I'm delighted to be a keynote speaker at the Online Information 2006 conference in London, England later this fall, thanks to an invite from KM guru David Gurteen.
My task is to brief the audience on the history of social networking
and then bring them up to date with the latest thinking on the subject,
and the newest and most promising social networking applications. It
should be a great event and I'm looking forward to meeting in person
some of the KM thought leaders on the other side of the Atlantic that I
have corresponded with over the past few years.
I thought it might be worthwhile, as preparation for this, to blog
about some of my personal emerging thoughts on the subject of social
networking. This will be the first of a series of posts on this subject.
The mindmap above is a rough taskonomy
of social network applications (SNAs) I developed last year. Since
then, I've been monitoring new applications and their success and (more
often) failure. A lot of the applications that have been developed seem
to be solutions in search of a problem -- simple to develop, kind of
interesting, but ultimately, in the cornucopia of sites and
applications out there, not terribly urgent or valuable, and ultimately
lost in the shuffle.
What is social networking trying to do? Most of the applications so far offer one or more of the eight features or functionalities shown in blue on the mindmap above:
- Finding people (discovering, rediscovering, or locating them)
- Building directories, network maps and social networks
- Inviting people to join your networks
- Managing access to your networks ("permissioning")
- Connecting with people in your networks (using various media)
- Managing
relationships across media (e.g. making the jarring transition from
e-mail or weblog-based relationships to voice-to-voice or face-to-face)
- Collaborating with people in your networks, and
- Content
sharing with people in your networks (and other learning,
knowledge-finding and knowledge-sharing functionalities that are
arguably the domain of Knowledge Management rather than Social Networking)
MySpace, for example, arguably the most successful SNA so far, is focused on passively helping people find other people (you put yourself out there, and the people you're hoping to find, for the most part, find you,
in contrast to LinkedIn, for example, where you can actively search and
connect with people with particular skills, backgrounds, or interests).
MySpace and most other SNAs also have some Knowledge Management (KM)
functionality -- you can share your stuff with others, search for
others' stuff (now often using your trusted network's recommendations
to filter your searches), and do some focused research.
In a previous article, I nominated the following as the ten most successful SNAs to date:
- Weblogs:
Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of
Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Weblogs provide
context-rich knowledge plus a forum for reader conversations. As social
software they are successful because (a) they are easy to set up and
maintain, (b) thanks to Google, they attract a lot of attention, but
they are also very valuable KM tools, so their social value is a bonus.
- Wikis:
Collaborating. They have succeeded because they're the simplest
imaginable asynchronous collaboration tool, and don't mess that up by
trying to be something more.
- Del.icio.us:
Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of
Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Same formula as blogging,
but trading off less work for against a poorer-context relationship, by
publishing your bookmarks instead of your articles.
- Flickr:
Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of
Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Just like Del.icio.us
except the shared content is images instead of bookmarks.
- DodgeBall:
Finding People + Finding Where People Are Right Now. DodgeBall gets
around the invasiveness of tracking other people (stalking) by putting
a reverse spin on it: You tell DodgeBall where you are and it tells others in your network (current and desired associates, friends, and crushes) when you are nearby, so that, if they are so inclined, they can contact you to meet up.
- BaseCamp: Collaborating + Messaging + Scheduling/Calendaring. An intuitive
project management tool that makes contacting project team members
using various media, with a minimum of other bells and whistles.
- MySpace: Finding People + Messaging + Content-Sharing. Dead simple social networking tool, primarily for young people looking for friends & romantic interests and sharing music and photos.
- FaceBook: Finding People. Focused on students in high schools and universities, this simple tool lets you establish networks within your current school and track people from former schools.
- Insider Pages:
Content-Sharing + Finding People. The content is reviews of companies
by consumers. The idea is to take the Consumer Reports or epinions concept local,
so that consumers can see what others think about local suppliers.
Information not available elsewhere and
probably only ever available peer-to-peer. Enormous potential here,
especially if Google Maps is integrated. The challenge is getting
people to take the time to volunteer their opinions. The way around the
challenge is getting reviewers to sign up their friends and neighbours.
- Mind-Mapping: Collaborating. Simply and quickly documents what's being said and agreed to, graphically,
in real time, so that participants in a conference/meeting/community
can see and react to it immediately. Gives participants a complete
'map' of the conversation as soon as the conversation ends. The
mind-map above was made using FreeMind.
Since then, three new variations on SNAs have caught my (and others') attention:
- Memediggers
-- tools like digg and reddit that allow groups to amplify and 'talk'
to each other about issues they agree are important and/or interesting
- Mashups
-- SNAs combined with other SNAs, or with multimedia or other apps to
increase their utility or add visualization or some other functionality
- SNA/Hardware Interfaces -- SNAs that connect with your TV, GPS, medical or emergency monitoring system or some other hardware device
There has also been a proliferation of multimedia SNAs, of the YouTube variety.
Mashups,
add-ons and other amplifications and combinations of SNA have arguably
widened the digital divide even further. Using many of them requires a
certain level of comfort and familiarity with basic SNAs. For the
majority who go online just for e-mail and rudimentary Google searches,
these apps are too technical and too sophisticated. But because
combining and adding functionality to SNAs is so easy, there is a
blizzard of new such apps each month, and the digital divide grows even
wider as a result.
In the meantime, dissatisfaction with these
applications remains high, on both sides of the divide. In my previous
article, I outlined ten drawbacks and failings of most current SNAs,
which might explain this dissatisfaction:
- Inflexible, tedious information architecture ("Why is entering this field mandatory?")
- Profile poverty ("This tells me absolutely nothing of value about this person")
- No
separation between What I Have and What I Need personas (the
information about you I care about depends on whether I am 'buying' or
'selling' -- even classified ads 'get' this)
- Lack of harvesting capability ("Why do I have to enter this again?")
- Populated
just-in-case instead of canvassed just-in-time ("Oh, sorry, I no longer
work there" and "Oops, sorry, I'm married now")
- The most needed people have the least time and motivation to participate
- Over-engineered and unintuitive
- Lack of scalability and resilience: Centralized instead of peer-to-peer (when it gets too big or goes down, you're out of luck)
- Socially awkward ("I'm not going to tell someone I've never met that!")
- Low signal-to-noise ratio because of dysfunctional information behaviours (blockages, disconnects, lack of trust) -- these need to be accommodated by Social Software tools, instead of ignored
The current generation of SNAs are used principally for recreational
purposes. This may be a reflection of the failings above, and the fact
that these apps are not yet robust enough to be ready for heavy-duty
business use. Beyond the above frustrations, playing around with some
of these apps is fun, and
that, combined with our deep-seated need for social interaction, and
the increasing isolation of our Western culture, accounts for the
immense popularity of many of these applications -- even though they
really don't work very well.
If these apps are to achieve use
and value beyond fun and novelty, however, they need to become more
effective, and they need to address real, urgent, important needs and
problems. I would suggest there are at least four urgent needs/problems
that SNAs could, and hopefully will, fulfil:
- Finding people to love and live with
- Finding people to make a living with
- Finding
people who share important or urgent affinities (and then enabling them
to organize, activate, and exchange context-rich information
peer-to-peer with those people, such as health counsel and 'epinions')
- Enabling powerful virtual collaboration when face-to-face is, for economic or logistic reasons, impossible
Existing
SNAs are not very good at doing any of these things, and they're
hopelessly complicated and unintuitive for most people trying to do
these things. But if we were to be honest, most of us would have to
admit that we're not very good at doing any of things in any case, with
or without technology. For many if not most of us, finding people to
love. finding people to make a living with (or at least do meaningful
work for), and finding people who share our life's passion and purpose,
is at best a hit-and-miss, serendipitous process.
The
non-people-finding apps above should not be problematic. Virtual
collaboration tools developed to date are unintuitive and
over-engineered, but we'll learn to make them simpler and more
sensible. Likewise, the organizing and activism and information
exchange aspects of affinity-group SNAs lend themselves to traditional
software solutions, and we can expect some very powerful and ubiquitous
apps to emerge in the coming years to do this.
The people-finding SNAs, however, are much more problematic.
Civilization
makes finding people mush harder than it was for gatherer-hunter
cultures, where the number of people you could expect to meet and know
in a lifetime were few, and the diversity of human activities was
limited. So we have no intuitive way of finding the right people among
the millions who we may have some limited contact with in our
lifetimes. So we have to resort to trial and error.
We won't
solve this with top-down standardized centralized databases and web
apps either -- the process of finding people to love, work with or
pursue mutual passions is a complex, highly personal process that does
not lend itself to such processes.
How then could we develop
SNAs that could accommodate these difficult, iterative, personal
processes? Might these SNAs need to be only partly
computerized and online, and rely on more 'essential' meetups and
face-to-face interactions? And how might the filtering mechanisms of
such applications be improved to increase the likelihood of finding the
right people?
These are
complex problems, and they will require the development of processes
that are suited to dealing with complexity (most software is designed
to address merely complicated problems). We're not very articulate,
after all, at expressing who we're looking for, or even knowing what
and who it is we're looking for (though, of course, we believe we'll
know it when we see it). Chemistry is often more important than logic
in making lasting and meaningful and effective relationships, and in
finding the 'right' people.
What we need to do is to run a large
number of focused experiments, small scale, improvisational, controlled
by the test group bottom-up, to hone some approaches that work. They'll
undoubtedly vary by culture and by objective. Dating services,
employment and contracting agencies, and self-help groups have always
grappled with these issues, but have not come up with terribly
satisfactory methods or approaches -- they nearly all have high failure
and high attrition rates.
We need to do better. Finding people
to love, to make a living with, and to share our passions and purposes
with, are vital, crucial human activities, and our modern, insulated,
transient society complexifies the task enormously. Software alone
won't make it easy, or certain, but SNAs embedded in new processes that
embrace complexity could take us a long way, and could easily become
the most important uses of the Web of all.
What techniques -- newfangled or old, software-assisted or not -- have you found especially effective at meeting the people you want, and need,
to meet and form meaningful,productive and lasting relationships with?
This, I think, is the greatest challenge of Web 2.0. And its greatest
promise.
[PS: Today and tomorrow I'm guest blogging at the Fast Company Magazine Blogfest. Some illustrious bloggers are involved and some really interesting ideas being surfaced. Check it out.]
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