Tag: socialnetworks

simplicity drives adoption

i joined meinbild.ch today after bernhard had some interesting things to say about it. bernhard argues that simplicity can drive adoption, and that simplicity may help to even the gender balance online:

And what is noticeable are 2 things: 1. It is really, really basic and lacks many features of the usual dating sites. 2. It is quite successful.

now, with its friends feature, one could imagine this service to emit FOAF somewhere. granted that’s totally against the simplicity argument, but it could be hidden at first.

burning FOAF

With the help of anselm, JibberJim, danbri, and zool from #foaf on irc.freenode.net, as well as the almighty google, I’ve compiled the below links (in the extended entry of this post). The plan is to add plugins to the web logging (blogs) application we will be using to provide burners with publishing, Movable Type, to allow people to set up their own FOAF identity and where they can be found on the playa.

this should be fun. i can hardly think of a better match between the online and the offline. the playa is all about meeting people, and FOAF is the online equivalent of it.

help im being friendstered

Suzanne has suggested a match between you and Bonnie.
Jen has suggested a match between you and Alexis.
April: Hi, you are very cute
Lea: i wish my father still lived in zurich, so that i might have actually had a chance at a real glance of you.
Jane: you sound like you’re a pretty cool guy.

quite some setup over at friendster for a slow sunday.. too much fun. maybe this sudden stream of nice-o-grams is by virtue of the personal network being at 134190 people. very unreal for a “personal” network, but maybe testament to reed’s law?

Protocol work

Just had pierre crevoisier from EPFL visit the Wyona office. We are going to organize a seminar at EPFL to show people how to leverage open protocols and formats. The idea is to embrace the diversity of content and applications, and rather than forcing people to submit to central control (they won’t), encourage them to open up their content via RSS, and their applications via web services.
We believe that as web services bridges gaps in EAI, so does weblog technology cross organizational, social barriers. the underlying philosophy in both is that if you unlock your stuff, you can reap the benefits of group forming and social networks.
Sebastien paquet leads the way by showing the academic community how to use weblogs in research and communication (can you say lab notebook?). Will it be possible to replicate the open source meme and make it one of open minds? The protocol and format barriers are coming down. It’s time for group barriers to follow suit.

Giving the levers away

ben hammersley reports that the hosted version of MT will sport a FOAF creator:

Other features include real-time statistics, posting by email, and automatic creation of Friend of a Friend data – instantly taking an experimental standard and taking it to the mainstream.

can you say manufactured serendipity? with the move of these powerful social network technologies to the mainstream, and the formation of standards bodies, who knows where this very interesting field will be in one years time. then again, the pessimist in me wonders what will happen when these neat toys pass from the realm of the elite to the unwashed masses. reputation spam?

Social networks as killer app

alicia shares my interest in social networks / software, so i started a conversation with her, asking what she thought of the potential for social networks to emerge a killer app.

alicia: I think the current trend in social software right now is definitely to try and harness the power of small world network topology. I don’t think anything related to “friend of a friend” is going to become a killer app though unless:
1. the chains are kept short to the tune of 2-3 hops (we, for example, are separated by 4 or 5 friends on Friendster. This is WAY too long of a chain for either of us to really know anything about the other, despite the fact that we’re “connected”)
gregor: highly agreed. yet on the other hand, it allows for serendipity. in our smaller friends circle, it would be harder to cover as many interesting topics, because it’s much likelier that someone with the same interests is in a larger group.
alicia: yes…absolutely true…the problem is that Friendster is positioning the fact that “we’re all connected by friends” as if that should have reputational currency…as if that makes everyone in your personal network trustworthy. And that is definitely NOT necessarily the case.

alicia: 2. the software needs to include a way for people to gauge the affiliative (social) distance of the other users. So, for example, knowing that your favorite movie is Gremlins doesn’t help me contextualize how close/far you are from me socially as would knowing what schools you’ve gone to, where you grew up, where you’ve worked — the groups and organizations you’ve been affiliated with). Without a gauge of social distance, there’s too high a transaction cost to traversing the network in search of someone specific.

gregor: also very true. as we move to leverage these contacts, and make explicit what was implicit before, we will need new vocabulary and new ways to distinguish various levels of being connected.
alicia: yup. definitely agree. “friend” is being worked to death at the moment…and really, it doesn’t import well from software to software (a Friendster friend is different from a LiveJournal friend is different from a Ryze friend, etc) let alone from the virtual to the real.

Infiltration

My social network at friendster (the beta code is still coke) grew 20000% today. Some crazy grrrl named hep somehow hacked the social network, and spread her meme like Ebola.

I am not the kind of girl you take home to show mom. I am short, sarcastic, brutally cynical, and enjoy laughing at the misfortune of others. I tend to dress like a cross between a candyraver, a goth, and a carebear on lsd. By day I am a web developer (except I am still employed BWAHAHAHHA) and by night I break into abandoned buildings.me

The first day in my life where I was simultaneously stalked online and offline. Heh.

Stigmergy beats pedantry

2 individuals interact indirectly when one of then modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of stigmergy.

The World-Wide Web is the first stigmeric communication medium for humans.

The World-Wide Web is human stigmergy. The web and its ability to let anyone read anything and also to write back to that environment allows stigmeric communication between humans. Some of the most powerful forces on the web today, Google and weblogs are fundamentally driven by stigmeric communication and their behavior follows similar natural systems like Ant Trails and Nest Building that are accomplished using stigmergy. The web is new. In the context of written human history is barely a blink of an eye. Yet as new as the web is, it is already showing its ability to support complex human interactions that mimic natural systems use of stigmergy. And were just getting started.

right-on. we are taking baby steps towards the global brain, sidestepping the ordeal of the pedantic web. id rather blog than type in angle brackets all day and worry about resources, properties and statements.

manufactured serendipity

Serendipity is all about making fortunate discoveries by accident. You can’t automate accidental discoveries, but you can manufacture the conditions in which such events are more likely to occur. Conferences are a great place for doing this. So to now are weblogs.

although my web traffic could stand some improvement, serendipity is definitely happening. gonna own some terms on google too, watch out for them 🙂