stoweboyd – Climb to the Stars

Reboot9 — Stowe Boyd: Flow, a New Consciousness for a Web of Traffic [en]

Here are my notes, unedited and possibly misleading, blah blah blah, of the Reboot9 conference.

Stowe’s happy to be back (“reboot was the best single thing I did last year”).

We’re hearing the word “flow” a lot during this conference, used in many different ways. It’s a term that is being stretched in many different ways. Complementary, or not?

Today: flow as a new kind of consciousness. Complementary to yesterday’s “flow” in the first conference.

Apology: because of blogging, Stowe doesn’t write/talk anymore in a very constructed way (“this is my thesis and here are the arguments”) — so lots of fragmentary and incomplete thinking. Incompleteness: the new rhetoric?

Human? “We make our tools and they shape us.” steph-note: cf. Stowe’s talk at last year’s Shift conference. Other note: Thomas is having to drag the Blimp off stage… Cycles.

We’re going towards a new kind of consciousness, which will not clear up the problems we have, but we’re going to change. How are we changing? How are brains changing based on the tools we use to understand the world? What are we losing, what do we gain? How will sociality change based on using new tools that shape cultures?

There is a new consciousness evolving, different enough that it’s going to cause trouble, that a lot of people are going to say it’s bad, and that the people participating in it are doing something illegitimate. (Finger-wagging.) Developing a new moral sense: valuing certain things more highly, and certain things less highly. Hive-mind? Sniffing each other’s pheromones all day?

Will take what the naysayers are saying, and debunk their arguments.

The juggler’s paradox

A small number of “true” jugglers in the room. To learn to juggle, simply do it. The ball falls, and you try again. You train your neurons to do something you didn’t know how to do before. The way jugglers describe what they’re doing doesn’t help other people learn it. They don’t focus on the balls, they don’t focus on their movements. They unfocus. A learned state of consciousness.

Other example: karate. During his first karate classes, Stowe couldn’t even “see” what his sensei was doing. Like magic, because so different. Learning to see. Also, shortening the delay, the dollar bill trick. People can’t catch it. But if you do martial arts, you can — you’ve trained your brain to do something you couldn’t do before. A different state of consciousness. steph-note: I’m not sure I’d call these things “different states of consciousness”. Now, when Stowe sees karate, he knows the moves they’re making, he can see.

A lot of people have caracterised the things that happen to us in a negative way. Over-stimulation is driving us nuts. Stowe thinks we’re learning to accommodate a new world and cope with it. Also doesn’t agree with the “scarcity of attention” economy. (Davenport and Beck.) Another failed metaphor. Treating aspects of human cognition in economic or industrial terms fails miserably.

Psychology of Attention: we actually don’t know much about attention. It doesn’t reside in one place in your brain. It’s all over the place. An emergent property of a bunch of stuff that goes on in your brain. Conventional wisdom about attention is probably wrong. Steer clear of advice of best-selling business authors about what we should do with our attention.

We have witnessed a shift in the way we perceive media: not rival anymore. We used to turn on the radio and just listen. Later, became a background. TV too. People who have the TV on all day, or while they play a video game or listen to music (Stowe is anti-TV). Talking during the movies.

Flow media. We’re getting used to having a bunch of things going on at the same time (IM windows, skype calls, etc.)

ADD: inability to focus, hyperactive. Invented disease. Treated (paradoxically) with stimulants. Maybe kids shouldn’t sit still (over-diagnosing and medicating). Stowe doesn’t think we’re creating a toxic environment for our children, but the school system has not snapped into the 21st century.

Stowe strongly disagrees with Linda Stone’s Continuous Partial Attention theses. In general, CPA is a disorder, for her. Stowe thinks this kind of thinking is based on an old model of how one should deal with the world. FIFO. Stowe doesn’t believe flow is bad, it’s just a different model. It’s not about speed, it’s about remaining connected. We can’t stay head down for hours or days at a stretch when important events might be occurring that require immediate response.

The world is more like an ER than a supermarket checkout. Reverting to pre-agricultural consciousness. Hunter awareness. Scanning the savannah.

The war on flow (steph-note: not sure I’d call this flow, again… agree with the concepts exposed here but the “label” flow bugs me). Remaining connected is not a disease, but a new ethos, a new set of beliefs. Time as a shared space, and psychology is adapting to that. Conflicts with industrial norms: maybe the tribe is more important.

The Buddylist is the centre of the universe. Made greater by the sum of our connections. Flow is generational. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be doing 16 things at once. steph-note: I must be rancid old-school, because I still think there is value on being able to concentrate/focus on one single thing during a stretch of time.

If you expose kids to more language, they tend to be smarter. We’re training our neurones.

Why call it Flow? steph-note: that’s the bit I’m curious about

CM’s notion of flow: “being in the zone”. He’s opposed to the stuff Stowe is talking about steph-note: not surprised, incompatible to me. cf. definition from wikipedia. Usually not a solitary activity steph-note: surprised… what about meditation? that’s an obvious example of flow.

Flow changes the way time works. Four flavours of time: physics, linear (industrial), cyclic (mystical), flow (lived time).

steph-note: Stowe says time slows down when you’re in the zone, you can see the tennis ball. But I’m not sure that’s the main characteristic, I think: that’s because you learnt to see. In flow, time passes fast.

Social applications (Stowe’s business): social networks are how we discover meaning, belonging and insight on the world. Traffic flow is the primary dynamic of all future social apps. Tools which will allow us to unfocus and concentrate on sociality.

Pushing Dunbar’s constant. steph-note: cf. Stefana Broadbent at LIFT… our tools allow us to manage more relationships Can you ‘know’ and ‘care’ about more than 150 people? What is the limit with these tools?

How do we use time? a way of sharing something. Productivity is second to connectivity. steph-note: perfectly agreed. Important stuff will find its way to you many times. You can miss things (not that important to be a slave to every e-mail, every RSS feed), but your network won’t, and things will get back to you.

Flow is a state of mind. Flow is a verb.

Discussion: Stowe says we still need to focus (steph-note: phew!), but it’s a question of degree. It’s about how we do a lot of things which don’t necessarily require full focus. Change from “head down with occasional coffee breaks” to “long coffee break with a few focused interruptions”.

Groups, Groupings, and Taming My Buddy List. And Twitter. [en]

[fr] Long, long billet sur la notion de "groupe" en social software et les différentes formes que peut prendre cette notion. Trop raide pour traduire ou résumer, navrée.

Warning: very long post. Not proof-read. Hope it makes sense. Mostly dictated, so if you see funky stuff that isn’t a typo and really looks weird, try reading out loud.

“Group” is a word which is thrown around a lot in the social software/social tools/social networking/social thingy arena. Flickr has groups. Google has groups. So does Yahoo!, of course. CoComment is working on groups (and have been for ages). Twitter is being advised against them (I second that). YouTube, Facebook, Orkut, Last.fm — “groups” seem to be a compulsory feature for any 2.0 service today. It’s very natural, too: we need to break down large communities in order to be able to function within them (see The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes for some thinking around this issue). Unfortunately, it’s also a result of all the 2.0 “community” buzz stuff floating around: “implement groups, and your tool/app will have communities!”

Like many overused words, “group” is actually used in different contexts to mean different things, and this brings about quite a lot of confusion. “How to implement groups” is a theme that I’ve had a few exchanges about with both the coComment and the Twitter people, and I think it’s an impossible question to answer unless we have cleared up the vocabulary a little to start with.

I would like to distinguish between three types of “groups”, which are often all called “groups”, but which have different characteristics and different uses:

“groups” or “shared-interest groups” (“Flickr-groups”)
“groupings” (“ad hoc assemblages of people with similar interests” — Stowe Boyd)
“contact groups” (organising my contacts)

Shared-Interest Groups

This is usually what people think of when they say “group”. It is a set of people who come together to (hopefully) form a community around a shared interest. Usually, one chooses to join such groups. Belonging to the group gives you some kind of special connection to other members (which you might not know, but you now have one thing in common with), and allows you to “do things” you would not be able to do if you were outside the group. (For exemple: send a message to all the people in the group, or post a photo to a shared album.)

Typical examples of this kind of group are Yahoo! Groups or Flickr Groups. People join these groups to be able to build something, share something, or simply hang out with the other members of the group. However, if you look at the way people use this kind of group in communities which are more “social networking”-oriented, like Facebook or Orkut, you will see that they tend to not be that active inside the groups, but that they use them a bit like “tags” to advertise their interests. These groups are therefore not only a way of connecting with other people, but also a way of saying something about yourself. And in some communities, the latter is clearly more important.

Groupings

Shared-interest groups are a bit limited when it comes to making your application truly “social”, as I heard Stowe Boyd point out during his Building Social Applications Workshop at the LIFT conference earlier this year. Now, I’ve been through Stowe’s blog to try to serve you with a nice citation that explains exactly what he means by “groupings”, and haven’t really found anything that satisfied me. (As far as I can see, Stowe first talks about groupings in In The Time Of “Me First”: IBM Slowr?, and explains a bit more in In The Time Of “Me-First”: Stikkit.)

Here’s the definition Stowe gives in his workshop slideshow, slide 24:

Groupings: ad hoc assemblages of people with similar interests.

Stowe Boyd

As I understand it, groupings are things that “happen” rather than things that people elect to join or build. Groupings emerge within a social network because of the way people are using it. Groupings are things that occur naturally and all the time inside networks, but the tricky part will be to decide which groupings to make visible to the users and how.

The first time I really encountered this type of automatic grouping of users based on their behaviour was in Last.fm. Last.fm tells you who your “neighbours” are, by picking out people who have similar music-listening habits as yours. So, in last FM, not only can you see my contacts or “friends”, people I have elected to be connected to in some way in the online world of last FM even though our musical tastes may have little in common, but you can also see my neighbours, people I probably do not know and definitely have not chosen to be connected to, but which I am inevitably connected to because we share similar musical tastes.

Isn’t this a more interesting way of interconnecting people than having them explicitly join groups saying “I like this or that artist”? CoComment also has a neighbours feature (I like to think that I’m for something in its existence, as it was one of the first suggestions I made and pushed for about a year ago), but unfortunately you can’t see other people’s neighbours or do much with your neighbourhood. The value groupings will add to your tool or service will depend greatly on which groupings you decide to make visible to your users, what doors being part of a given grouping opens up for the user, basically, what you choose to do with these groupings (display them? Nice, but not enough in most cases).

With all this in mind, if you are trying to figure out “the best way to implement groups” for your application/tool /2.0 service, here is what I would recommend. Start by taking a long hard look at how your application already organises users into possible groupings. What can you make visible? What is interesting? What doors could you open to people who are inside the same grouping? What are your users going to want to do with these groupings?

Some examples of groupings could be:

people who have listened to a particular song regularly over the last six months
people who favourite my photographs on Flickr
people who subscribe to a given blog
people who have commented on a given post or blog
people who have marked me as a contact
people who use a given tag
people who comment on posts or photographs tagged “cat”
people who ordered this or that book on Amazon
people who have been marked as a contact by somebody
people who have joined a certain group…

As you can see, the definition of “grouping” is much wider than the definition of “group”. “Groups” are a small subset of “groupings”, which have a performative flavour, as you become part of them by the simple act of stating that you desire to be part of them.

The example before last is a little bit problematic in my sense. Most of the time, a user ends up belonging to a grouping because of the way he or she uses the system. It is your actions which make you part of a grouping. Here, you are not part of a grouping because of something you have done, but because of what somebody else has done to you (added you to her contacts). I have been hesitant for this reason to consider “being somebody’s contact” as a grouping, but if you look at it from the point of view of the social network, it is still a way in which “usage” organisers to people who are part of the network.

The existence of these “passive groupings” (from the point of view of the user who is part of the grouping) invites us to go through the looking-glass and examine what goes on from the perspective of the user creating the groupings by making his connection to other users explicit.

Contact Groups

I hope that we have now come to accept that networks are asymmetrical. It is not because I have marked you as a contact, that you have to mark me back as a contact too. I think that a great source of confusion is the general use of the word “friend” in social networks. There is an emotional component in there that makes it rather difficult to say “well, you might think I’m your friend, but I don’t.” Friendship is supposed to go both ways. “Contact” is a much more neutral word, which is easily understood as meaning “you are, in some way, part of my world here.”

“In what way?” is the big question here. In what way is John part of my world? In what way am I part of his, if at all? I will leave the second of these two questions completely aside in this discussion, for I consider it to be a psychological, emotional, and relational minefield. In our offline relationships, we don’t usually get to know exactly how important we are for our friends or acquaintances, or even love interests. We are treading on eggs, here. And to make things even more delicate, different people use different words to describe the people who are part of their world. These are, in my opinion, human relational issues which are way too delicate to be formalised in a social network without a lot of serious thinking, if they are to be respectful of people’s feelings and meaningful in any way.

The first question, however, is a crucial one. I personally think that it is also the key to managing many privacy issues intelligently. How do I organise the people in my world? Well, of course, it’s fuzzy, shifting, changing. But if I look at my IM buddy list, I might notice that I have classified the people on it to some point: I might have “close friends”, “co-workers”, “blog friends”, “offline friends”, “IRC friends”, “girlfriends”, “ex-clients”, “boring stalkers”, “other people”, “tech support”… I might not want to make public which groups my buddies belong to, or worse, let them know (especially if I’ve put them in “boring stalkers” or “tech support” and suspect that they might have placed me in “best friends” or “love interests”… yes, human relationships can be complicated…)

Flickr offers a half-baked version of this. I say “half-baked” because it does allow me to introduce some organisation in my contacts, but it is not quite satisfying. And regarding what has been said above, this classification is made public — so inevitably, there is no way that it can be satisfying to the person making the classification. It has to remain politically correct. Basically, what Flickr does is allow you to single out certain contacts as “friends” or “family”. This is tame enough, particularly given that the word “friend” has been emptied of much of its meaning by social networks which use it as a synonym for “contact”. What is interesting here is how Flickr uses this classification to help users manage privacy. I can make certain photographs visible only to my friends or my family. I can decide to allow only my contacts to comment. But this kind of control remains quite coarse, because the groups are predefined and may not map well to the way I view my social world and want to manage my privacy.

A more useful way to let a user organise his contacts is simply to let him tag them. Xing does that. Unfortunately, it does not allow one to do much with the contact groups thus defined, besides displaying contacts by tag, which is of course nice, but about as useful as making groupings visible without actually doing anything with them.

Use more precise vocabulary than “group”

Have you noticed how I’ve been using the word “groups” to speak of this way of classifying one’s contacts? Well, instant messaging software uses the word “group” (“buddy groups”, “contact groups”), and that’s what people are used to. Now, imagine the confusion if somebody says “Twitter needs groups”, meaning “contact groups”, and the person listening understands it as “shared-interest groups”? These are two very different kinds of groups. They are organised differently and serve a different purpose. See why I think we need to stop speaking about “groups” in general and be much more precise with our vocabulary?

Shared-interest groups are groupings that we actively choose to be part of, they are generally public, or at the least, we know who the other members are, and the point of being part of such a shared-interest group is to be able to do certain things with the other members, or get to know them.
Contact groups (normally) passive groupings that somebody puts us into, they are generally private, to the extent that one does not know exactly what grouping one is in, and the interest of such contact groups is mainly for the person creating them, who can choose to treat the people inside them differently (mainly regarding privacy).
Groupings, defined by Stowe Boyd as ad hoc assemblages of people with similar interests, can actually be understood as a very generic expression, including the two previous ones, to refer to “ad hoc assemblages of people emerging through social network/software/tool usage.” When it is one’s actions which bring him/her into a grouping, we can speak of “active groupings”, and when it is another’s actions, “passive groupings”.

One could probably say that the way in which a social application implements groupings (which are made visible and how, and which actions, features, permissions or characteristics are associated to them) — shared interest groups and contact groups being two particular species of groupings — is going to play an important role in how successful it is, because groupings in general are the key through which users will interact with each other.

Maybe somebody could start working on a taxonomy of sorts for groupings? We already have active and passive, the weird performative ones that are the similar-interest groups, all the contact group stuff, but we could imagine classifying and analysing groupings by looking at what brings one into a grouping: is it interaction of some type with other users? Quantity of something? Centred around one object, or a collection of objects? Is there a time component? Does it involve reciprocity? What kind of pattern of usage is it linked to? We could go on, and on…

Case-study: Twitter

Even though this post has been ripening in my head (ew!) since February, the reason I am writing it today is the following twitter from Tara Hunt:

Advising Twitter (Britt) AGAINST groups (gameable/spammable) and FOR personal lists (solves group messaging)

twitter from Tara

I have blogged about Twitter quite a few times already, spoken with the Twitter people when I was in San Francisco and sent them a bunch of feedback and ideas that I haven’t got around to blogging yet (I wonder when I will). This should make pretty obvious that I really really like this service. (So that’s the disclaimer: fangirl.)

If you’re still reading this, your head is probably full of groupings/similar-interest groups/contact groups ideas and concepts. Let’s see how they apply to Twitter. The nice thing about Twitter is that it’s a rather simple application, feature-wise (and that’s one of the things that makes it so nice). So, where are the groupings? Here are some:

users who are friends with John
users John is friends with (not the same grouping!)
users John is following (still another grouping, because of the distinction twitter makes between friends/contacts and the act of “following”)
users who are following John but he is not following (fans/stalkers, depending on how you look at it)
users who answer John’s twitters (with @John)
users who use the word “LIFT07” in their twitters
…

What makes Twitter great? Well, besides the great online/offline integration through the use of mobile phones, the clean, usable interface, the great people using it and the cats in the servers, one of the things that makes Twitter Twitter (if I may say) is what it does with the grouping “users John is friends with”. Well, it’s pretty simple, in fact, and you’ll probably think I’m pointing out the obvious (but that, in my mind, simply indicates how good a job Twitter have done with it): they display all the twitters of those users in that grouping on one page. Well, yeah, I guess that was the Obvious thing to do with that grouping.

Amongst the other types of groupings, one can wonder if Twitter needs to introduce similar-interest groups, or contact groups. I don’t see much of a case for the former, as Twitter is centred around people and relationships rather than the content of their interactions. Twitter is not really about what I’m saying to people. It’s about who I’m talking to. Twitter is precious because it gives me a space in which I can share a little things about my life with anybody who has decided that these little things had some value to them (and that can include non-Twitter users). Twitter it is equally precious because it provides me with a space (and this is where the “what they actually did with that grouping” thing comes in) through which I can stay informed of the little things in lives of others that I have decided were meaningful for me.

Which brings me to contact groups. Contact groups could have two purposes for twitter:
– privacy management
– twitter overflow management, particularly on mobile devices.

Without getting into the technicalities involved (and I’m aware they are not straightforward), let’s imagine that I can tag my Twitter contacts. This allows me to give some structure to my online world in Twitter. I can use that structure in two ways: make certain messages visible only to certain people I have chosen (privacy), receive messages on a given device only from certain people (overflow).

Tagging is the best way to create these contact groups. It leaves each user completely free to organise their world how they wish. It allows multiple classification of contacts. Keep the tags private, and personal dramas are avoided. Multiple classification requires establishing rules for when conflicting orders are given. Interfaces (web and mobile) need to be devised to tag contacts, to set message privacy (default, message by message, on/off style), and following behaviour. Not straightforward, of course, but can certainly be done.

Remains the basic question: does this kind of feature address a real need? (For me, it does.) How is it going to change Twitter if it is implemented? (If this can be predicted…) What might happen if it is not implemented? Well, you know, the usual stuff when making a decision.

More LIFT Notes: Sampo Karjalainen, Lee Bryant (and Stowe again) [en]

As always, can contain inaccurate material.

Sampo Karjalainen

Habbo: hang-out place. You get a character, you can configure it. steph-note: looks like a very lo-res version of Second Life

There are games inside Habbo.

What makes people come back? People can create their own room/spaces. Can buy furniture (in-game credits), pets, kissing booths, armies, banks. steph-note: this really looks like pixelised Second Life. Question: can you create stuff and objects as you can in Second Life? People seem to be having a ball in Habbo, in any case.

Playful environment, though people might find it “uncool” to say they’re “playing” in there. A part of unexpected in what people did with Habbo.

Provide building/playing blocks. Intuitive interaction. Get people in the mood for play.

Lee Bryant: Collective Intelligence for the Enterprise

Original photo by Violator3 on Flickr.

Basic problem: wasting a lot of brain power in large organisations.

Our IT systems don’t understand how we work. People are great at pattern matching. We don’t go “yellow object, subset with large hairy objects, teeth => lion” — we just shout “Lion!”.

We need to feed our minds, not the machine. steph-note: Lee has got much better at slides since BlogTalk 2004

Many intelligent people inside organisations are surprisingly open to using social tools.

Usually, enterprise tools get worse the more people use them. Social tools get better the more people use them.

There is no such thing as a global collective intelligence. Collective intelligence exists only within a defined community.

Large large companies (>1k) have enough scale to make these things work, and do internal versions of these tools.

Bottom line for doing social stuff:

potential cost savings if we work in a smarter way
multiplier effect on productivity
greater peripheral vision
less duplication of effort
closer, more responsive client relationships

Basic principles: reading, writing, filtering.

Over time, information starts to find you. If I miss something in my news reader, it’ll probably pop up again, because somebody else in my network is going to blog/link/del.icio.us it.

Concretely:

feeds everywhere
feed library management
filtering tools
clipstream tools
social search

Importance of engagement and context. There is no magic tool. Adapt the solution to the context and situation.

Engaging people with new ways of working is not easy.

There is perception of dangers, risks, security — and the “real” evalutation.

Stowe Boyd

This is a shorter version of the workshop notes, so I’ll send you there. Or read [Bruno’s notes], which, as always, are quite complete.

Stowe Boyd: Building Social Applications [en]

Warning: these are my notes of Stowe‘s workshop at LIFT, meaning my understanding and interpretation of what he said. They might not reflect accurately what Stowe told us, and might even be outright wrong in some places. Let me know if you think I really messed up somewhere.

Update 05.2007: enjoy the slideshow and the video of his presentation (not the workshop!).

Questions to play ball with:

What makes social applications social (or not)
How can we make applications more social?
What are the common factors in successful social applications?
What is worth building?
iTunes vs. Last.fm; also non-social applications which implement, at some point, some social component.

“Software intended to shape culture.” Stowe Boyd, in Message, August 1999

steph-note: a step further than “groupware”

Applications which are qualitatively different. But they haven’t replaced the rest: people are still building applications which allow people to buy stuff online. But we’re looking for ways to stick the humans back in there (“what do the top 10 authorities on cellphones recommend?”)

Read: The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg (Third Place, not home and not work)

Decreasing affiliation in the USA (Putnam — sp?). People spend less time “hanging out” with people. steph-note: cf. danah/MySpace More TV. Commuting isn’t that significant, but hours in front of the TV is. The light at the end of the tunnel, the only hope we’ve got left, is the internet. Social hours spent on the internet are hours not spent watching TV (steph-note: yep!)

TV is not involvement in people, but in this “entertainment culture”. TV reached lowest numbers in the USA since ’50s.

One way we can measure the success of a social application is how much it moves us in that direction.

Social: me first. Put the individual in the centre. Look at the difference between traditional journalism (disembodied third voice) and blogging (first person, you know who’s writing and who’s reading). Need to start with needs and desires of the people using it (?).

Adoption happens in stages. First, the application needs to satisfy the needs of an individual, in such a way that he/she comes back. And then, there needs to be stuff to share that encourages the individual to invite his friends in.

my passions — my people — my markets

Start with the people. Put the people in the foreground (but how?) Easy to fail if you don’t do that right. How are people going to find each other? Second, support their networks/networking.

Only third: realisation of money — markets — shipping etc.

Give up control to the users: “the edge dissolves the centre”.

To review a social app, you need to use it “for real” over an extended period of time.

Xing: the edge doesn’t dissolve the centre. E.g. can’t create a group. Need to ask them by e-mail, and they try to control group creation and management.

Build an environment in which people are “free”. Allow them to find each other.

Success factors for a social application: me first and bottom up. Otherwise, it won’t spread.

Blogging: primary goal is social interaction and networking (steph-note: half agree, there is the “writing and being read and getting some recognition” goal too — and that is not necessarily social interaction and does not necessarily lead to network contacts)

What suicide girls get right: low price, real people, real lives, social stuff like chat, pictures, etc. They have the connections between the people as the primary way to go around.

Semi/a-social

iTunes
Bestbuy.com
Pandora (until recently)
After the fact (eBay: reputation, Netflix: friends in a tab, Amazon: recommendations from other users, Basecamp: not that social, fails some of the critical tests)

The Buddylist is the Centre of the Universe…

A case against IM being disruptive: the user chooses how disruptive the client is (blings, pop-up messages, etc… same with e-mail)

Totally acceptable to not answer on IM. But also, maybe at times your personal productivity is less important than your relationship with the person IMing you.

“I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.”

(Give to others, and they’ll give to you. Help your buddies out, be there for them, and others will be there for you when you need them.)

List of hand-picked people who are on your list.

Groups help huge communities scale, in the way they bring them down to manageable sizes for human beings again. (Dunbar constant, roughly 150 people.)

Six degrees of connection doesn’t work. People are strangers. Even second degree is really weak.

Difference between people you really talk to, and “contacts” (often people will have two accounts => should build this kind of thing into the service — cf. Twitter with “friends” and “people you follow”).

Me, Mine, and Market.

Market: it’s the marketplace where the application builders are going to be able to make money by supporting my interaction/networking with “mine”.

You can’t “make an app social”, you need to start over most of the time.

Think about the social dimension first, and then what the market is. E.g. social invoicing app, what could the market be? Finding people to do work for you. And then you can invoice them using the system.

E.g. Individual: “I need a perfect black dress for that dinner party.” => who knows where to shop for the most fashionable stuff? => market = buying the perfect black dress, with commission to the recommender. (New social business model!)

Facebook profile: all about flow, it’s not static. It’s a collection of stuff going on in my world. Information about my blog (posts), friends… I don’t have to do anything, and it changes.

It represents my links to the world. People want to belong. Be in a context where what they do and say matters. Make it easy for users to find other people who will care about them.

Orkut failed because it was just social networking for the sake of social networking. Not targeted at a specific group of people. Nobody who cares! Disease-like replication and then died down. Nothing to do there.

Swarm intelligence. People align around authority and influence. Some people are more connected then others. Inevitable. Swarmth = Stowe-speak for measure of reputation. As soon as reputation brings something to those who have it, charlatans step in and try to figure out how to game the system. Need to be aware of that, to discover those cheating mechanisms and counter them.

General principle: things are flowing, and we want to support the rapid flow of information (ie, stuff that goes in my profile). “traffic”: do you make it possible for people to get information from a variety of sources delivered quickly to them? (e.g. Facebook bookmarklet) (traffic=possible metric).

The media hold the pieces, but not the sense of the conversation. You need to immerse yourself into the flow to get it. How transformative is it to get a constant flow of information from people you care about? Can’t evaluate that from the outside.

Tags

cf. David Weinberger: tags matter for social reasons. The power of classification is handed out to the users. They use it to find information and to find each other. They define implicit social groupings.

If people don’t “get” tags, the interface isn’t good. Because the concept is really simple. (e.g. Flickr, del.icio.us get it right)

Discovery

Primary abiding motivator of anybody on the internet: discovery (things, places, people, self)

One of Stowe’s pet peeves: Groups and Groupings

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

Groupings are ad hoc assemblages of peope with similar interests (from my point of view). (My buddy list categorisation.)

Groups try to be symmetric.

Community of tags. They happen automatically.

Power Laws

There will always be people with more power than others, get over it. The recommendation of somebody with more swarmth should count more than that of one with no swarmth.

Accept and work with the imbalance of power.

But careful! The people decide who has more swarmth. And you need to constantly counter the games. Natural social systems are self-policient (sp?).

Reputation

Measure and reward swarmth (steph-note: !== popularity, quantity)

Reputation is not transportable from one network to another.

Deep Design

last.fm (neighbours!)
upcoming.org (events are nothing without people!!)
Facebook
ThisNext (about design and fashion)

First, just build the social app. Once the social stuff is in place, build the market (see Last.fm).

Journal where you can integrate music references. With backlinks from artists.

Mistake? tags aren’t source of groupings.

steph-thought: Flickr groups are not just about people, they are about editing content (creating collective photo albums).

If you have an existing social app, and an entrenched body of users, to make people switch to your new product you need to be an order of magnitude better.

Tag beacons: a recommended tag (e.g. lift07)

If you make people tag an item, the tags used stabilize over time. After a while, the same 10-15 tags. Little chance a new user two years latter will suddenly introduce another tag.

ThisNext is pretty. A piece of social interaction stuff missing however — can’t communicate with other people. Profile just leads to recommendations.

Cautionary Tales

Basecamp and the Federation of Work: multiple logins, domains — fragmentation. Wanted to be able to pull everything in a single place. Not simple to keep track of everything one has in the system. Pervasive static models with hardly any flow. It’s an online groupware app, not a social app. It doesn’t put me in the foreground.

Outside.in is about finding people who are in your zipcode. I remember Stowe did a post on this some time back. “Where’s the people?”

You only get one first launch. What’s the point of missing it by doing it before you got to the social tipping point?

Blinksale: where’s the market? (invoicing thing)

Explorations

Where is all this going? All commerce on the internet in the future will be social. Put in context of social recommendations etc (perfect little black dresses). A social iTunes — what would it look like? They could acquire Last.fm and integrate them to iTunes, for example. I could recommend music to my friends via iTunes…

Calendars are hard! We’re still waiting for the perfect (at least good) calendar-sharing system.

Social browsing… “What should I look at today, based on recommendations of these n people I really find smart?”

Safety/privacy concerns: solutions we have in the offline world need to be emulated online.