Category: Social Impact

How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?

Posted Jan 28, 2004, 8:33 PM ET by Judith Meskill

Today in Wired News, Leander Kahney has a story Social Nets Not Making Friends in which she talks about: an SNS backlash brewing; Jason Kottke s parody job listing on craiglist.org; and the fact that the social networking service field has ballooned to include about 20 different services.

Well Leander, by my count, there are more than 100 social networking services that I have been observing cruising past my virtual radar gun in the past few months. I have been tracking this burgeoning growth of services aspiring to help discover and connect my friends, potential partners, business cohorts, and various levels of acquaintances and I have this scary feeling that I am only carving shavings off of the tip of an iceberg with this list.

Here is a copy of my accounting replete with links of this daunting deluge of SNSs:

Affinity Engines, Amigos.com, AsiaFriendFinder, Backwash, Backwash for Pets, BuddyBridge, BuddyZoo, Chia Friend, Classmates.com, Community Zero, Company of Friends, The Conneck, Contact Network, Corporate Alumni, CraigsList, Delphi Forums, Dude Check This Out!, easeek, ecademy, eFriendsnet, 8minuteDating, Eliyon, enCentra, Eurekster!, everyonesconnected, Evite, First Tuesday, FriendFinder, Friendity, Friend Surfer, Friends Reunited, Friendster, Friendzy, GermanFriendFinder, Globe Alive, GoingProfessional, gradFinder, Growth Company, HeiYou, HelloWorld, hipster, Huminity, IndianFriendFinder, InterAction, ItsNotWhatYouKnow, KnowMates, LianQu, LinkedIn, Living Directory, Love.com, The Lunch Club NYC, Match.com, matcheroo, Mediabistro, MeetUp, Monster Networking, mrNeighborhood, MyEMatch, NetMiner, Netmodular Community, Netparty, Netplaya Burning Man Community, Networking For Professionals, Nerve, Online Business Networking Resource, The Opinion Exchange, orkut, PalJunction, Passion.com, peeps nation, PowerMingle, qpengyou, RateOrDate, RealContacts, ReferNet, RepCheck, Ringo, Ryze, Salesforce.com, SeniorFriendFinder, Shortcut, Silicon Valley Pipeline, Small World Project, Social Circles, Social Grid, SocialTree, Sona, The Spark, Spoke Software, StumbleUpon, Sullivan Executive Networking Community, Talk City, There, Tickle by Emode, Tribe.net, uDate.com, UUFriends, Visible Path, Wallop, WisdomBuilder, WorldShine, YeeYoo, YOYO, Zdarmanet, and Zerodegrees.

[The Social Software Weblog]

Judith was certainly busy compiling this post!

While I am inclined to agree with those who argue for weblogs as a more robust medium for active social networks (see, for example, Jon Husband’s, Scoble’s, Dina’s, and Lilia’s comments for starters) I don’t think this is just a matter of VCs with money burning a hole in their pockets. Nor is it simply a matter of too many programmers with free time on their hands and a copy of Linked nearby.

We’re social animals and were long before writing was invented. Connecting has always come before content. Failing to understand that was the downfall of many early online experiences. One way to think about what’s going on now is that we’re in the midst of making new and more intereting mistakes than we have in the past.

The Oldest Weblog. A standard definition of a weblog is a series of posts in “reverse chronologic order”. I can’t give you a reference here because the standard online reference sites don’t have a definition for “weblog”

But, as a geologist, I understand “reverse chronologic order”. Reverse chronologic order is youngest on top and older as you go down. This is a stratigraphic order. Younger deposits bury older deposits, so you get progressively older as you dig down. So weblogs view the world in a stratigraphic order.

It would be nice if the weblog folks acknowledge those who have gone before them. The Earth has been recording events in reverse chronologic order for over 3.8 billion years. The oldest weblog is the Earth. [Fluid Flow]

Sometimes the earliest ideas are the best.

Once again, Judith finds an excellent resource.

social (software) entrepreneurs?….

While performing a ‘social software’ search last evening, I found a paper that was written five years ago on ‘business’ and ‘social’ entrepreneurship.

J. Gregory Dees published this paper, on Social Entrepreneurship, for The Stanford Business School’s Center for Social Innovation. At that time he was the Entrepreneur in Residence, Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service, Graduate School of Business Stanford University. Currently Professor Dees is with Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

In this paper Professor Dees gives a brief history of the evolving definition of ‘entrepreneur’:

[…snip…]

Peter Drucker: “the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.” Dees goes on to interpret Drucker’s definition as: “Entrepreneurs have a mind-set that sees the possibilities rather than the problems created by change.”

Howard H. Stevenson, a leading theorist of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, defines the heart of entrepreneurial management as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”

[…snip…]

In conclusion Dees states:

“Social entrepreneurship describes a set of behaviors that are exceptional. These behaviors should be encouraged and rewarded in those who have the capabilities and temperament for this kind of work. We could use many more of them. Should everyone aspire to be a social entrepreneur? No. Not every social sector leader is well suited to being entrepreneurial. The same is true in business. Not every business leader is an entrepreneur in the sense that Say, Schumpeter, Drucker, and Stevenson had in mind. While we might wish for more entrepreneurial behavior in both sectors, society has a need for different leadership types and styles. Social entrepreneurs are one special breed of leader, and they should be recognized as such. This definition preserves their distinctive status and assures that social entrepreneurship is not treated lightly. We need social entrepreneurs to help us find new avenues toward social improvement as we enter the next century.”

Based on Professor Dees definitions, both borrowed and advanced, of ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ – Who do you think are the ‘Social Entrepreneurs’ of the ‘Social Software’ movement?

[judith meskill’s knowledge notes…]

As a side comment, I continue to be amazed at the quality and the quantity of great material that Judith Meskill continues to find and share.

Umberto Eco on Paper vs. Electronic Memory. joabj writes “Paper was itself a technology at one point, this essay (Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books) from Umberto Eco, author of “In The Name of the Rose,” reminds us. Eco holds forth on the … [Slashdot]

Fascinating lecture by a fascinating mind.

This idea is going to backfire. Better to send music CDs to record company execs, cut them in half so they can’t re-sell them, and send an unmistakable message that the gravy train is drying up. Sending email with huge enclosures is a horrible abuse of the Net. [Scripting News]

I’d have to agree with Dave here.

Besides being an abuse of the net likely to cause more harm to the average user than it will send any useful message to record company execs, it has another problem. I’m willing to bet that many if not most of these execs don’t read their own email. You’re more likely to make life difficult from some poor Executive Assistant than you are to deliver any useful message to the executives themselves.

If the relevant executives were making any extensive use of email and the web, I think we’d see a lot less clueless behavior on their part.

J. Boyle on the 2nd Enclosure Movement. I came across this article as I was putting together the reading list for TP5: The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.(pdf file) This is a terribly interesting article that uses a fair amount of the history of intellectual property thought and economics to raise the … [Furdlog]

More for my reading pile on intellectual property. Maybe I should have gone to law school after all.

The Copyright Cage.

Jonathan Zittrain, law professor at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center, authors “The Copyright Cage” in Darwin Magazine. Recommended reading. Thanks to Ten Reasons Why.

[commons-blog]

Very helpful to understanding today’s copyright environment

Gator Threatening Those Who Call Their Application Spyware. Many people have pretty strong negative opinions about Gator’s adware application (it watches what you surf and pops up its own ads). Gator, like most companies that have strong critics, has decided that they need something of a PR campaign to improve their image – specifically trying to overcome the impression that they’re placing spyware on people’s computers. So, what do they do? They decide to sue anyone who calls their application spyware. It seems like a debate on semantics, but Gator insists their product is not spyware at all. They claim that spyware is installed surreptiously, whereas their software requires someone to agree to install it. Others disagree with that definition, saying spyware includes any software that is constantly “phoning home” with your information, or which does things (such as pop up ads) without the user understanding why – in which case, Gator would qualify as spyware. However, so far, Gator’s “PR” campaign has been winning, and sites are changing how they refer to Gator. This is, most likely, a short term strategy – because of articles like the one linked here, that make Gator look even worse by using threatening lawsuits to quiet anyone critical of their software. Instead of pulling out the big legal stick, wouldn’t it have made more sense to make the program less problematic? [Techdirt]

What you call it isn’t the issue. Trying to build businesses that appear to depend on keeping users uninformed of what software applications are doing to their systems is.

Here’s a gedanken experiment for you. How many of the staff at Gator would be comfortable running the software on their machines (or their mother’s)? Alternatively, how many people would install and run the software if all of its activities were fully disclosed in something other than an EULA that almost nobody reads?

This is fundamentally a cluetrain argument. Do youhave a business model that is potentially transparent to all parties. Or does the model depend on the laziness or ignorance of one of the parties. Classic mass media strategies (TV, Radio, Magazines) are built around sponsors who will foot the bill in exchange for the chance to present ads to viewers. An acceptable tradeoff and one that is generally transparent. Product placement starts to move into a grayer world. The more I think about it, the more the Mom test seems pertinent.