March 12, 2004
Posted by Liz Lawley
During lunch today with Ben Shneiderman and some of my colleagues (yes, I dragged my sorry, sick self out of bed, dosed myself with cough syrup, and selfishly risked infecting them all), we had an interesting discussion about blogs and academics.
I asked Ben if he had any plans to start a blog of his own, and he cited two reasons for not doing so.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
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March 10, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Christopher Allen dives into the detail of my ecosystem of networks. His analysis suggests some of the more optimal sizes below 12 and 150 with some great anecdotes.
Its important people understand the scaling limits of groups at 12 and 150. I never ventured a guess at optimal group size, as its heavily context dependent. Instead I would suggest that our challenge as creators of social software is to enhance social capital so productive teams can be dynamic while extending their limits with cohesion.
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March 9, 2004
Posted by David Weinberger
From Christine Rosen's essay, " Romance in the Information Age," in The New Atlantis:
Among Pascal’s minor works is an essay, “Discourse on the Passion of Love,” in which he argues for the keen “pleasure of loving without daring to tell it.” “In love,” Pascal writes, “silence is of more avail than speech…there is an eloquence in silence that penetrates more deeply than language can.” Pascal imagined his lovers in each other’s physical presence, watchful of unspoken physical gestures, but not speaking. Only gradually would they reveal themselves. Today such a tableau seems as arcane as Kabuki theater; modern couples exchange the most intimate details of their lives on a first date and then return home to blog about it.
"It’s difficult,” said one woman I talked to who has tried—and ultimately soured on—Internet dating. “You’re expected to be both informal and funny in your e-mails, and reveal your likes and dislikes, but you don’t want to reveal so much that you appear desperate, or so little so that you seem distant.”
Rosen pulls together lots of threads — some familiar, some unexpected — about the nature of love and what sending it over wires in bits does to it. But, for me, the heart of it is in the excerpt above: We live in an age increasingly deaf to the unspoken.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
Bambi Francisco interviews Kleiner Perkins VC and investor in enterprise social networking vendor Visible Path Ray Lane. Lane contacted Bambi Francisco about Spoke's privacy concerns. The resulting interview is full of 80/20 rules. Apparently, the value of a business relationship is $600 per year.
(CEO Anthony) Brydon said that Visible Path interviewed 30 vice presidents of sales and asked what they'd spend each year to access the relationships that have been made by the entire corporation. That's 20 percent of the $3,000 that companies spend on each salesperson who use a sales force automation tool provided by Siebel Systems.
Layne suggests the KPCB contacts will only be available through Visible Path while citing that only 20% of relationships are of value. They also signal a shift from an OEM business model to selling directly to enterprises.
On handling privacy, the distinction they draw is keeping two degrees from the enterprise anonymous. This is a better approach, but they are still modelling nodes in the network that haven't volunteered to participate in it. This is pretty standard for sales intelligence applications of social networking, but it is a shortcut. Twenty percent of the contacts may give you the other eighty percent, but it comes with eighty percent of the privacy concerns. Over time this may devalue relationships, but until further iteration we won't know if its by eighty or twenty percent.
The irony is the bottom of the power law has a stronger demand for relationships, while the top values filtering demand. This may not effect our fuzzy and fun valuation, but targeting the wrong market need could have a greater impact than pricing for a startup.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Was struck by two recent interface changes, one on Orkut and one on Friendster, both in the direction of gathering more explicit meta-data.
Friendster first: they have added these two sets of preferences, to be used in the next rev of the service:
...continue reading.
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March 8, 2004
Posted by
When you include rules & rankings in a social system, you're laying foundational elements for an emerging culture -- and communicating what's valued within that culture. As the recent brouhaha over Orkut deletions demonstrates, the absence of clear rules can lead to confusion, anger and lots of energy spent exploring the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
Given that Orkut is still in Beta, this is arguably a useful and necessary part of the 'debugging process' - i.e. the members are helping Orkut debug and fix their Service Agreement and Code of Conduct, as well as their software. However, all that energy is NOT being spent on building relationships -- and the strength of those relationships will ultimately drive Orkut's success.
So, bending & breaking the rules is one kind of meta-game -- but if you step back, squint your eyes and look at the experience of navigating a social network, you can see an exploring game where finding people and learning more about them is the core activity. What do people do in a first-generation social network? Browse profiles, follow links, collect friends, join and create groups, and search for people using a variety of criteria. Sounds kinda like a social exploring & collecting game to me :-)
Computers allow us to create navigable 3D worlds -- and our sense are exceptionally well-tuned for operating in a physical space. Computer games like RPGs and MMPs allow us to embody a character and explore a fantastic 3D world -- but there's something equally fanstastic about exploring a fast-growing, ever-changing networked 2D world of people and relationships. Like MUDs, social networks are lightweight, easy to change, and leave lots of room for your imagination. Although they're not 'games' per se, social networks offer a new kind of entertainment experience that's centered around connecting with like-minded people. I can't wait to see what next-generation social networking apps look like -- I'm hoping we'll see some breakthrough products that redefine what a networked entertainment experience can be.
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Posted by David Weinberger
Scott Kirsner in The Boston Globe (link will break tomorrow) writes about companies trying to enhance eBay. His lead example is a storefront operation run by AuctionDrop that operates as a consignment shop: You bring in your old goods, they place them on eBay, you split the winnings. It sounds like a cool idea until you get to the final paragraphs of the piece: Their 75 employees and 20,000 square feet of warehouse space brought in $1.3M in revenues last year. Ulp.
Scott cites other companies that have failed, sometimes because eBay sued them into failure. An eBay spokesperson says:
"We are happy to see this universe of different kinds of companies offer services that extend the eBay marketplace in new and innovative ways," says Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman. But Durzy says it is in eBay's best interest to ensure that tools offered by third parties work well, and that data from the site is used in a way that protects "the integrity of the marketplace."
That's not why they sued BiddersEdge.com into oblivion. BiddersEdge consolidated auctions across auction sites, so you could find which site was offering the Princess Di Beanie Baby at the lowest price. BiddersEdge helped preserve the "integrity of the marketplace"...unless you define "the marketplace" as "eBay." Yet eBay tolerates (how magnanimous!) AuctionSniper and other such sites that, for a fee, place your bid at the last possible second before a bid closes. Does this protect "the integrity of the marketplace"? Maybe, maybe not, but it does ensure that eBay gets the highest price that robots can provide.
I've lost bids to auction snipers. As a customer, I feel cheated, even though, of course, I could take a sniper's eye-view of the transaction. Even if letting robots game the auction doesn't affect the integrity of the marketplace, they sure take the fun out of it. And that's part of eBay's value as well.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Looks like Orkut is bidding to be the service that nullifies Google's "Don't Be Evil" policy, after subjecting users to random and unnotified deletions. Huy Zing, an incredibly active Orkut user, describes these deletions in a pair of posts.
First, in Orkut Times: Uncertainty of Orkut Life: For every profile, Orkut.com provides a "Flag as Bogus" button intended to allow any user to report profiles that are known to be fake. This bogus-flagging sounds like a great idea, but it turns out it has been used between forum flamers to spread hate and escalate battles beyond the community discussions. Unfortunately, orkut.com chooses the policy of shooting first and asking questions later, presuming guilt before innocence. So argue with someone in a community and you'll be looking over your shoulder for a while.
I don't think that I'm a victim of bogus-flagging, as I'm fairly sure that I've had no enemies on Orkut.com. My crime seems to be the fact that I either created too many communities or that odds are that I created some questionable communities. The problem is that there are no known rules against creating communities that members might enjoy. Why wouldn't I want to make Orkut.com entertaining and fun for others?
Then, in Tuesday's with Huy Zing, he details the hilarious arbitrariness of the community deletions: It became obvious soon enough that the final judgment of my communities was arbitrary: coldplay & U2 remain but all hip-hop acts like Eminem & Jay-Z are gone. Dance Like Everyone's Watching is gone, but All Your Base Are Belong To Us lives on. It appeared a nerd was at the wheel. Some very questionable editorial discretion was exercised: death penalty-related communities or Middle East Conflict, all food communities were destroyed.
Luckily, my personal favorite "Fly Chicks For the Geeky Guy" survived; the "G-Spot Search Expedition" didn't. I have to wonder how Orkut expects the geeky guy to know how to satisfy the fly chicks.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Robert Key has published his ETech talk on a design for social networks for file sharing as an essay on OpenP2P.com: To apply this concept, the network starts with a group of trusted people forming a tribe of people. Starting a tribe as a friendnet, where each connection is backed up by a meatspace connection, is an excellent starting point. However, sharing files inside of a small tribe is only interesting for a short while because it presents a limited search horizon. If tribes connect with other tribes to form chiefdoms, the search horizon expands with each new connection in the chiefdom. Finally, connect chiefdoms to other chiefdoms to form states, and the search horizon may start to look similar to the search horizons in open file-trading systems.
Each tribe should carefully select tribal elders who will set the tone of the network and determine social policies for the network. The elders should be aware of the tribal members and their strengths and weaknesses in order to set policies that are effective for the group. The elders should focus the tribe on its primary goals and continually evaluate the state of the tribe to ensure that its members are well educated on the tribal policies.
I've been interested in this idea for some time, but the devil is in the details. In particular, the more a group approaches mutual responsibility over long periods, the more its problems become the problems of a state -- here, one issue that jumps out is tribal elders. I don't know how Robert is instantiating this in software, but the simple phrase "Each tribe should carefully select tribal elders..." hides reams of complexity. Choose how? Voting? But once the elders are set, how are they to be changed, or removed? And do new members simply have to accept the elders that were there when they arrived?
Etc etc. The fascinating problem here is political plasticity -- if the system is too easy to change, it will decohere or get hijacked by the RIAA. If it is too hard to change, the users will tear it down from within.
It's a good idea, and Robert's got chops, so this effort will be worth watching.
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March 5, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
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Posted by Clay Shirky
News.com is reporting on a tool out of Lili Cheng's group at Microsoft called Inner Circle. "Contacts don't match the way people think," said Lili Cheng, group manager of the social-computing group within Microsoft Research. A better model is the handwritten list of phone numbers many people keep next to their computer. That, Cheng said, "better represents the people that you'd want to talk to."
To try to translate that idea into digital terms, Cheng and her team have come up with a concept called Inner Circle, which automatically maintains and updates a list of about 20 people with whom one is e-mailing and instant messaging the most.
No pointers to the project itself, but I assume it will appear on the Social Computing page eventually.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
AOL's ICQ division is launching ICQ Universe, a social networking service built on top of a buddy list.
The FAQ is filled with all sorts of interesting notes, including:
Q. What is the ICQ Universe Lobby?
A.The ICQ Universe Lobby is for users waiting to be invited to the ICQ Universe. As long as you're listed in the lobby, you cannot interact with people in the ICQ Universe. However, you can encourage people to invite you by filling the Why I should be invited box or request to join a recruiter's part of the universe. People who are recruiting are listed in the lobby.
This takes the AOL Lobby/LambdaMOO closet pattern and adds it to the YASNS world -- an entry space where you're in the system, but not yet part of the social world.
...continue reading.
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March 4, 2004
Posted by
...continue reading.
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March 3, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Rob Cross has a good introductory overview on social networks in a business context, including some case studies:  *Key Findings*: It is obvious from the picture on the left that the consulting practice is broken into two different sub-groups with one person acting as a boundary spanner. Interestingly enough the practice was divided on precisely the dimension it needed to be connected, their unique skill sets. The group on the left side of the network was skilled in the 'softer' issues of strategy or organizational design, whereas the group on the right was composed of people skilled in 'harder' technical aspects of knowledge management such as information architecture, modeling and data warehousing.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
A new version of (_thanks Tom_!) the code that runs the Wikipedia is available for general users, including multi-lingual support and the ability to display mathematical formulae and other hard layout challenges using LaTEX.
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March 1, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
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Posted by Clay Shirky
danah boyd's ethnographic research on Friendster has been accepted at CHI, the Computer-Human Interaction conference. Fundamentally, context is missing from what one is presenting. On one hand, an individual is constructing a Profile for a potential date. Yet, simultaneously, one must consider all of the friends, colleagues and other relations who might appear on the site. It can be argued that this means an individual will present a more truthful picture, but having to present oneself consistently across connections from various facets of one’s life is often less about truth than about social appropriateness.
Another argument is that one is simply performing for the public, but in doing so, one obfuscates the quirks that often make one interesting to a potential suitor. Notably, most users fear the presence of two people on Friendster: boss and mother. Teachers also fear the presence of their students. This articulated concern suggests that users are aware that, in everyday activity they present different information depending on the audience. Given the task of creating a Profile, users elect to present themselves based on how they balance the public/private dimension.
Congratulations, danah! (PDF taken from her page of published work, home of much other goodness.)
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Posted by
A few weeks back, Clay Shirky posted about the lack of games coverage on Many2Many . That got me thinking about the relationship between game design and social software, and about why social software apps like buddy lists, blogs and social networks FEEL so game-like to me.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Seb Paquet
Alex Halavais’ blog is home to an interesting discussion of the privacy / information property issues around the Orkut geomap we wrote about two weeks ago : part one, part two. It’s worth noting that Rolan (the datapimp / Orkut mapper) participates in the discussions. Jill Walker voices the clearest objection:
For me the problem is the (open) publication of my name in relation to data about me that I gave out in a different context than that in which it’s been published.
I voluntarily gave out information in Orkut, but yes, although that is on the web (OK, I wasn’t specific enough there) it’s password protected and access is limited to others who have also voluntarily shared information about themselves. There’s a mutuality there, and I do experience a site like Orkut as a more closed form of publication than putting something freely on the web. I think this happens in email lists and places like MOOs, too, although anyone can join most of these communities, what is written there is meant FOR that community not for the general public.
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Posted by Seb Paquet
According to the product page, AlstraSoft's E-Friends is "an online social networking software that allows you to start your own site just like Friendster and Tribe.net." (They surely haven't tested it at that scale, though.) It sells for $280 with a year of updates, and they've got a demo up.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
Looks like the island nation of Palau is getting into the social networking business. PW Registry Corporation Launches New Top-Level Domain Devoted Exclusively for Online Communities and Social Networking:
With its unique structure and policies, the PW domain is the ideal address for individuals looking to better manage and control their social network. Unlike traditional social networks that are fragmented by professions or social interests and require users to compromise personal address books, a PW address enables users to establish their membership in a social network without exposing the identity of colleagues and friends...PW also enables individual applications such as “web logs” and digital photo albums at addresses such as “Bob.Smith.pw”.
What a crock of crap. First of all, a top-level domain does not provide identity any more than a second level domain does. Second, social networks are naturally fragmented by interests. Third, if you don't contribute your contacts the service cannot build a graph. There is no synergy for top-level domain names and email addresses with the "killer applications" of the day. Only a larger namespace.
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Posted by David Weinberger
Jeff Kang, who headed up the Queryster.com project, is gathering names of people who want to get an email when Collablog.com is ready for download, probably in a few weeks. Jeff says Collablog aims "to make multi-user weblogs easy to do and administer." No further details at this time.
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