Ton Zijlstra has a piece on the Failure of Social Networking Platforms that is a good starting point for thinking about this stuff and including a spot-on comment from John Moore who says " Ecademy in particular seems to have succumbed to networking for its own sake", which encapsulates my main objection to the forms so far of Social Networking.
I read a year ago about a book which helped you to ensure that there was no "wasted" time in your relationships, that they all contributed as directly as possible to your personal and business success. A repellent and fundamentally stupid idea that ensured I didn't bother to read the book.
But it strikes me that some of this thinking is embodied in many social networking tools, that networking for its own sake is a 'good thing' and that somehow we can do this through an online, otherwise anonymous chunk of software. And the problem with that is that it has no context. Without a context beyond "hey, we're both human beings who speak a mutually comprehensible language, lets network', nothing useful is going to happen.
Trust is an essential part of networks and you only earn trust by acting in some way. You don't own your trustworthiness, it exists in the network of people around you, who share it with each other behind your back. When its value is positive, you gain unexpected benefits, when it is negative you reap unexpected failures. But the trust is rarely explicit, in fact, being explicit can get you in deep trouble. It works when I ask you, whom I trust, who you would suggest to do some work for me. You offer a name, and perhaps some qualification and endow that person with trust. You don't mention the people you don't trust. If I offer a name and you offer another in return or say "I don’t know whether he could manage that", a pretty clear, but wholly implicit transaction has occurred to which neither you nor I can be held accountable.
Make that stuff explicit, as social networking software needs to do and you will quickly find yourself surrounded only by parasitic networkers with no pride. After all, you don't need to, and probably shouldn’t, make explicit, let alone public, your close relationships with people, that just invites exploitation by others. The results of the Six Degrees of Separation experiment run by Columbia University should be a warning to all Social Software developers.
On the other hand, I do believe that 'human network aware' software will become essential for us to make sense of the flood of information and to function intelligently in increasingly distributed lives. The software will deduce our relationships from the links and connections we share. I will send my daughter more links to photos on the personal blog than I send a business colleague with whom I work on a book, who will get files from a folder called "book", the email address I use for messages will tell some more and so on and the software will use that knowledge to help me keep track of where, and for what purpose, information came in and went out and oiffer suggestions for some things, or people, that i might also find valuable in that context.
But it will all have to have a context because I am a different person in different places. I behave and dress and speak differently when I am with my wife, from when I am with another close family member, from when I am at a public meeting, from when I am a speaker at a conference, from talking over the dinner at the end. To each context I log in as a different person and software that doesn't understand that, and doesn't attach itself to the things I am doing in the places, and with the people I am doing it, wont work.
Have you seen this item on the blog Teledyn ?
http://www.teledyn.com/mt/archives/001649.html
Posted by: Jon Husband | January 29, 2004 at 08:08 AM