Facebook and MySpace are trying to turn themselves into application platforms (how else will they monetize their audience?). Google is pushing OpenSocial to compete with it. But no matter what features they offer their users, they user still orbits the site.

Scot Hacker talks of BuddyPress changing the game, turning “social networks” from destination websites, to features you’ll find on every website. And the “social network” is the internet, with all those sites sharing information meaningfully.

Some might say this is little more than overgrown XFN, but Tris Hussey thinks Ning is on the ropes and Facebook should be worried.

At least the design shows all the right stuff.

All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace.

There are some real lessons here, however, about how to court the early adopters that are essential to making an application that depends on user activity successful:

• The license matters. Nobody wants to invest the effort it takes to get the ball rolling just so somebody else can profit from it. Wikipedia’s GFDL was essential, SWIFT’s license policy is already strangling the site. Don’t call them “users” if they’re really the ones building the site, and don’t expect them to work for free if you’re going to make a killing off of it.
• Details matter. Would you trust a company that can’t figure out permalinks in WordPress (the site’s blog is powered by WordPress) and has URLs like http://www.imswiftblog.com/?page_id=698 to be technically capable of protecting your privacy or solving the problems that matter to you? What does the placeholder text in the last page of this FAQ suggest?
• Your friends matter. A supposed social software app that associates with a conference that looks like astroturf has already lost my trust.
• If you find yourself explaining what value your service offers to the very people who you hope will be early adopters, you’ve already lost them.

Anybody want to bet me a drink that SWIFT won’t break the 1,000 users mark before the end of CIL? I doubt anybody using the CiL wiki would take me up on that.

Andy Peatling, who developed a WordPress MU-based social network and then released the code as BuddyPress has just joined Automattic, where they seem to have big plans for it. I’d been predicting something like this since Automattic acquired Gravatar:

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

A post to Web4lib alerted me to this U Mich survey about libraries in social networks (blog post) that finds 77% of students don’t care for or want libraries in Facebook or MySpace.

the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool.

This isn’t bad news. It’s worth remembering that 23% of the respondents said they were at least a little interested in connecting with libraries in social networks. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore this opportunity to question the push to put libraries into those spaces. And the first thing to ask is if we understand them.

I doubt the patrons of an average bar would welcome libraries if we tried to set up shop there, and not just because we’d get nitpicky about the weekly trivia games. Bars and libraries are both social spaces, but that doesn’t make them equivalent spaces. Whether libraries belong in Facebook anymore than they belong in my local bar is still an open question in my mind (one major factor is that FB is working to make itself a social applications platform, something that should have all of us paying attention).

That doesn’t mean Facebook and other social applications don’t matter. Quite to the contrary, so let me say it again: Social Applications Still Matter To Libraries.

One giant lesson we can take from the entire history of the internet is that social matters. There have been blips and bubbles where we lost sight of it, but the internet spread because of social applications like email and chat. And more than Ajax and rounded corners, web 2.0 has been all about Social. And now we find it everywhere. Flickr defines itself as a photo sharing site, but it only works because of the social features there. And though Facebook allows image sharing, the different purposes of the two sites are clear to all who use them.

It is essential that we build social features into our libraries. Comments, easy linkability (short, sensical URLs), and findability in search engines are must haves in our systems. But that isn’t enough. We also need outstanding librarians to breath life into them. Librarians who can speak in a post-Cluetrain voice, and be accepted and respected in Facebook, Second Life, and in the comment threads in our own libraries.

We all know social networking may be a feature, not an application, but one person’s feature can become another’s bane.

So when Netflix offers a handy Friends feature that makes it easy to share your viewing history and recommendations, it opens itself up not only to the value of social interaction, but also the awkwardness it can sometimes be rife with.

Titration’s story is instructive:

So I have this friend who has invited me to become her “netflix friend” twice now. The first time I totally ignored it. But this time I feel I need to say something. The thing is, I am not “out” to her. And frankly my movie listing would give me away. Straight christian women don’t tend to watch things like “The ‘L’ word” or “If these walls could speak 2”.

I have no idea what to say. I was thinking of trying to joke a bit about my movies being inappropriate for all audiences. But the problem with being a good girl like I am is that she will not believe me.

She will ask me questions. And then I will have to say “I’m not comfortable sharing.” And she will know something is up anyway. Maybe I should just let netflix out me. I think it is much better to tell a friend to their face shocking news like this. But dang nabbit it all I am not yet ready. I think I’m a bit befuddled on this one.

social software, out, netflix, awkward, friends, outed, social networks

My own feelings about Twitter have gone back and forth across indecision street for a while, and despite a moment of excitement it’s still not part of my life-kit.

So I was amused to see Blyberg pointing out Kathy Sierra’s poo-poo-ing of Twitter.

Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some people with a feeling of not being connected, by feeding the fear of not being in the loop. By elevating the importance of being “constantly updated,” it amplifies the feeling of missing something if you’re not checking Twitter (or Twittering) with enough frequency.

Though I think what I really liked about Twitter was the potential for a really _really_ lightweight blogging platform (or easy to use message broker), I have to admit that Kathy’s criticism of the social aspects (costs) is pretty close to the mark.

virtual communities, twitter, social software, social networks, cold water, anxiety, anti-twitter

Wendy Seltzer gave a shout-out for Yochai Nenkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, describing it as…

…an economic history of information production. We’re moving from the age of industrial information production to one of social information production. Ever-faster computers on our desks let us individually produce what would have taken a firm to organize just a decade ago. Ever-further networks let us share that with the world as cheaply as storing it for ourselves. This “social production” is distributed and motivated by social relationships rather than market signals.

Of course there’s a rub: the new economy threatens giants of the old economy, and those old dogs tend to bite back with legislation, monopoly power, and DMCA hammers. Still, Seltzer notes that Benkler’s presentation faced that with optimism: leaving the last slides of his presentation blank, waiting for social forces to fill them in on the wiki.

, big thoughts, information production, network economy, new economy, peer production, social economy, social networks, social production, social software, The Wealth of Networks, Wealth of Networks, Yochai Nenkler

(note: the following is cross-posted at Identity Future.)

Being that good software — the social software that’s nearly synonymous with Web 2.0 — is stuff that gets you laid, where does that leave IdM?

Danah Boyd might not have been thinking about it in exactly those terms, but her approach is uniquely social-centered. She proposes “SecureId”

What is SecureId? SecureId is a program that helps you protect and control your digital identity by allowing you to determine who can access your private information. By allowing you to articulate your digital contexts based on facets of your identity, SecureId provides the framework for you to properly relate identity information and people with contexts, thereby giving you the ability to portray yourself properly. SecureId uses a knowledge-based security system to help you manage access to various facets of your identity. By presenting you with a portrait of your digital identity, SecureId also gives you a virtual mirror to your social performance.

Reading further, she implores us to “imagine that you are in control of your digital identity.”

The information you give out on a daily basis is quite context dependent. While you might give your medical history to your doctor, would you give it to a random stranger? Does your language differ between work, the pub and at home with your 3-year-old? What about your clothing? Not only do you make different decisions based on the level of trust you have, but also based on what is socially appropriate. Speaking to your boss like you speak to your child might be both inappropriate and offensive. Do you have different groups of friends, family and associations that may or may not interact with one another? What roles do you play in your life and how do aspects of your character change when you are in these different roles?

SecureId offers you an interactive visual landscape for articulating your identity facets and associating appropriate data with them. Through this mechanism, you can quickly see who has access to what aspects of your self. By presenting you with a portrait of your digital identity, SecureId also gives you a virtual mirror to your social performance, an awareness that is taken for granted in the physical world.

context dependent identity, danah boyd, identity management, idm, social, social aspects, social context, social identity, social idm, social interaction, social networks, social software

The FlickrBlog reports this message from Gale:

People have been submitting good humpback whale fluke shots to a group called Humpback whale flukes. I volunteer at Allied Whale which holds the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog and I was able to make a very exciting match with one of the whales that was posted on the group by GeorgeK.

George saw this whale in Newfoundland in the summer of 2005. It matched with HWC#2943 in the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catolog ….. this whale was seen only once before in March 1984!!! on Silver Bank (the breeding grounds North of the Dominican Republic).

This is what flickr has the power to do.

update: Gale sent me a link to this photoset of her 1987 encounter with a two-year old humpback wale. Flickr wasn’t designed for naturalists or marine biologists, but it allowed her to share those photos, richly annotated with notes and descriptions, with the world. And because it creates opportunities for communication, it connected somebody who may not have been aware of how his photos contributed to the body of knowledge of whales with another passionate user who could piece it together.

The Allied Whale database doesn’t appear to be searchable online, but maybe whale watchers in Flickr should take advantage of the tagging feature to create a searchable database there?

connections, North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog, allied whale, collaborative database, connections, flickr, flukes, humpback whales, serendipity, social networks, social software, whale flukes, whale watch, whales

No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.

Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.

Yeah, Google rocked this picture a good long while ago with their purchase of Blogger long before most people could understand what value it offered, and even Microsoft beat Yahoo! to this. But the better way to read this is as the final piece to a rather impressive array of social software.

And where perhaps only ten percent of internet users will likely ever be regular bloggers, it’s a safe assumption that nearly 100 percent of internet users will create bookmarks and almost as many will have reason to post a photo online. And with Yahoo! controlling the leading services for both, it sort of rearranges the picture.

flickr, delicious, del.icio.us, yahoo!, social software, social web, web 2.0 web20, yahoo, internet, social network, social networks