musings of a social architect

Emergent Purpose

Lately, I've been musing about the key trends in Net social dynamics circa 2004. These are my initial rambling thoughts, I welcome your comments and stories.

First, some background: in the mid-to-late 1990s, I ran a successful design studio specializing in innovative online communities. I was fascinated by the potential of the Net to amplify social interactions, so I actively sought out a wide variety of clients and helped them design, build and grow their communities. I learned a lot from these projects, and felt driven to summarize and share hard-earned lessons about the dynamics of growing online social environments.

So I synthesized these lessons into nine basic design principles, and gave a few talks. People loved the material -- I was mobbed afterwards by designers who found the ideas incredibly useful, and asked for more.

So I wrote a book which was a minor hit in the United States - and most exciting for me, was translated into in 7 languages. As a result, I've had the deep pleasure of meeting people from England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Japan, China, and Korea who read my book, and found it useful in their work.

From Place-centric to People-centric

The deep principles of community-building are timeless - but the details of how successful networked services are deployed has changed dramatically in the last few years. Being online is a mainstream experience now; the demographics of who's online reflect the population at large. And mobile devices are dramatically transforming the landscape of networked services. Cellphones are the fastest-growing segment of Net-connected devices [NEED REF TO STATS]. Because of economic and infrastructure issues, cellphones are far more pervasive than computers in the developing world [NEED REF TO STATS].

Online communities are old-skool. The heat these days is around social networks, buddy lists & blogs -- all bottom-up social tools that place the individual at the center, and grow outward from there. This is a very different design model than message boards, chat rooms and virtual worlds, which are virtual places where where like-minded people congregate.

This people-centric design model intersects with the social patterns of cellphone users. Cellphones are intimate, personal communications devices -- which also happen to be increasingly powerful computers. Young people use cellphones to stay connected to their buddies, get info from the Net, and to meet new people via flirting or gaming. Net-connected cellphones are dramatically increasing people's ability to form lightweight, transient social groups. This works great for people that are young, single and socially mobile -- yet not so useful if you're family-oriented, and interested in maintaining relationships with stable, long-term groups.

What I see all around me now are networked social tools that have 'emergent purpose.' This is an old theme in new clothing -- the 'build it and they will come' belief that connecting people is STEP 1, and the purpose and business model for a cool online social tool will emerge over time. I saw a lot of companies fail as they followed this ethic - particularly those that created and marketed FREE tools & services built around chat, message boards and virtual worlds. The companies who made real money connecting people online -- Amazon, eBay, SOE (makers of Everquest) -- built their community infrastructure around a shared, meaningful activity other than pure socializing.

So what is a Net community circa 2004? A set of overlapping links in a social network? A group of cross-linked blog owners and readers? People who participated in the Dean campaign? Kids who meetup in a club using their cellphones to coordinate? Lightweight content-building tools like blogs and social networks are enabling social groupings that are fluid and dynamic, and Net-connected cellphones enable 'just-in-time' socializing.

I find all this fascinating - and it makes me wonder when and where we'll see small, focused, semi-structured groups (e.g. teams, bands, guilds) emerge in networked services -- 'cause that's a cross-cultural social structure that gets stuff done.

More later -- and if you know of networked services that include team structures, let me know - I'd love to check 'em out.

Harnessing the Collective

I've had the pleasure to talk with lots of interesting, smart folks recently -- and a theme that's emerging from these conversations is the Net's increasing power to harness the collective..

We see this vividly right now in the political landscape, with Howard Dean's success using the Net to raise money and catalyze volunteer support. We also see this in the proliferation of easy-to-use tools for building and maintaining relationships. Today's social networks are essentially software frameworks where the users create ALL the content and virally market the product. More and more online discussions are using Slashdot-derived self-moderating systems, which harness the collective editorial behaviors of the readership. And then there's Google, who has this idea embedded in it's DNA. Google Search harnesses the collective interest of people online (as expressed through links) and Google News gives us a real-time picture of which stories are attracting attention online.

Today, just for fun, I googled this phrase. The results were sprinkled with terms like 'smart organizations,' 'learning communities' and 'hi-performance teams.' It's exciting to see the basic principles of system dynamics and knowledge-sharing becoming more mainstream and accepted -- in our software systems, poitical processes, and company cultures. That's a sure sign of how much the Net is infiltrating everyday life.

Bottom-up Politics meets voter reality

This article in the Seattle Time points out the disparity between internet buzz & real-world voting behavior. I have the same question, and I'm gonna watch this evolution closely -- there is much to be learned about the blending of online dynamics and national politics.

The Howard Dean 'movement' reminds me of Ross Perot's campaign a few years back. Like Dean, Perot stimulated a grass-roots movement of people who were tired of politics as usual, and wanted to believe in someone with a fresh perspective on the situation. There are also many differences, to be sure - but I'll be curious to see how this plays out over the coming months.

Social Networking from Google

So Google is experimenting with social networking -- not surprising, given their business goals and their young, wired company culture. I checked out the service - it has "post-Google" interface design (clean, but includes flair and personality), and the usual collection of social networking features (profiles, friends, testimonials, groups, etc.) Nice to see them including groups from the get-go - that's a gaping hole in Friendster's product. And this statement in their term of service show they've been paying attention:

We may refuse to grant you a username that impersonates someone else, is or may be protected by trademark or proprietary rights law, or is vulgar, offensive or otherwise inappropriate, as determined by us in our sole discretion.

Google currently has no cross-property UserId or user profiles visible on their site -- but they DO have forums (Usenet) and blogs (Blogger), with separate login systems. With the addition of Orkut, Google now has the building blocks for persistent online identity. It'll be fascinating to see how Google packages and productizes these disparate services, and to what extent they provide integration between them.

What goes around, comes around

I just had a great customer service experience at HearthSong. My service agent was funny-yet-helpful, and really took initiative to help me resolve my problem (lost package). I'll definately shop there again. Funny how that works :-)

I took a moment to talk with his manager and commend him -- which gave a 'good karma' start to my day. My goal is to send out positive personal energy at least 3 more times today.

Bottom-up Net Society

Insightful article at AlwaysOn Network about self-organizing tribes and the bottom-up Net society.

Just as storylines evolve based on the interactions of the people that make up reality TV, the Internet is a channel where ideas, processes, political agendas, or Web sites are less scripted, presented and disseminated in a top-down format, but rather discovered and given merit in a real-time show of virtual hands.

My thoughts exactly. Tha's what happens when the basic infrastructure consists of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Envisioning the Web as a seemlessly interconnected 3D space has never made sense to me. Snowcrash was a great book -- not a design spec :-)

Joi Ito: Human Router

I first met Joi Ito in 1994, at a party thrown by his sister Mimi and her husband Scott. A few days later, Joi came to visit Scott & myself at the Paramount Technology Lab, where we were working at the time. Joi seemed to know everyone in the media/technology biz, and took great delight in figuring out who I should make contact with, and getting me hooked up.

I find it fascinating that Joi's Blog so clearly reflects his basic nature as a 'human router' - a person who's mission in life is to bring people together and foster connections between them. Whenever I run into Joi on various social network services, he's always incredibly well-connected -- which brings ME more connections in a tangible and visible way.

Experiencing Joi in these different yet consistent ways makes me hopeful that bottom-up social systems can help us build online social identities that are true to the deep nature of who we are. There's something about the sum of the parts - all the different pieces of identity we develop using these various tools - that reveals our basic nature as human beings.

What do you think? Do you feel that your online social identity reflects your true nature?

Bottom-up Social Systems

While researching an upcoming talk about self-organizing social systems, I ran across this excellent article about the data-driven, bottom-up nature of today's social software. A good read.

I'm fascinated by the underlying dynamics of bottom-up, data-driven social systems, including:
1) decentralized (vs. centralized) control
2) member-created (vs. staff-created) content
3) statistical (vs. editorial) ranking & classification systems

As I look around the Web, I frequently see bottom-up dynamics in successful products. Google's success is based on leveraging social information in the form of links created by people, and it's flagship products are scalable, self-organizing systems. Blogs, Wikis and social network products like Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribes, Ryze, Spoke, etc. follow these self-organizing principles as well.

Links are the atomic units of the web - and leveraging links seems like a smart data-mining strategy for online self-organizing systems.

Bottom-up News

A few months back, I made Google News my browser startup page, began using Google News Alerts to follow interesting stories, and started reading a few blogs on a daily basis.

I'm enjoying the combo: it's fun to experience news as an ever-changing pattern of events & people, rather than a composed editorial viewpoint -- and it's incredibly useful to follow stories of interest via keyword alerts. Now, if I could just customize my Google News layout and have those alerts showup on my start page, I'd be a happy girl.

I still browse the New York Times , Cnet, and Wired -- but less often than before I made a habit of reading bottom-up news sources like blogs and Google News. Take note, editors & advertisers :-)

So - what's your favorite source for online news, and why?

Karaoke Revolution Rocks My World

I've been having waaaay too much fun playing Karaoke Revolution, a PlayStation game made by my talented friends at Harmonix Music. This game lets you play in sing-a-long mode (which is simple and non-competitive) and also includes a competition mode where the computer gives you real-time feedback on the pitch and timing of your singing efforts. The interface is intuitive and clear, and as your performance improves you unlock new outfits for your characters and new venues to perform in.

Best of all, Karaoke Revolution delivers on the promise of being instantly accessible to non-gamers of all ages. To illustrate my point: here's a picture of my 4-year-old son Gabe singing "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" by Pat Benetar, with his 10-year-old cousin Zach dancing wildly in the background while waiting his turn at the mic. Rock on, li'l dudes, rock on!