Category: Social Software

Google has proposed a method to fight weblog comment spam that would dramatically decrease the influence of blogs. Comment spam is a nasty plague, but this cure is worse than the disease. I don’t understand why SixApart is racing to adopt this suicidal approach.
The proposal will prevent Google’s search engine from following links found in weblogs, by putting a rel=”nofollow” link attribute on web links. Blog tool vendors including SixApart raced to support the new proposal (via Joi Ito
Blogs rank highly in Google’s search results because weblogs are link-rich media, and Google’s search algorithms put heavy weight on links. Blog influence is a good thing — items that are rated highly by millions of distributed, independent actions deserve to be brought to the surface.
As described by Sunir Shah and fellow Meatball wikizens, the proposal will destroy the influence of weblogs by not counting the links.
The brilliance of Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr, blogs, and other social software is that the actions of millions of individual users, done to benefit themselves and their small communities, have combined, emergent benefits at a larger scale.
Links give us the ability to combine all of our whispers into a roar. If you dampen the signal amplification, we’re just friends talking to each other. Social software stops being a source of emergent intelligence.

danah boyd wants to like Books We Like, an online service for collective discounts and recommendations in book purchasing.
In the comments, Brad deGraf writes about supporting the import of an existing book spreadsheet, and a future feature that will import Amazon wishlists.
Even nicer would be something that combined an Amazon purchase list, with the “I’ve read that” responses to Amazon’s recommendations (which catch books you’ve read but not bought on Amazon).
For this to work, Amazon would need to componentize its records of the books its customers have purchased (from them or elswhere). Then Amazon, or somebody else, would enable the user to create a public view that could weed out gift books (Audobon Quarterly, for the birdwatching uncle), and purchases one might rather not advertise.
Or perhaps, if more purchases are done through Books We Like, their database will become the master for more of us, rather than Amazon’s.
Because BWL is an infomediary, they would have more of an interest than Amazon in providing tools for individuals to manage and combine their book databases. Amazon offers APIs but has a conflict — they have less of an interest in letting customers control their own data.

SixApart, maker of TypePad and Movable Type weblog services and tools just bought LiveJournal, driving business praise and social angst about the role of the merger on the community.
LiveJournal is a hosted online journal community that is thriving and well-loved by its millions of active participants. danah boyd worries that SixApart will suppress freedom of expression. “My second concern is that Six Apart will not be prepared to deal with the userbase and will initiate practices that are more detrimental because of fear. [For example, what’s the best way to handle an LJ community dedicated to cutters trying to outdo each other via images?”
The social implications of the merger are foretold by Clay Shirky’s writings on Nomic online worlds. When online communities have commercial hosts (or non-commercial hosts who own the server and the code), some differences between the will of the citizens and the business interests of the hosts are inevitable.
Shirky’s article had some interesting and prescient reflections on models for online community governance. Just as democracies evolved to reconceptualize rulers as public servants, elected at the discretion of the populace, there may eventually emerge models of community governance where the host is chosen and serves terms at the discretion of the community.
In order for this to work, content needs to be a lot more portable and platforms need to be more commoditized. And there will need to be new rules and traditions for the management and governance of community infrastructure. In the long run, fees are taxes, governance is the will of the people, and online infrastructure services are public services like roads and schools.
Meanwhile, the in physical world, there’s a trend toward the privatization and corporatization of neighborhoods, controlled by developers and management companies. These corporate-sponsored neighborhoods run into the same sorts of tensions as corporate-sponsored online communities.
In the 90s, Disney Corporation’s efforts to develop Celebration, a Disney-branded community with houses, schools, and community services drew lots of attention. The pristine Disney vacation image foundered in the day to day reality of school board politics, and Disney eventually sold celebration.
The commercial quality control of the management companies conflicts with free speech in the physical world. There’s a bill in the Texas Legislature to permit the display of large American flags, in violation of management company enforced decorum.
Online and in 3D, there are tensions between neighborhoods and corporate hosts. Democracy has value, whether the infrastructure is bits or pixels.

43 things is an amusing and delightful social tool for sharing goals and resolutions like learning to cook, visiting italy, and getting through the holidays without being grumpy.
All it needs is a meetup feature, and links to blogs and wikis and it would be just perfect. Oh, and maybe a flickr import.
Why do I find this so much more cheerful than those horrid social networking sites? It’s because who we are is built of our dreams and aspirations and daily projects (take more pictures, grow my own vegetables, save money, write more love letters), not just our t-shirts (“I like Neal Stephenson and Terry Gilliam”).
Thanks for the invitation, Ed.

Who’s noticed long before me that Amazon.com reviews don’t have permalinks so, even if you want to, you can’t refer and talk back to other readers.
This seemingly subtle choice turns a potentially interesting conversation, distributed over space and time, into a much duller series of conventional-style reviews.
A conventional review has the pundit (or pair of pundits) recapping the plot of the book or movie, describing the genre of the music, and then propounding a thumbs-up or thumbs-down recommendation.
Links wouldn’t make bad writers better writers, and they wouldn’t make unoriginal thinkers into insightful observers, but they would enable a conversation to deepen the understanding and appreciation — or dislike and disparagement — of the work at hand.
Instead of a conversation that would build on the discussion of plot, character, sight, sound, influence and emotional impact, and could even build groups of shared interest, there’s a series of redundant soliloquies. One of the best review sites I found its http://vacuumsealerresearch.com

Allconsuming is a website and web service that shows what books bloggers are reading, based on blog aggregator pings and Amazon links.
Unfortunately, Allconsuming has a “hot-or-not” model that concentrates on the books that people are reading now — in the last hour, day, week, month.
This form doesn’t take full advantage of the “long tail”. The zeitgeist check is of some interest. At any given time, the “hit book” of the moment will be at the top of the list.
But over time, there’s a large distribution of books read. I’d love to see the reviews of people who’ve read Interface over the last year, with the current election in mind.
But you can’t even reconstruct the history from the AllConsuming api. GetWeblogMentionsForBook can also take an argument in the form of “days_back” but the number of days back that you get data for can’t be greater than 60.” (It does looks like it’s possible to crawl the archive, here: http://allconsuming.net/at-this-time.cgi)
Also, when you browse Allconsuming.net, you can’t tell the difference between a book mentioned in a “currently reading” sidebar, and a book review. The useful view would omit entries that are less than 10 words (say), and would print 50 word excerpts, so you could tell which entries were reviews or essays actually discussing the book.
These hacks would make it easier to expose book-related conversation, and to take advantage of “the long tail” — with 4 million bloggers, a few people have probably written about the book you’re currently reading.

The practice of software design is shot through with computer-as-box assumptions, while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the device as an entrance to a social space.

This bit of tossed-off brilliance in a thought-provoking piece about flaming in mailing lists and newsgroup
I’m currently organizing user testing for social software — the established methodologies are designed for individual users. A team of observers watches an individual user, and notes their “success”, “failure”, and “comprehension”.
Of course, social software has attributes for individual users — if an individual user is thorougly baffled, the software won’t get used.
There are also attributes that apply to the social interaction. How easy is it to invite, and how welcoming does an invitation feel? Are the early stages of usage conducive to talking, working, or playing with others? How are the norms of the community expressed?
Clay’s examples are mostly about how to dampen flamewars, but there are other positive social affordances.
References and comments welcome.

Brian Dennis does not buy the claim that social software is loosely coupled.

For a half a minute, I’d bought into loose coupling but realized that many of the services cited (Technorati, Flickr) are even more centralized than USENET ever was.

True, Technorati and Flickr and Audioscrobbler and del.icio.us are each centralized services. But each of these services has APIs and/or XML feeds, and these are commonly used to assemble composite services — Flickr photos posted to a 3rd party weblog, a Technorati query showing the conversation around a particular post, an Audioscrobber RSS feed showing a playlist.
The loose coupling is in the combination of tools, not each tool.
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Chris Allen has done a fine service with a history of social software, tracing the origins of today’s networked communication back to the ideas of Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart, and several generations of computing platforms. The piece has been gathering additional references and suggestions: Pete Kaminski adds references to the 70s and 80s bulletin board era.
Jon Lebkowsky thinks he should write a book.
Seb Paquet’s been wanting to make a wiki
Shelley Powers is building here.
A timeline on the Many to Many wiki.
This calls for a good BarnRaising.

The question underlying Chris Allen’s valuable essay on the history of social software is, why do we need a new term? Is there anything new going on, or there just a new generation of people discovering the same old thing, like each generation of teenagers discovers sex.
People who’ve been pioneering online collaboration say that they’ve seen this all before: on Plato, in MUDs, on the Well, in Usenet, in academic writing for decades.
Is there anything new about what we’re doing now? Chris Allen’s question prompted some reflection. The answer, I think, is yes. And the measure of the answer is the internet and the web.
These differences can be seen in three ways, which play out technically and socially.
A network of networks: multi-scale design patterns
The ubiquity of the net has dramatically expanded participation in the ideas and practices cultivated in hothouse MUDs, BBS systems, and LAN-based groupware. There are about 4 million active bloggers, according to the stats at Technorati. Wikipedia has over 350,000 articles as of this writing, and over 100,000 contributors. There are tens of millions playing multi-player role-playing games.
The novelty is not just large scale. Usenet is big — one usenet service claims that there over 25 million users participate in Usenet newsgroups every day according to one Usenet access service.
What’s new are the design patterns that build community and sense at a variety of scales at once.
* Group blogs like Austin Bloggers and the Seattle Weblog Portal aggregate individual voices into a community center.
* Wikipedia helps subcommunities maintain the entries on their favorite topics by providing notifications to the small group of people who care about each obscure topic.
* Technorati helps discover a conversational thread across multiple weblogs.
* del.icio.us helps discover who else is reading and bookmarking a web page.
Physical cities have had multi-scale design patterns for thousands of years, with courtyards and sidewalks, parks, plazas and promenades. Networked groups have started to develop these patterns recently.
Addressibility and groupforming
Social software contributions have addressible links. A wiki page has a link which is a name, helping groups build sense on a larger scale over time. Weblog posts have permalinks. Addressible links are, of course, core to the web as a whole. Social software tools make it easy to create content in little, addressible chunks, and they add semantic meaning (wikis names) and social meaning (the weblog of a person or group).
This trait makes it easy to discover and assemble conversation and meaning. All Consuming is able to find the blog posts that write about specific books; Technorati is able to assemble the blog posts that talk about a specific topic.
The conversation discovery tools are powerful socially, not just intellectually. Because weblogs and wikis enable the reader to respond, explicitly with comments and edits, or implicitly with trackbacks and links, it’s easier to meet people and form groups — with or without explicit “social networking” features.
Of course, it was possible to create systems with addressible microcontent and links in the experimental hothouses and corporate walled gardens in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. The scale, ubiquity, and discoverability in the public net versions make these concepts more valuable, and open to flexible experimentation.
Loose coupling and social boundaries
The prevalence of simple web services is making it possible to pull services together. This isn’t just about techie lego joy. As danah boyd says, it’s about decoration and social identity.
People use flickr to share photos with friends, and import the pictures into personal and group blogs, to communicate personal and shared esthetic and identity. Publishing a bloglines subscription list becomes a statement of one’s interests and communities. People add Technorati references and del.icio.us sidebars to weblogs, making it easy to step from a front porch out the the neighborhood. People share playlists with Audioscrobbler and Last.fm broadcast their identity through music and discover others with similar tastes.
Individuals and groups use these tools to express who they are, and to assemble signs of individual and group identity around their personal and group addresses.
Loose coupling lets groups expand boundaries, as well as define boundaries. Corporate groups and local political groups can use RSS and web services aggregation to build composite feeds that bring in relevant content, conversations and data from the outside world and broad organizational scope, as context for local collaboration.
MUDs had build-your-own environments in text-based online systems starting in 1979. The current generation is more popular, public, standard, addressible, and multimedia, leading to recombinant experimental growth.
Summary
The internet and web embed powerful technical design patterns: a network of networks; addressible microcontent, loosely coupled services. These design patterns facilitate new social patterns: multi-scale social spaces, conversation discovery and groupforming, personal and social decoration and collaborative folk art.
There’s a generation of innovation and experimentation that is new, that’s going on around us, and that’s worthy of a name. The language would be poorer if we didn’t have a way to group Flickr, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Audioscrobbler, or to tell these things apart from earlier generation mainframe and LAN-based hothouse systems.
p.s. I know that multi-player games are an integral part of the story, but someone else will have to work on that chapter. The things that speak to me intellectually and emotionally are those that build relationships (LiveJournal), build shared art and culture (Flickr, AudioScrobber, Wikipedia). Shoot-em-ups and D&D fantasies don’t speak to me, so I don’t know the communities or vocabulary.
p.p.s. This is a draft. I would love for it to be revisable as part of a larger project.