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Gender, personality, and social softwareGender, personality, and social softwareGender, personality, and social software 02/17/2004 11:56 AM
"I feel like I'm at a Microsoft monastery here," wrote Rory Blyth from the most recent Professional Developers Conference. "I think I've seen about 2.5 females ... it's like they're an endangered species." The observation holds equally true for open source conferences.This column touches on two third-rail issues: personality and gender. The Wired article on Asperger's syndrome cited in the column was incorrectly dated, by the way. My error: it was of course published in 2001, not 1991. That slipped past me and my editors, but my friend Larry Welkowitz, a psychologist and AS specialist, caught it. ... This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Gender, personality, and social softwareGrok Headline matches for Gender, personality, and social softwaresocial construction of gendersocial construction of gender 02/06/2005 03:07 AM employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/gender.html Social Issues Surround Social Software
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 A few months ago I wrote about Edward Hall's book The Hidden Dimension, on the science of proxemics -- the study of 'social distance', how we relate physically and psychologically to space and to overcrowding. A month earlier I wrote a fanciful piece about how people choose where to sit at a boardroom table and what that says about them. Now I'm reading Impro, by British playwright Keith Johnstone, which is ostensibly about the art of improvisational acting, but which has a great deal to say about other subjects, including proxemics. Here's a passage on Status and Space that especially caught my attention: Imagine that two stangers are
approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds
of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at
an
even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in
order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more
before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs
of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they're
equal, both move aside. If they both think they're dominant (or if one
isn't paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and
muttering apologies. But this doesn't happen if you meet a frail or
half-blind person: You move aside for them. It's only when you think
the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember
doing
it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and
gently moved me out of the way -- it still rankles. Old people tend to
cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately 'not
notice' others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of
the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously
exchanging
status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person
stepping
aside.
Johnstone is interested on how this subliminal body language and
status-checking can be exploited, to both powerful and comedic effect,
on the stage. I'm more interested in its implications for human
behaviour in a crowded world. I didn't believe the above passage was
true until
I started observing people (and myself) moving in crowds. You can
easily pick out who
sees him/herself as dominant, and who's going to move aside, a mile away by their demeanor and
body language. It's hilarious to watch. Older people almost always
expect, and subtly signal to younger people to move aside, even young
people in gangs with attitude. And they do move aside, belying their whole
superficial demeanor. Women tend to defer to men of the same age, but
old, frail and pregnant women somehow trump everyone else -- everyone
moves aside for them. I watched adults puff themselves up and brace
for
collision with children (especially those of cultures that let their
kids learn these status rules slowly) rather than simply
get out of their way. In one case I watched a very respectable,
well-dressed middle-aged man actually deliberately kick a child out of the way, and
then apologize to the mother (not the child) that he (the man) 'wasn't
paying
attention'. I never realized how arrogant I must appear in crowds. I tend to dislike them, 'pretend not to see' people in them (much to the dismay of people who later tell me I 'rudely' ignored their smile or nod or wave of recognition), and take on a hurried, distracted, disinterested, hostile and elbows-raised demeanor. It works very well, except with some children, and except when I have to pass people from behind. Imagine how this plays out in protest demonstrations! And in lineups, especially where first-come first-served is hard to observe because there are no clear lines, or where some lines move much faster than others. So here you are a dominant person, forced to wait passively behind a long, crowded line of 'people of lower status', while other people of low status move ahead faster or even cut into line. Foaming at the mouth time! Ever noticed that the people angriest in lineups are middle-aged businessmen? Maybe I'm finally starting to understand pecking orders: Why they're important in nature, as a simple and automatic mechanism for social organization and balance. And how, in man, in our horrifically overcrowded civilization culture, they get inflated and perverted into political hierarchies and produce megalomaniacs and nuclear pissing contests. What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures -- communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is -- a primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the breeding -- and what it isn't -- a license to take an unfair share of wealth and power?  Impro has some other
wonderful insightful observations on several topics. Here are my
favourites:On Creative Blocks: At a time when I seemed to have lost all my artistic talents, I began to explore [dream images] and hold onto and attend to them..Then I progressed to attending to mental images [things I pictured for example while reading]...The effect was so interesting that I persisted...I looked in the window [that I was picturing in my mind] and saw strange rooms in amazing detail...I belatedly thought of attending similarly to the reality around me. The deadness and greyness of my life and imagination were immediately sloughed off...The dullness was not, as I had thought, an inevitable consequence of age, but of education. On Overcrowding: People travel a long way for a 'view'. The essential element of a good view is distance, with nothing human in the immediate foreground. It lets us experience the pleasure of having our space flow out unhindered. Posture improves, breathing improves...These are all probably symptoms of human overcrowding. On Social Distance: When you hand out leaflets on the street, you can't just thrust them into people's hands. You have to establish that you're giving out leaflets, and then present one at exactly the right moment. If you get it wrong, people will either ignore you or be alarmed. [It's a very complex social activity, hard to do well, as any election campaigner will tell you. It's a submissive act, requiring great improvisational skills, and almost impossible for dominant personalities to master.] On Education: Most schools teach children to be unimaginative...Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better teaching if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many 'well-adjusted' adults are bitter, uncreative, frightened, unimaginative, rather hostile people [anyone you know fit this description?]. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that's what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing. Many teachers express surprise at the switch-off that occurs at puberty, but I don't, because first of all the child has to hide the sexual turmoil he's in, and secondly the grown-ups' attitude to him completely changes. A story written off as childish fantasy in an eight-year-old may be taken, at fourteen, as a sign of mental abnormaility. The adolescent therefore has to learn to 'fake' everything. On Art: We have this idea that art is self-expression, which is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated...Imagining should be as easy as perceiving. [In children, it is.] On Acceptable Behaviour: Sanity is a performance...It's a matter of presenting yourself as safe... When people are perceived as unpredictable, they are socially rejected...And it's no good telling a student he won't be held responsible for the content of his imagination [he will]...so the student must pretend to be dull...People's normal behaviours destroy other people's creative talent. All the social weapons we use against other people we also use, inwardly, against ourselves. On Assuming an Identity: Our faces get fixed with age, but even in young people you can see that a decision has been taken to appear tough, or stupid, or resigned. (Why Stupid? Because then people expect less of you). Sometimes in extreme situations people will break out of their usual expression and you can't even recognize them...Our personality is the Public Relations department for the real mind, which remains unknown. It always seems to function at some level in terms of what other people think. If I am alone and someone knocks on the door I 'come back to myself'. I do this to check that my social image is presentable. Though I may later get 'lost in the conversation' [and get outside my personality]. People isolated for long periods report 'personality disintegration'. [Perhaps this isn't madness -- maybe they become who they really are]. A final caution: Despite its insights, this book is hard work -- it's written for those who know the jargon and rituals of acting, and for the rest of us it's tough slogging. |
Shel Israel: Automating friendship with social software. "For me, there’s a sense of déjà vu. VCs are ponying up investments apparently without much sense of history. The business plans often emulate the worst thinking of the Dot Com Era and VCs, burned once seem undaunted by the experience."
Via D. Keith Robinson, LinkedIn is a social software system that works kind of like Friendster but is targetted at professionals. You sign up, create a profile that includes your industry and geographical area and it provides you with a number of tools to find other people with similar interests. More importantly, it lets you build up a network of contacts through which you can access other people. If nothing else, it's a great way of maintaining your CV.
Keith says he's had a few leads for freelance work from it so it appears to work. I've created an account; if you sign up, drop me an invite (my email address can be found via my contact page) and provided I have at least a vague inkling of who you are I'll add you to my immediate network.
Incidentally, the most connected member is currently one Joi Ito with 493 connections. I'm guessing LinkedIn follows power laws just as much as the rest of the web does.
Yesterday, I dreamt that my father died. So I woke up upset and disturbed. Disturbed because my father is going to Paris today, a trip I have a bad foreboding about. Chewing bad mojo all morning led me to think about using blogs as a memorial of sort and then spilled out into thinking about dead people in social networks. Here are some notable pieces from that trail:
Rewinding a blog back in time
I thought it might be neat to have a blog that moves backward in time with posts sorted in reverse order. So when I die, my blog will show posts from the day before I died and then the day before that and so on. There will be blog comments by visitors before and after I died. There are problems with this idea but is worth savoring to look for hidden passages to new ideas.
Blogging from the Grave
It would also be interesting to turn my blog into a wiki-ish blog after I died so that my friends can post to my blog for one reason or another. In a sense, 'I' continue to live within the mind of my friends so 'I' am still blogging from the grave.
The Dead as a Party Host
I mentioned before that a 'center' of a social network doesn't have to coordinate or even be aware of the synergy he or she creates. Come to think of it, the center doesn't even have to be alive. For example, people who met each other at a funeral forms a social network around a dead person.
Zombies in Orkut
What should happen when a member of Orkut or LinkedIn dies? It's bound to happen or have happened already. Should his node disappear? That doesn't make sense. Two people having a friend in common is relevant even if the friend happens to be dead. But if the node is left within the network, what are the downsides other than having to add a gravestone icon to the profile?
This post is why I like danah boyd so much. She not only is smart as a whip (as they say) but she writes about rocks!
roleplayi ng in social software.
Roleplaying in social software is not contained to just Friendster. I remember being quite humored to find that both Saddam and Dubya had LiveJournals during their tiff. This morning, i got a note from a fellow researcher, Anindita Basu, responding to my postings of Live Journal statistics:
oh, reminds me-- i meant to respond to your post about lj stats. i'm not sure about this, but i don't think they're taking roleplayers into account in their stats, and they're (or rather we're) probably throwing numbers off. that's what i'm looking at now, research-wise. blog-based roleplaying. communities appropriating online technologies to co-construct stories. there are a lot of young teenage girls who've set up blogs as harry potter characters, for instance, saying they were born on july 31, 1980 like harry potter and live in the UK. so male/female numbers are off as well as ages and locations. besides the whole harry potter community, there are a bunch of others, including buffy, lord of the rings and even pop icon based ones. i'm not sure how many are out there, if the numbers are significant enough to skew their stats out of their million users, but it's something to take note of.
I have *no* idea how many roleplayers exist within the world of LJ, but i'd bet that it's no small number. Yet, all too often, these subcultures go unnoticed by the larger tech world. This behavior is quite reminiscent of that vast community of fan fiction and slash fans. When i started working with Henry Jenkins, i was astonished to hear how many people produced fan fiction online. For those who don't know what fan fiction/slash are, imagine watching a TV show (like Buffy) and then writing back stories about what is really happening behind the scenes. Using the characters from the show, people would produce thousands of subplots, stories of the characters when they were younger/older, etc. Slash is a particular subform of fan fiction where underlying homoerotic/sexual subplots are revealed. Before the net, people were using zines to write fan fiction. Now, fan fiction writers from all over the world are connected via the Internet.
Fan fiction is a fascinating form of participation in media consumption. The audience participates on a deeper level, engaging with the characters and building a community of like-minded folks who help each other with writing, personal struggles, etc. Not suprisingly, quite a lot of fan fiction is created by individuals trying to work out their own demons.
Of course, here's where the lawyers have a field day (oh, Creative Commons...). The first issue is not surprising... Some have charged that this reappropriation of characters violates copyright/trademark. But, here's a beaut...
Often, teens are using fan fiction to explore their sexuality. When 14-year olds write fiction about sex, is it child porn? Even worse, when 14-year olds write about imagined sexual encounters with teachers (i.e. in the context of Harry Potter), is it pedophelia? Henry is having a field day looking into these claims. But it certainly puts a nice twist into the process.
Btw, for those who find this topic fascinating, definitely read Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins. Oh, and Henry blogs in collection at Technology Review.
[zephoria]Adina on Esthetics of Social Software [Weblogsky]
Adina Levin posted a note about the discussions between Honoria and I re. esthetics of social networks and software. Adina notes some criteria. Honoria and I have been looking at three aspects of the subject:
Honoria and I are assembling a panel on the subject for South by Southwest Interactive, along with danah boyd and Molly Wright Steenson. [Link to
Adina's comments]
Here are Adina's comments:
Jon Lebkowsky and Honoria have an interesting insight about evaluating social software according to esthetic, leading to some reflection about the criteria for an esthetic of social software.
Thinking out loud, here are some criteria to consider...
* ease of groupforming
* intimacy gradient -- ability to create
spaces on a continuum from public to private
* expressiveness --
ability for individuals and groups to express mood and style
*
shared memory -- the social software equivalent of bookshelves and
mantelpiece photos
* attractive front porches -- social public
areas preceding private spaces
* helpful navigation -- clear
signage, or meditative exploration
I'm on vacation, so I don't have Christopher Alexander near to hand; that would bring some good insight.
Here's Marc's comments.....
As the rush towards dating, business and jobs has raised the attention level of social software, I often try to factor in the importance of personal publishing, micro-content and aesthetics in general. I have to remind myself that we called it "creativity software" before it was called "multimedia".
Now we are in the midst of the 'next big thing' - yet everyone (except for Jon, Honoria and adina apparently) is focused on the all mighty buck, rather than what makes the world a beautiful place.
YES..... in addition to the points made in the two lists above, I'll add:
- the face, the human face, the MOST beautiful thing around
- the act of identity browsing - cruising not after some fact, info bit or meme - but simply because you're interested in that person
- the kind of interaction, group forming, spontaneous combustion, pivot forming, game the system - on the fly - improvisation we saw with Fakesters, Tribe Tribes, etc.
- and soon some pretty sexy zoom up into to someone's face - even larger (made possible by Laszlo)
- and even sooner - the kind of group voice that the AlwaysOn Network will have (and Ecademy has had for a while)
Incentives for online software: the 7 pieces social software must have .... This is an excellent read as I think about Drupal's role within social software... After years of study, I found th is blog from Matt Webb most interesting, and actually very accurate. Enjoy reading. [drupal.org - community plumbing]
This is an excellent read as I think about Drupal's role within
social software... After years of study, I found this blog from Matt Webb
most interesting, and actually very accurate. Enjoy
reading.
From the blog:
"We need mechanisms in the
online software to bring in a similar incentive structure to the
offline world. The single most useful piece of thinking I've been
using is
Identity
Presence
Relationships
Conversations
Groups
Reputation
Sharing
I'll describe each of these, as I see them, critiquing
AOL Instant Messanger (just as an exmaple), and then describe how we
put them into use.
Identity | Your identity is shown by a
screenname, which remains persistent through time. There are
incentives not to change this, like having your list of friends stored
on the server and only accessible through your screenname. This acts
as a pressure to not change identity. Having a persistent identity is
more important than having one brought in from the physical
world.
Presence | Presence is awareness of sharing the same
space, and this is implemented as seeing when your friends are online,
or busy. AIM isn't particularly good at group presence and visibility
of communication, although other chat systems (such as IRC and early
Talkers) use the concept of "rooms" and whispers.
Relationships | AIM lets you add people as buddies. From that
moment, their presence is visible on your screen. This is a
relationship, you're allowed them to have an effect on your
environment. Not terribly nuanced however.
Conversations |
Conversations are implemented as synchronous messaging. There's a
difference between messaging and conversations. Messaging is just an
exchange of text with no obligation, but conversations have their own
presence and want to be continued. AIM does this by having a window
for a conversation. It's difficult to drift out of it, it hangs there,
requesting you continue. Contrast this with email which often is just
messaging, and conversations die easily.
Groups | AIM isn't
great at groups. Although you can have group chats, the group is
transient. People have more loyalty to a group when there's some kind
of joining step, when they've made some investment in it. Entering a
window just doesn't do that, and there's no property of the group that
exists outside the individual user's accounts.
Reputation |
Reputation is used more in systems which allow meeting new
individuals. AIM's simple version of this is "warning". Any user may
"warn" any other user. A users total "warn" level (a figure up to 100)
is shown to everyone they communicate with. Unfortunately, it's not a
trustworthy reputation system, and reputation is notoriously difficult
-- but humans are great at dealing with it themselves, given certain
affordances: persistence identities, and being able to discuss those
identities with other people. AIM's simplistic relationship system
makes reputation not so important though.
Sharing | People like
to share. With AIM, sharing is often as simple as giving a friend a
link to follow. Other systems, such as Flikr, are about sharing
photographs. These act as small transactions that build genuine group
feeling."
Curious what our Drupal development community thinks
about these 7 components (as pivotal/needed) to the Drupal project.
Thoughts/discussion? Thanks. [MapTheWay]
You can download the core part of the material that follows as a PDF presentation entitled Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).
A buddy-list for television:
Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto your
screen with the merest tap of a 'friends' key on your remote control.
The buddy list would be the first stage of an interface that would let
you add and remove friends, and see what your friends are watching in
real-time - whether they be watching live television or something
stored on their PVRs. Adding friends would be simple - you could enter
letters on screen using your remote, or browse your existing friends'
contact lists.
Being able to see what your friends were watching on television would remind you of programmes that you also wanted to see, it would help you spot programmes that your social circle thought were interesting and it could start to give you a shared social context for conversations about the media that you and your friends had both enjoyed.
Obviously there might be some programmes that you might wish to view with a significant other, but wouldn't necessarily want to advertise to the rest of the world that you were watching. For this reason your personalised settings would have to have all kinds of options to help you control how you were being represented to the wider world that were as simple to use and unobtrusive as possible. Primary among the tools at your disposal would be your ability to tell your set-top box not to advertise that you were watching any shows marked as for adults only and to mark certain channels as similarly private. These settings would obviously be on by default.
Presence alerts:
One of the core functions of a socially enabled set-top box would be
to create the impression of watching television alongside your
peer group and friends - even if you were geographically distant from
one another. One key way to do this would be to create a sensation of
simultaneity - to remind you that there are other people in your
social circle doing things at the same time as you. This would allow
you to create a mental impression of what your friends were doing.
Here are two versions of an alert that could fade up gently onto the screen when someone on your buddy list changes channel. These alerts would work in two ways - if the person was changing channel and landed on a station as a programme was just about to begin or within the first three or four minutes of a programme, then the alert would be immediate. This would give you the opportunity to change over to that channel as well without missing too much of the show. If - however - they were changing over to a channel in the middle of a show or they changed the channel again within ten seconds, then the alert would not be sent. They would have to have been watching the new channel for a few minutes before an alert would be sent. There would be nothing more intrusive and irritating than watching someone compulsively flick between channels at a distance (except perhaps being in the room with them as they did so).
The most important part of all these alerts is that they provide you with the option to join the person concerned in whichever programme they happen to now be watching...
Watch with your friends:
Now we have the concept of joining a friend to watch a show, we have
to ask what should that experience be like? How should your parallel
engagement manifest itself. Traditionally, net-mediated social spaces
have tended towards text as a communicative medium. But this would
seem like an enormously clumsy way to interact during a television
programme.
Television is an audio-visual medium and there's no reason why your engagement with your friends shouldn't also be audio-visual. For this reason a simple high quality webcam above the television would help you see how your friends were responding to what was on screen - it would help you feel an experience of shared engagement without there being a need for overt discussion. By default your conversations with your friends would be muted, and you could - of course - minimise their images if they started to get annoying, but if you wanted to shout and scream alongside your friends, then you'd simply turn the sound back on. This would be the perfect form of engagement around certain sporting events, or for making a well-known television programme or film just the backgrounded context for a shared conversation.
In the mock-up below, you can see the cameras of three of your friends on the right. One person has wandered away from their TV...
Chatting and planning:
If your friends were in the room with you during an ad break, you
might chat about the programme you've just been watching or bitch
about the adverts in front of you. You might turn the sound down low
for a few seconds and talk about something else completely. There are
lots of contexts where the programme on television might not be
the main focus of activity around the television. These might
be times when it's still important to have a sense of what's happening
on the screen, but where the social activity has been dragged to the
foreground.
Set-top box social software would have to support such engagements. So how about a second view when you're in one of these social situations? From having the programme in the foreground, one simple switch of the button could drag your friends into the limelight. The programme could be fully or partially muted, and your friends automatically unmuted. Then you could chat to each other about the programme you'd just watched, or wait for the adverts to end together. You could even use these opportunities to plan what to watch next. If this was handled in a similar way to group formation and parties in online gaming structures like Halo 2, then perhaps one person could even set up the next programme and stream it to everyone else, or cue forward to show their friends the best part of a particular dance sequence or the key quote from a political interview.
Choosing channels and playing games:
Having this technology in place under your television could create a
tremendous platform for all kinds of other applications or games to be
layered on top of your television experience. And these could be
equally usable with people in the same room as yourself. If you gave
everyone a personalised remote control (or installed universal remote
control software in something like a mobile phone) then people could
propose changing channels but be over-ruled by other people in the
room. The wonderful browsing experience of flicking through music
video channels could be turned into a game, with each song being rated
on the fly by everyone present or telepresent and records kept of
channels and songs that people tended to enjoy. The same controls
could be hooked up to other forms of interactive television or to
net-enabled functionality on the boxes themselves...
Sharing a social library:
And finally, to return to the idea of media discovery and regenerating
a social context around television programming, how about if the shows
that many of your friends had decided in advance to record were
automatically recorded by your device too. How would it be if you
never missed the show that everyone was talking about? And if you had
- your box could ask its peers for some kind of swarmed download if
anyone still had a copy and it could appear in your local library
overnight.
All this of course, is just the very beginning of the kinds of things that you could create with a socially-enabled TV set-top box. It's all basically just extensions of stuff that we're already doing in other media. There are still technological barriers of course - bandwidth and synchronisation being core problems. But we're gradually on the way to solving them.
To repeat - If you'd like to download this piece as a simple to read and print PDF presentation then you can do so here: Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).
Addendum:
Here are a few related links that people have
brought to my attention since posting this stuff up or since I
finished work on the presentation and illustrations. I'm a little
cross with myself for not posting this stuff up before, but hey...
My talk focused on the findings of the BBC identity group's qualitative research and usability testing with children and teens. I shared insights into Jessica and Jake's approaches to identity management, friendship and group membership, with the view to inform actual product development work in this area.LinkWhile the purpose of my talk was to stimulate interest in the question: How can we ensure children's safety while letting them have expressive identities in social software?, I also gave some of my own opinions about the appropriateness - or not - of existing social software, and speculated about some positive future directions that wikis and weblogs could take (e.g. using RSS syndication to involve parents in the moderation of social spaces for children).
From Clay Shirky via ElasticSpace.......
Coolio list.....
I'm loath to wake the old evil beastie of definitions of social software, but I came across some old notes that I sent off to someone in October and I'd like to keep track of it for later. Basically the question was could you produce a short and pithy, mostly accurate short-hand description of social software that mostly worked. I came up with:
Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.
I slapped a lot of examples in there because it seemed to clarify the issue a bit. Note, this is a shorthand, and nothing more - my fuller posts on the subject include: My working definition of social software but I think maybe I prefer this shorter, rotted-down and composted version.
Another method takes advantage of "the natural incentives that occur in peer communities, as manifest in things like Napster and Gnutella," says Canny. "It does seem within a community you have a few altruistic people who will, for whatever reason, help the community by providing the service, and from a privacy perspective you can do a lot if you can identify some users who are willing to leave a machine online that provides some privacy protection. The rest of the people in the community can use that machine. They don't have to trust the owner of the machine because the algorithm is set up so that the owner of that machine can't get access to that machine anyway, but if they provide this service, they can protect their peers' information from the service provider."Link
Although I think the "socially awkward" and the "what's the point" problem of some social networking sites is a problem, I think the "suck up your email addresses from outlook" and the one click "spam all of my friends" features are the most troublesome. Stowe Boyd talks about his accidental "spam my friends with one click" episode with Zero Degrees.
Actually, what I find scarier is the way Spoke which takes all of your email address from your headers and makes a network out of them. So even if you don't "join" Spoke, if someone who you exchange email with joins, you're actually already in Spoke.
I think the key is user control and a clear interface of what is happening. I think UI used to be a lot about making things "seamless". I think when you are dealing with sensitive privacy related information, your UI has to make it very clear where your data is, when it is going to be transfered to another machine, and what the privacy policy of the said machine is. Every time data moves across a boundary, the user should know this an be provided a choice. UI's that deal with personal information should be about showing the seams, not being seamless.
Ross and Ju dith also chime in.
corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/26/is_social_software_bad_for
_the_dean_campaign.php
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Some friends asked me why we weren't mentioned in this article in CNet. I guess I have to go schmooze up the writer - Josuhua Jaffe.
But I wonder - why Joshua didn't mention 1Up, Tribe or aSmallWorld or Yahoo 360? He also didn't mention LinkedIn, MySpace or hi5. I guess there's allot going on - and the focus of this article is on corporatioons doing work - not individuals finding jobs or having fun.
But one thing it implies - is that the COMBINATION of blogging with something else! Perhaps now folks will see that it's time to move beyond thinking of blogging as some stand alone activity and see it as a natural form of expression and feature - that then gets applied to EVERY kind of activity.
This is at the essence of DLAs. An integrated, aggregated and highly customizable experience that combines social networking, blogging, media and communications with whatever the focus constituency, company assets, positioning or approach calls for. Oh yah - and mobile too (thanks Russ!)
We've been getting allot of great reception from our DLAs ideas - so we'll have plenty of examples to show and talk about in the near future.
Final note: I can't wait to see what 6A comes up with - and what Micahel Sippey is all about.
a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007633
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Now that we have demystified social networking software, let's think about how to apply the features in an open system that works in conjunction with weblogs. The current systems are too closed and limited to be of much long term value. Here's my thinking:
OK, this would be very, very easy to do in the weblog world if
we start right now. All that is needed is a simple standard
for an XML profile (as simple as RSS -- which only Dave seems able to build)
that can be published by weblog authors in a form on their weblog tool
of choice. If the vendors (UserLand, Blogger, and SixApart) did
this, within weeks sites like Feedster and Technorati would have tools that
took advantage of that information. This would then usher in a
whole new deluge of innovation similar to what we are seeing in RSS
today. Let's put Friendster out of business and open this up.
Social software, applications which enhance human collaboration, continue to spur new software . Projects including Friendster , Tribe.net , Ryze , and Eliyon are populating and connecting users into social networks . FOAF develops a standard for networking, while Microsoft is considering a move in this area.
The popularity and perceived efficacy of social software is perhaps part of a patent drive to claim the six degrees of separation as intellectual property , or small world theory, which supports many of these collaboration engines. This interdisciplinary theory, perhaps most powerfully developed in social network analysis , has been applied to a variety of fields, including internet structure and security .
(thanks to Clara Yu!)
The following post contains some of my thoughts about Social Software for Set-Top Boxes. But before I do so, I thought maybe I should write really briefly about some of the context. I've been thinking around this stuff for a very long time now, but I've been too disorganised and busy to put any of it out in public. The last thing I wrote around this area was several months ago, and was in fact entirely an attempt to set the scene a little for what I'm going to write next. It was about conceptualising how a connected media hub might operate in the home. For more background on that, you should read the three posts I wrote back then, the last of which has enough pictures to give a sense of the whole concept without the effort of ploughing through my clumsy inarticulate prose:
I started writing this post and the following post immediately after producing the pieces above, and the illustrations and design work you'll see were well on their way before Christmas. I decided to postpone publishing it for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I felt it had a certain amount of synergy with the paper that Matt Webb and I were going to be presenting at ETCon with Paul and Matt Biddulph on "Reinventing Radio". But with that paper now out of the way (and available here: Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many) I think it's probably the right time to launch into it. So with no further ado: Social Software for Set-Top Boxes.
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It's just in Singapore now,
but there's another social mobile networking service now called BEDD
that uses Bluetooth/SMS/MMS/IM or email to connect people when they
are physically close by. It's orients around phone-to-phone
connections, too, which means its pretty much limited to the range of
your phone's Bluetooth receiver, but they have a large range of
services, including dating, eBay-like auctioning, buddies, software
distribution, and more. Actually, the more I look at this, the more
I'm noticing this service has been out for a while (on Series 60s
phones, at least), although they just had their official 'big launch.'
I guess the news is that they're aiming to roll out to the rest of
Asia, Europe, and the Americas soon.
I'm not too big on the Bluetooth-based mobile social softwares, not
because I don't like the concepts, but just because Bluetooth has such
a short range. Even here in New York you'd have to be on the same side
of the block for this to be useful; I can only imagine how
infrequently you'd hook up with someone in a less densely packed city.
I need a GPS-enabled phone sending my location to a central server,
with user-definable ranges of intersection. And a pony.
Rea
d [HardwareZone via AdMBlo
g]
Google, the world's leading search engine, has quietly released a social software application. Orkut is invitation-only, and represents a potentially significant intervention within that new, burgeoning field.
(via OLDaily )
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