24 March 2008 The full piece has been posted (below) as submitted and prior to cutting and editing. (The Acrobat facsimile is of the published article.) The piece is extensively endnoted and I have also included the un-published sidebars. If you would like to comment on the piece see Discussion (below).

05 March 2008 This piece has been published (see note in Recent activities)

Discussion and sharing

Comments on the piece can be posted to my related journal entry. Or, of course, you can post a response to your own Weblog and link to the journal entry. The piece can be shared via the bookmark on Ma.gnolia.

Post-publication

References and examples in piece such as this will naturally date quickly. I will post a note on any key developments here. Meanwhile, please see my bookmarks tagged ‘social networks’ on Ma.gnolia ma.gnolia.com/people/nico_macdonald/tags/social%20networks

Story

“I think I need to go for a walk to clear my head. Yauatcha for Macaroons anyone?”. Tom Coates, a staffer in the London office of Yahoo!’s Brickhouse division, needed a break, and decided the best way to round up some company was by posting a ‘tweet’ on Twitter [twitter.com], a hip application developed as a side project by a San Francisco-based Web development outfit.

At any other time, asking your entire network of friends (or ‘followers’ as Twitter characterises them) if they would like to join you for lunch would have been bizarre – as well as impractical. But communicating with one’s friends in this way is becoming increasingly common.

According to a 2007 survey conducted for the authoritative Pew Internet & American Life Project[i], 55% of American teenagers who are online have used social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. 48% visit daily or more often and 26% percent visit once a day. And 72% use the sites to make plans with friends – which may or may not include lunch.

In the network age, computing power is in the hands of more people, and is, slowly, being applied to new challenges. We have moved from using computers as work objects – expensive resources for the creation, manipulation and retrieval of documents – to the widespread use of computing enabled things – from laptops to mobile phones, personal video recorders to games consoles. On these devices, and in myriad places, we manipulate more granular and diverse kinds of information – from emails to diary entries, instant messages to contact information, URLs to Weblog posts – as we engage in collaboration, learning, transaction and entertainment.

This behaviour has been such a phenomenon that this summer BusinessWeek devoted a Tech Special Report to ‘The Future of Social Networking’[ii]. And the media itself has got the bug. In the UK, the BBC network on Facebook boasts almost 10,000 members, not far under half the Corporation’s headcount.

Background

Let’s take a step back from this excited melée and put these developments in context. Social networking is one application of the broader concept of social software: applications which may be desktop- or Web-based that take advantage of Internet connectivity to facilitate collaboration or information sharing, or to add value based on explicit or implicit input from other users. In a 2003 publication for The Work Foundation’s iSociety project, researcher and academic Will Davies observed that “the principle of social software is to breakdown the distinction between our online computer-mediated experiences and our offline face-to-face experiences”[iii]. Davies gave the example of the collaboration platform Groove, since acquired by Microsoft, Wikipedia, and the Weblog publishing system Movable Type.

Social networking refers to the creation of computer-mediated networks between people that capture their familiarity (usually described as their ‘degree of separation’), how they are connected (through school, work, some other organisation, a mutual contact), their location, occupation, current activities and interests, and the use of this information to enhance or support users’ activities.

Tom Coates (the macaroon fan, better known as a social/media technologist) believes that social networking is best employed for the “communication and establishment of things like reputation, trust, friendship, a sense of similarity”. He describes it as a “new substrate for social grooming behaviour, the building of reciprocal trust links through a population”.

The applications of social networking currently take two forms: services that are explicitly about connections – such as the business oriented LinkedIn [www.linkedin.com], teen focused MySpace and Bebo, and US college born Facebook [www.facebook.com] – and those which employ connections around types of artefacts or for specific uses – such as the photo-sharing site Flickr [flickr.com] or the event information sharing service Upcoming.org.

A bit of history

The first site or service that embodied a model of social networking was SixDegrees.com, which allowed users to connect with people two- and three-degrees separated from them. It came to prominence briefly in the late 90s and ceased operation in 2001. After the financial collapse around Internet companies, Friendster [www.friendster.com] launched in 2002, focusing on the less formal ‘circle of friends’ model, and was adopted more for personal than professional relationships. Friendster popularised the concept of social networking, but was not itself popular for long (though it is still widely used in parts of south and east Asia). Google launched Orkut [www.orkut.com] in 2004, and although it has a mass membership it is mainly popular outside the more developed nations, primarily in Latin America and in India. Both services were eclipsed by MySpace, launched in 2003, which employs a very basic model of social networking, allows users to extensively customise their pages, and has become a focus in particular for bands and people interested in music. In 2005 it was acquired by News Corporation, indicating the potential business value of social networking. (While Friends Reunited, founded in 1999 and acquired by ITV in 2005, is focused around people who know each other it doesn’t create any significant or continuing benefits from those connections, and can’t be considered a social networking site. Similarly, the video sharing service YouTube, founded in 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006 has limited social networking-based uses.)[iv]

The most recent services to come to prominence are Bebo [bebo.com], a youth-oriented site with an emphasis on music and video (acquired by AOL in March 2008 [added post-publication]), and Facebook. Describing itself as a ‘social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them’, Facebook was launched by a group of Harvard students in 2004, exclusively for college networks (the name taken from the publication given to incoming college students). Since ceasing to be exclusive it has grown to over 20 million active users, including one million in the UK. In 2006 it launched its ‘development platform’, allowing third parties to create basic applications that can access a user’s profile and take advantage of Facebook’s features.

In the business realm LinkedIn launched in 2003, using the six degrees of separation model. It was founded on the observation that ‘relationships matter’ to professional success, has over 13 millions users, and charges for premium accounts. Other business-oriented services include UK-based Ecademy [www.ecademy.com], founded in the late 90s around events that facilitated relationship building for self-employed professionals; Soflow, also UK-based, which recently closed; Xing [xing.com], based in Germany (formerly known as Open Business Club); and Plaxo [www.plaxo.com], which began life as a tool for keeping address books up-to-date.

What is driving social networking?

As social beings, humans have always networked socially, and this characteristic may partly explain the success of the human race. Social networking has been observed from the coffee houses of seventeenth century London to networks of penpals among children in the twentieth century. However, the current rise of social networking is a product of specific technical and social developments. The key technical developments are significant, and well-known, but the phenomenon has been driven by significant societal change.

The social developments, which precede technical developments, are manifold. Teenagers, who are core users of social networking tools, are tending to spend more time in the home, due to fears for and of them. Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, notes the “overwhelming culture of fear” in societies and its impact on the independence of teens, and the converse consequence of this culture that “youth have very little access to public spaces”[v].

The Pew Internet project reports that teenagers who are online at home are more likely to report using social networking sites (58%) than those who only have access at school (42%).

More generally, decreasing trust and the culture of fear is manifest in greater wariness of encounters with unfamiliar people, and a greater wariness of getting into deep personal relationships, partly evidenced by the decline in the institution of marriage. As a result, there is a tendency to opt for ‘safer’ relationships that are, to some extent, mediated via a screen.

Weakening inter-personal bonds have also created new modes of interaction in which young people in particular will connect with friends in a non-committal fashion, ready to engage with other groups and avoiding encounters that require their full attention. As such, they tend to prefer modes of interaction characteristic of social networking that allow them to keep up and have a connection with an extended group of friends but without direct commitment to any particular group. Consumer trends analyst and former IT industry executive Linda Stone describes this as ‘continuous partial attention’. “We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimise for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment” she writes. “To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognised, and to matter.”[vi]

The lowering cost of travel and a more integrated global economy are also significant factors. As more global organisations require high-powered staff to travel for their work, most people change jobs more often, and disempowered workers from the developing world migrate for work, the need to keep in touch with friends, family and former colleagues grows.

Applications and affordances

Social networking appears to be a valuable new model for helping people manage their activities in a number of areas. To understand better how it is being used, and how it might be used, we need to understand its applications and ‘affordances’ – the kinds for functions and interactions it best supports.

The most basic is familiarisation and keeping up with contacts. From status updates and changes to profile pages one may learn that a friend or colleague will be nearby that day and available to hook up, or attending an event at which you will also be present; that they are busy in a meeting or travelling, and thus hard to contact; that they are working on an intriguing project, or have a new job. This model circumvents, for the moment, the challenge of keeping up with people via their Weblogs, Web site or email-based announcements.

A significant affordance is that these updates can be posted when mobile and, unlike email, don’t invite or require a response. They help build up a more rounded picture of an individual’s knowledge, way of life and disposition. But the key affordance is that these information snippets point to areas of knowledge with which one’s friends and colleagues are familiar and which may be valuable in future , at which point they should be prepared to assist with your enquiries to some degreee. Essentially, human knowledge and intelligence is being connected by the network (rather than embedded in it: the objective at the heart of so many past computing visions).

Cognitively, people appear to be able to remember information ‘streamed’ in this fashion such that it can be recalled when needed: ‘Ben knows about that country as he reported from there, ‘Etienne can tell me about this company as she was employed by them a while back’. (Of course this information can also be a distraction for those disposed to be distracted.)

Another area in which social networking adds value is information and ‘object’ sharing. The information shared might be contained in a friend’s Weblog post, link to or summary of an article or broadcast, rating of a book, or pointer to an event. An ‘object’ may be a photograph, a movie or perhaps a song. These are typically shared via Web-based services that aggregate such user-created information and represent it to their network – including you. Other services allow one to aggregate one’s information and objects created across a variety of services so they can be reviewed in one place – making it easy for friends to keep up with one’s activity. The key affordance is that information and objects are stored online and thus can be browsed further, searched, sorted and, if desired, added to one’s own ‘space’ or collection.

Related to this are recommendation and evaluation models. Linking to or rating an article or broadcast constitutes a recommendation, as does indicating one is interested in or will attend an event. Describing or critiquing something constitutes an evaluation. The key affordance is that one can discover things of importance by drawing on one’s knowledge of the contributor or recommenders, or the number of one’s contacts recommending something.

Somewhat related are micro-publishing and research. Micro-publishing takes the concept of Weblogging one step further with even smaller, allowing one to published even more granular ‘pieces’ or opinions to one’s network. Social networking tools facilitate research in a similar manner, allowing one to ask a question to one’s group of friends or colleagues, as one might in a pub or over a coffee: ‘What’s the best phone for my needs?’, ‘How can I make my computer run faster?’, ‘Would you recommend I live in this neighbourhood?’. The key affordance is that by answering a question your friends build their relationship with you, and may increase their kudos with others who choose to review their answer.

A minor area enabled by social networking platforms is group discussion, which has typically taken place via email ‘lists’ or Web-based ‘bulletin boards’ but can now be conducted in some social networking spaces. The key affordances are debate ‘spaces’ which are easier to navigate and contributions evaluated. Contributors’ proper names and pictures can be displayed; one can learn about a contributor by visiting their profile; and contributions from people one trusts can be found or prioritised.

Collaboration and planning are areas that can also benefit from social networking, to the extent that people use online or Internet-enabled applications for activities such as task management, arranging meetings, or organising their time. The key affordance is that one can, for instance, make one’s diary accessible to contacts so they are able (at least) to see when one has no appointments and will be in the right location – and schedule a meeting accordingly.

The area of finding and offering skills has been a core benefit of, and business model for, social networking services. The core scenarios are around people or companies looking to hire and, to a lesser extent, people looking to be hired; and people or companies looking for tradespeople and services. The key affordances are the desire for people to hire and be hired, and willingness to share information accordingly; and the implicit recommendation made by someone linking to someone else (‘if Etienne is linked to Ben, he must be good at what he does’). Some services also support explicit recommendations in which people can describe why someone was a good co-worker, boss or employee. These affordances also apply in the related area of inter-personal purchases, particularly via auction services such as Ebay.

The last key area is motivating and campaigning, in which social networking services are used to convince and involve people towards political ends. The key affordances are the ease of connecting to people in one’s network, the visibility of supporters of the particular cause to potential supporters, and having supporters champion the political idea or action to their friends (which may be done unconsciously as a information related to a campaign one has joined appears in one’s profile).

These scenarios build on the trust and respect that exists between friends and close colleagues; tacit knowledge of their experience and wisdom; and explicit information based on their activities and on rich user profiles.

In general, social networking, appears to work best the less that making connections is an end in itself, which partially explains the demise or decline of services such as SixDegrees.com and Friendster. Jyri Engeström, co-founder of presence-sharing service Jaiku [jaiku.com], believes that “the term ‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people”. Instead, he advocates object-centred sociality’, citing the success of Flickr and MySpace in evidence[vii]. In this analysis objects could also be the kinds of activities, projects or goals described above.

Realising the potential

Based on these uses, it is clear there is great potential in social networking models. There are few areas of personal or work activity they may not enhance in some way. People we trust have been and are one of the key ‘tools’ we use to find, filter and marshall information. Other tools and axes we may use to manage information include time, search, existing knowledge, activity, context and location. Other than time and search, these are poorly exploited by software services and applications.

The significance of social networking models can be seen in the differing approaches taken by seasoned rivals Google and Yahoo!. The former focuses on computer science, engineering and performance, where in recent years the latter has focused more on services enabled by its users. Yahoo!’s Vice President of Product Strategy, Bradley Horowitz, characterises the company’s approach as ‘better search through people’[viii]. Its acquisitions and new products bear this out, from purchases including bookmark sharing tool del.icio.us and photo-sharing site Flickr to internally developed services Yahoo! 360° [360.yahoo.com] and Yahoo! Answers [answers.yahoo.com]. [Post-publication: Google has to some extent embraced social software models with the announcement of its OpenSocial ‘application programming interfaces’[ix].]

It would be appropriate for social networking models to be thought of, by service developers and designers, as one of a number of functions – at the level of search – that can reveal, filter, enhance or shape the data people encounter. Asking one’s network for friends to recommend a cool club playing a particular kind of music is a more active way of engaging with information, and will deliver more valuable results than any search engine. In this mode one friends are acting as ‘trust engines’. Considered in this way, it is clear we have barely begun to explore and exploit the potential uses of social network-based tools.

To realise this potential there are a number of areas in which social networking needs to develop. Current platforms have a crude model of relationships: one it either a ‘friend’ or one isn’t. In the real world our relationships are more granular and have more dimensions – personal/work, degree of trust and loyalty, affection, longevity, frequency of contact – that will influence the scope and character of the interactions and information sharing in which one wants to engage. A model for and characterisation of relationships is needed that reflects this, based on an analysis of the real interactions between people, building perhaps on an analysis of existing interactions including those conducted using email and instant messaging.

The process by which people have to describe themselves in their profiles is also laboured. Population of Facebook’s personal profile, which includes favourite music, TV shows, films and books, has to be completed manually. As a result, its use is limited and it will always be out of date. Such profiles would be richer if they drew on a user’s actual activity, such as the music they purchase or play, TV shows they set to record, films they rent, or books they order. More generally, much could be inferred by using artificial intelligence-based tools to parse a user’s locally stored information. Apple Inc.’s Spotlight technology already makes this data accessible to applications, as do similar services in Microsoft Windows.

However, we need to be wary of over-engineering solutions. While the model of relationships can be significantly improved, we need to appreciate that technically-based approaches will only deliver an approximate characterisation. That an element of a profile or relationship can be extracted or inferred doesn’t mean that a user will want to share it with everyone, and there is a significant design challenge in giving users visibility on and control of what they are sharing. To this end, LinkedIn already lets users ‘View my profile as others see it’ and Facebook members are invited to ‘Check out your Public Search Listing’.

Social networking services offer possible solutions to some of the profound challenges Internet users face, for instance junk mail, as any mail that were received through one’s social network ‘filter’ would be guaranteed to be from someone one knew. And if this relationship were abused, the abuser could easily be removed from one’s network. A related but profound possibility is that social networking services could become one’s default and ‘always up-to-date’ contact list, accessible and ‘dial-able’ from whichever device it were accessed.

For social networking to be most useful, tools need to be accessible and ‘to hand’, which will primarily require support for mobile devices. To an extent these are already supported, often based on the well-featured browsers shipped with modern mobile and ‘smart’ phones, including the recent Apple iPhone. Going one step further, Jaiku offers a dedicated application for modern Nokia devices that uses the mobile network to identify the user’s geographic location to their circle of friends. Such applications offer the possibility of smart address books that could better mediate communication by indicating the status of a contact one planned to contact (‘busy’, ‘in a meeting’, ‘available’) and their time zone and location.

As well as being ‘to hand’, like so many others, social networking tools may be more valuable if they have a presence beyond digital platforms, taking advantage of people’s physicality and the richness of the real world. An early example of this is Availabot [availabot.com], created by London-based design researchers Schulze & Webb. The Availabot is a pop-up figure connected to one’s computer that changes state, by standing up, when the contact it represents comes online, creating awareness at the periphery of one’s attention[x].

Limitations and dangers

We have already noted the issues around sharing one’s information with friends (and more publicly), and the danger of over-engineering solutions. The subtlety of human relationships can’t be over-estimated. Which facets of our lives, personalities and interests we choose to share with someone may vary based on many factors. We often finesse what we tell different people, and – for good and for bad – even lie. There is also a danger that excessive concerns about privacy, and scares based on exceptional abuses of social networking tools, may cause people to become overly wary of using them.

At the organisational level, many businesses and other employers block access to social networking sites such as Facebook[xi] (as well as many other innovative services), which will limit their ability to uses these models and tools to improve their internal processes, promote knowledge sharing and collaboration, develop new products, deliver better customer service, or lower transaction costs.

At a practical level, there is a danger of social networking exhaustion. To date, social networking has been in its play and experimentation stage. But as Tom Coates observes “the amount of sites that are using social networks now is so substantial that it’s no longer something that people will just go through again for no obvious reason”. One solution to this is for social networking services such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo to be integrated as an external service to other sites. For instance, if the book cataloguing and recommendation service LibraryThing were able to access a member’s Facebook profile, it could show them books owned or rated by their circle of friends. In a limited way this is beginning to happen. For instance, the bookmark sharing tool Ma.gnolia.com allows users to sign in using Facebook to authenticate themselves, though information related to their Facebook contacts isn’t then accessible within the service. Another solution would be to abstract social networking profiles such that they were controlled by their subject and could be ‘applied’ to any site or service. And this model has been tried, with limited success, with the Friend of a Friend (FOAF)[xii] model for a ‘machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects’. As the use of social networking tools becomes standard, and the tools for editing profiles improve, the prospects for a FOAF-like model will brighten. [Post-publication: At a practical level LinkedIn’s Intelligent Application Platform now enables some of these possibilities[xiii]. More generally, DataPortability.org aims to allow people share and remix data using open standards and to create ‘DHCP for identity’ and a ‘distributed File System for data’[xiv].] http://www.dataportability.org/

More broadly, social networking models are often proposed as tools for tackling social exclusion, re-invigorating the democratic process, or re-energising organisations. And this is hardly surprising. As the old aphorism has it ‘To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ – and social networking tools have become an all-purpose hammer. To the extent that these problems are the products of other trends and dynamics they can only be fixed by directly addressing those trends and dynamics. But areas of social life that are functional may well benefit – and are already benefiting – from the application of social networking models.

Conclusion

Social networking could be used facilitate transformations as profound as those delivered by email and search over the last decade. Whether it is successfully leveraged will depend on it being shaped by the way real people work, adaptable and not over-engineered; and being designed to be ‘to hand’, easy to use, and controllable. It will also depend on social phenomena such as changing levels of trust and concern about crime. And it will depend whether as a society we are serious about challenges such as knowledge sharing – or whether we are content to just play.

Back in London, Tom Coates is planning a move to San Francisco, the city and its hinterland home to so many of the developments in social networking. Like so many future emigrants, his network will ensure it won’t take long to feel at home in the city, orientate himself, and meet up with once distant, but not unfamiliar, friends.

Sidebar: Designing with social networking tools

Lee Bryant is co-founder of digital media consultants Headshift, which specialises in development around social software tools. Headshift’s clients include the thinktank Demos and the political participation research organisation Involve.

Bryant warns of the dangers of adding yet another login to a new site. Headshift’s approach is to retain a simple login and use services such as Facebook to allow people to invite their friends to that site. Given the immaturity of the use social networking tools, he also counsels the need to design for ‘emergent behaviours’ from users, counterposing the “desire to control and curate content” with creating “a space that people can mess up”.

When designing ways for users to prioritise information, he argues that this is better done on a group rather than an individual basis, as people may want to re-prioritise in different situations[xv]. He is skeptical about the value of information visualisation of social networks, noting that it is rare to find visualisation that add value or delivery insight, and the limits imposed by screen size. However, he believes that a network analysis tools may be useful.

When considering mobile devices and context of use he suggests sticking to one very simple tool or mode of interaction, citing Facebook mobile Web interface, which shows just see three status updates and allows the user to change theirs.

For designers, and indirectly for the clients of designers, social networking can be a powerful tool, and it presents some interesting design challenges, not least, as we have noted, around privacy.

In a key article on design and social networking[xvi], Jared Spool, founding principal of Massachusetts-based User Interface Engineering, offers a note of caution on the embrace by some designers of these tools: “Just because we can do all these things doesn’t mean we should do them”. He also notes that “if we all organize our own information with our own evolved structures, chaos is bound to emerge when these conflicting structures are merged on a massive scale... Working past these issues will take experimentation and time”.

There are two aspects of social networking in which design input is broadly needed: information design and information visualisation. The richness of the data that can be presented via social networking tools requires good typographic information design to support understanding and action. Information visualisation, a subset of information design, could be well employed to help people to better perceive and navigate their network and associated information, comprehend discussions, and filter and manipulate material. Design will also have great value in the creation of usable and desirable interfaces on mobile devices, as well as creating physical instantiations of the network in the real world.

Considering the future of design, and the broader relationship of designer and end user, it is argued by some that social networking tools in particular, and social software in general can democratise design, akin in some ways to the levelling effects that the free or open source software model has had on the development of tools such as the Linux operating system. While the open source model doesn’t work with design (as design solutions are more bespoke and less re-usable than software solutions and more difficult to interchange with others, and the design world doesn’t have the same status dynamics as the software world), it may be possible for designers to get input into and feedback on their work from their network.

Sidebar: Getting exemplary

Social networking enabled tools in use in…

Familiarisation and keeping up with contacts

English-based services include MySpace [www.myspace.com], Bebo [www.bebo.com], Facebook [www.facebook.com], Xing [xing.com] and LinkedIn [www.linkedin.com]

Information and object sharing, micro-publishing and research

Twitter [twitter.com] is used by some popular journalists and industry mavens as a way of communicating with their network of ‘followers’, using ‘tweets’ to share links to articles or updates on their business activities. Twitter is also used by BBC Sport to update football fans with team news. Facebook ‘status updates’ also afford micro-publishing. LinkedIn and Facebook (the latter via a third party application) support asking questions of and polling your network. Twitter is increasingly used for asking questions, though it doesn’t aggregate responses for those questioned. Flickr [www.flickr.com] focuses on sharing photo ‘objects’, allowing users to play slide shows of, and comment on, new pictures from their family and friends.

Recommendations and evaluation

del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia.com are used for sharing bookmark ‘objects’, Digg.com for sharing news stories, and Connotea [www.connotea.org] for sharing scientific papers and articles. Upcoming.org, owned by Yahoo!, focuses on discovery and recommendation of event ‘objects’, and events are also a core Facebook service. Facebook also hosts a number of applications, such as Visual Library, for sharing recommendations and reviews of books.

Group discussion, and collaboration, planning and meeting

There are at present few successful tools. Facebook groups offers basic threaded discussion boards, and the teen-oriented Bebo [www.bebo.com] discussion lists. Google Calendar [calendar.google.com] allows realtime sharing of diaries between colleagues (though as Google as yet has no social networking ‘service’ it can’t leverage users’ networks). Dopplr [www.dopplr.com] allows frequent travellers to share plans with trusted fellow globe-trotters, and reminds them of friends and colleagues who live in or are travelling at the same to their destination cities, thus facilitating meeting. The German startup Plazes [plazes.com] allows users to identify their physical location based on where they are online (using their ‘Internet Protocol’ or IP address), and these ‘plazes’ can be considered recommendations. Plazes can also flag a friend at a nearby location and thus could effect a meeting.

Finding and offering skills

LinkedIn and Xing are the key services for hiring and being hired, and LinkedIn also allows members to recommend the services of other professionals (from tradespeople to consultants) and people with who they have worked.

Motivating and campaigning

Facebook application Causes (apps.facebook.com/causes/), seeks to grasp the “unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation”, aiming at people who feel alienated from the political system, by allowing them to “leverage their network of real friends to affect positive change”. OpenRSA is a Facebook group created, as the result of a face-to-face meeting, to “encourage discussion, ideas, action, meetings and linkages to other networks and groups” around the Royal Society of Arts, a venerable thinktank and campaigning organisation with an existing model of social networking in its Fellowship programme.

Sidebar: Terminology

To ‘friend’ someone: connect to a friend or colleague

A ‘status update’ is a short message, easily composed, that indicates what one is doing, planning, thinking or wondering about

To ‘poke’/‘nudge’: ‘wave’ at someone or remind to them of you via a content-less communication

Collaborative filtering: a model for recommending something based on the preferences of people with similar taste. This model is employed by Amazon as the basis for its ‘Customers who bought this item also bought...’ recommendations.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary): a structured way of making information (typically from a Weblog) available as a ‘news feed’ for viewing in a user’s preferred new reader application, and for including in other sites or publications, possibly aggregated with other news feeds. As the data structure is separated from any formatting (typographical or other) the information can be presented according to a users’ or publishers’ preference. [Defined in Wikipedia]

Sidebar: Key technical developments

The key technical developments that have facilitated social centre around the creation of, sharing and access to user-created material. Digital cameras and digital audio and video input, and computer-based image manipulation and music tools, have facilitated the creation and editing of visual and aural material. Broadband Internet access, more sophisticated browsers and improved Web site interface design has enabled fast and easy uploading, manipulation, sharing and annotation of this material. As well as its speed, the ‘always-on’ aspect of broadband facilitates fast page loading – a key factor given the tendency to browse around such sites. The lowering costs of developing and deploying syndication and data interchange technologies, such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and simple ‘application programming interfaces’ (APIs), allow this information to be accessed in many ways, and to be aggregated and combined into enhanced or new services.

Thanks

I would like to thank for their input to this piece: Colin Donald of the digital media research practice Futurescape; Rishi Dastidar of Archibald Ingall Stretton; Paola Kathuria of consultants Limitless Innovations; and Andrew Calcutt of the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London

Endnotes

[i] Pew Internet & American Life Project: Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview, 3 January 2007

[ii] Tech Special Report ‘The Future of Social Networking’ BusinessWeek, June 18, 2007

[iii] You Don’t Know Me, but... Social Capital & Social Software, William Davies (iSociety/The Work Foundation, 2003)

[iv] To get a sense of the character of social network use around the world see the information graphic Réseaux sociaux: des audiences différentes selon les continents, Le Monde, 14.01.08

[v] Citation: Boyd, Danah.(in press)“Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.”MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Linked from www.danah.org/papers/ [Accessed August 28, 2007]

[vi] Cited from Linda Stone’s site continuouspartialattention.jot.com [Accessed August 28, 2007]

[vii] zengestrom.com: Why some social network services work and others don’t Or: the case for object-centered sociality, April 13, 2005 [Accessed August 28, 2007]

[viii] See presentation ‘The Changing Face of Web Search’ delivered at the NMK Content 2.0 conference 2007 (London) http://www.content2point0.com/2006/

[ix] ‘Google launches open APIs for social networks’ CNET Webware, October 30, 2007. Google’s version of this “write once run anywhere” concept is called OpenSocial, a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) that will enable developers to create applications for social networks, blogs and any Web sites that accept the OpenSocial code... Google's social network, Orkut, is among the sites that will accept apps written using OpenSocial APIs, as is LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster and Plaxo.

[x] For more on the idea of peripheral and ‘calm’ computing see ‘The Coming Age of Calm Technology’ Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown Xerox PARC October 5, 1996

[xi] This has even lead Britiain’s Trades Union Congress to issue a statement. See ‘TUC backs online networking by employees’ Financial Times, August 30 2007

[xii] See the Wikipedia entry on FOAF [Accessed on September 11, 2007]

[xiii] See press release LinkedIn Introduces Intelligent Applications Platform, December 10, 2007, which announces that “Using a set of LinkedIn APIs and widgets, partner sites using the Intelligent Application Platform will be augmented with business networking features allowing the 17 million LinkedIn users to be more productive on those sites”.

[xiv] The DataPortability.org sites notes that “As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together”. [Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) allows devices to automatically pick up network configuration information from the network. Defined in Wikipedia.]

[xv] Discussed further in Bryant’s post Facebook to get social zones?, September 02, 2007 [Accessed on September 11, 2007]

[xvi] Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype, Jared Spool, self published, Aug 07, 2007 [Accessed on August 22, 2007]