Social tools
A month ago, my old colleagues at Socialsquare posted a short video interview with meon how the internet is changing business. The interview was an edited excerpt of a longer interview where I also talked about KBHFF as a concrete example of a networked, open source organisation. To me, that was the most interesting part of the interview.
So I’m very happy to find that they’ve put up another edited excerpt from the interview, focusing on KBHFF:
Recently, I went to visit my old colleagues at Socialsquare to catch up. They also did a little interview with me about KBHFF, the Copenhagen food co-op I’m involved in, and how I see that the internet is changing business in general.
Yesterday, they posted this little video of some of the main points from the interview:
I must admit I find talking about “how the internet is changing business” in general to be rather diffuse subject matter. Business is such a broad field that it’s pretty difficult to claim that all of these trends are equally applicable to all sectors. I prefer very concrete examples and stories that can elucidate these new trends in a manner that’s easier to grasp. I did talk a lot about the food co-op in the interview. But as Kim writes in his blog post, they used that part in relation to a project with Aarstiderne. Who knows, maybe they’ll share it later on…
Defining the topic for this blog has been an on-going challenge for me since I started blogging in December 2004. And that is reflected in the way my blog has evolved over the years.
Starting out as a simple way of sharing my experiences as an exchange student in Manchester in 2005, the blog evolved into a more solid online presence, eventually hosting the observations and ideas gathered throughout my fieldwork and thesis writing.
Following my graduation, I redefined my blog as my outboard brain, borrowing an expression from Cory Doctorow, a random stream of whatever caught my interest or my fancy at any given time.
Once I began working at Socialsquare, much of my blogging was diverted to their blog, and my own blog saw only sporadic posting.
Now that I’ve started out on my own, I find it is time to define the topic of this blog anew, and much more clearly this time. Inspired by Josh Porter’s advice on small-company blogs I’ll focus on the fields in which I work, and on how the developments in these fields can make a difference.
I work at the intersection of two fields: social software and people-centred design.
Social software is the fuzzy field sometimes known as social media, social tools, or lately even social business. Fundamentally, it is software tools and services on computers or mobile devices that support social relations, sharing, collaboration and collective action.
People-centered design is a strain within another fuzzy field often called user experience design, design research, user-centered design or even user-driven innovation. But all of these strains still draw upon the same mother lode: The notion that it is vital to understand understand the practices, motivations and needs of the potential users in order to design new products and services that can offer lasting value.
What both of these fields have in common is the fact that they are opening up new avenues of user involvement in their own way:
Social software facilitates involvement by offering people tools to share, discuss and solve issues – either directly among one another or indirectly by engaging with an organisation dedicated to solving those issues.
People-centred design creates involvement by engaging with people in their everyday lives, exploring and analysing the issues they face and building on those experiences in design solutions.
So, to sum up: I write about user involvement through people-centered design and social software. Stay tuned for more.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how we need to reinvent something like The Whole Earth Catalog.
The Whole Earth Catalog is an ancient thing. Initiated by Stewart Brand in 1968 as a response to the communard movement that followed the summer of love. During the autumn and winter of 1967/1968, more than 30.000 hippies sought to make true on the idealistic promises of the 1960s counter culture, and moved back-to-the-land and into communes throughout the US southwest.
The first Whole Earth Catalog was a 64-page catalog that provided “access to tools” with which to build the new and better world envisioned by the communards. In addition to providing information on how to order material goods (mostly books), the Catalog, and to an even greater extent, the Whole Earth Supplement that subscribers would receive in-between new versions of the catalog, provided a forum where the communards could share information and reach out to one another. As Stewart Brand explains:
If [the commune dwellers] were going to go back to basics, they needed to know where the basics were. And I didn’t either. But I set a thing in motion a thing by which by purveying the stuff, and being a node of a network of people purveying it to each other… I would get to learn whatever the network was learning.
The Catalog and the supplement became looking glasses through which to peer down and see a reflection of an emerging world and, at the same time, spot doorways through which newcomers could enter that world.
Inspired by his own experiences of environmental biology and the works of Buckminster Fuller, Brand sought to develop this fledgling network into what he hoped would become a self-sustaining system. As he put it,
What you’re trying to do is nourish and design an organism which can learn and stay alive while it’s learning. Once that process has its stride, don’t tinker with it, let it work for you.
Indeed, the Whole Earth Catalog inspired a whole generation of communards, free-thinkers, activists and dreamers to think of computers, cybernetics, ecology, Buckminster Fuller, geodesic domes, and lots more.
One of the key design principles of this information eco-system was juxtaposition. Brand juxtaposed radically different topics in order to help the reader to win new perspectives. As he put it,
How you get energy is, you take polarities and slap them next to one another. If you get into Cybernetics and your head is just a minute ago full of organic gardening and ecology, then cybernetics starts to come alive for you in a different way.
Little wonder that the Whole Earth Catalog inspired long-haired computer programmers as they imagined how a computer would handle and juxtapose information. As Alan Kay (the man who first envisioned the laptop computer) said, “We thought of the Whole Earth Catalog as a print version of what the Internet was going to be.”
And that is what the Internet – and especially the World Wide Web – has become. It is the ultimate information eco-system – the ultimate juxtaposition of human knowledge. Everything is just a click a way. But that also means that it is too big to know. With Google, you can find anything that you know to seek, but you rarely come across that which you did not expect to find. You tend skim along, never focusing, never allowing the energy of the juxtapositions to hit home.
I find myself lacking the carefully curated, annotated and juxtaposed mix of inspiration, ideas, and tools that the Whole Earth Catalog offered. Tools gathered with a specific purpose and audience in mind. Just like the Whole Earth Catalog was a primer for the hippies, the communards, and the computer geeks, we need a primer for young people today.
Such a primer should provide tools and inspire conversations and everyday action towards the sustainable, open, free and shared future we know we need to build.
If you know of something like that that already exists, or if you want to help make one, get in touch.
(PS: All of the quotes above are taken from Fred Turner’s excellent book “From Counter Culture to Cyberculture and the related panel discussion at Stanford University)
Just trawled my way through a ridiculously long slide deck by David Gillespie called “Digital Strangelove – or how I learned to stop worrying and love the internet“.
It has a lot of good points, and describes among other things:
But the point that stuck with me occured around slide number 190 (!) was the “musketeer rule”, which sort of sums it all up:
Your intent is framed by the way you deliver value.
I call this The Three Musketeers rule.
All for One or One for All
All For One is 20th century value creation. It is driven by self-interest & excelled in the silos.
One For All is how businesses thrive today. When they create value for themselves, they create value for an eco-system.
It is called the â??Good Enough Revolutionâ?ť, and it is not a conversation about features.
It is a conversation about benefits.
Good stuff!
Working at Socialsquare, I’ve been introduced to some very practical thinkers in the realm of digital sociality. These are the people who are concerned with connecting the technical ‘how’ with the social ‘how’ to build new web services that help redefine digital sociality. One of the more thoughtful of these thinkers is Jyri Engeström.
Jyri is a Finnish entrepreneur with a Ph.D in sociology, and in his work, he combines his social science background with experience developing applications for web and mobile platforms. The most prominent result of this is Jaiku, a micro-blogging service very similar to Twitter. But with much more balanced design focused on conversation.
One of the main reasons why Jaiku comes across as a much more well-defined web service compared to Twitter is the way it was conceived. As Engeströmi explains in this interview with Brian Oberkirch, when Web 2.0 developers sought to define the functionality of their service, they thought of the social network they were building in the terms of traditional social network theory that claims that networks consist of nodes (people) connected by lines (relations).
Engeström found this theoretical framework to be lacking. Inspired by sociologists of science such as Karina Knorr Cetina and Bruno Latour, he argues that people are always connected by objects, and by focusing on the role of objects in social relationships, we can see how these objects often provide context in which these relationships come to make sense. This makes sense for us in our daily lives where we the contexts of situations to be self-evident. We’re very good at figuring out what the centre of attention is – depending on whether we’re attending a birthday party, a funeral, a baby shower, or a barn raising.
Engeström’s point is that these centres of attention are social objects that we use to connect with one another. Social objects offer us a vital context to make sense of how we ought to behave in a given situation. This is even more important in an online setting, where there is much less social context to draw upon. As human beings, we tend to adjust our behaviour according to the people around us, but if we can’t see how others act and interpret a given online social space, how can we make sense of it?
As Engeström argues, we can do this by defining a clear social object for a social web site. Consider the difference between how you’d present yourself and who you’d connect with through a web site offering to help you find jobs, and a web site offering to help you find dates. In both cases, the social object shapes how you will interact with it – and indeed, whether you will interact with it. Engeström argues that social services with an ill-defined social object tend to not do so well.
In this presentation, Engeström offers some tentative explanations of the power of social objects:
When you begin to examine social web services and look for social objects, they’re often easy to find: Delicious focuses on bookmarks. LinkedIn focuses on jobs. Dogster focuses on dogs. Upcoming focuses on events. Flickr focuses on photos. Youtube focuses on videos. Amazon focuses on books. eBay focuses on auctions. Craigslists focuses on classifieds. Myspace tends to focus on music. And so on. The real magic of Facebook, according to Engeström, is that they’ve opened it up to allow users and developers to create their own social objects, providing for unlimited number of objects – events, photos, status messages, what have you.
So how did Engeström use this notion of social objects in building his own social web service, Jaiku? Well, the social object of Jaiku is status messages – or jaikus as they’re called (a neologism similar to tweets, I suppose). Engeström was inspired by Instant Messaging status messages, which people already used to a great extent to tell their network what they were up to (whether on Microsoft Messenger, AIM, Gtalk or elsewhere). But these IM statuses weren’t sharable (outside that specific Instant Messaging network) or savable (no web history). He wanted to turn these status messages into a fully fledged social object, which users could share, discuss, and socialise through. Having worked for Nokia, he also sought to combine the service with SMS updates.
In short, Jaiku was conceived from the beginning with a specific centre of attention, which all use of the service would revolve around. Twitter didn’t come with all these features for socialising, and users had to invent them for themselves. In that way, it’s somewhat unfortunate that Twitter took off, and Jaiku did not. When asked about what the next big thing in the field of online social objects might be, he suggests locations, which Jaiku also experimented with. But being able to digitally bookmark a location as a social object depends on a much more widespread adoption of GPS-enabled phones. Just like Flickr depended on widespread adoption of digital cameras, and Youtube depended on widespread adoption of webcams and digital camcorders.
Summing up his experiences with building Jaiku, Engeström names 5 key design principles in using social objects as a design parameter:
1) Define your object. (users should be able to identify a site’s social object within 10 seconds of entering the site)
2) Define your verbs. (what actions can users actually perform on the site in relation to the social object? – a brilliant example is eBay’s Buy and Sell buttons)
3) Make it sharable. Make it easy and quick to share. What is the particular way to share this kind of object?
4) Make it viral. You need to turn each invitation into a gift. Make receivers feel like that they are getting a gift. Youtube does this well. Sending a video is often just like sending a smile.
5) Don’t charge the spectators, charge the publishers. Make it free and easy to see, use and share the social object. Those who have a keen interest in using the social object for more specialised purposes will also be willing to pay for that privilege.
It’s striking how well these design principles fit with what successful free software projects are doing. The Ubuntu community is an excellent example of how a whole community of hackers are brought to gather by a social object, an operating system, which they have a common interest in. I really like the idea of social objects as points of focus and gravity for social interactions. I’ll have to spend some more time thinking about how such objects may create social coherence by providing a context that allows people with shared interests to relate one another in new and meaningful ways.
Following my last post, where I likened Twitter to shouting out the window of a moving truck, I’ve been giving the matter some more thought and dug up some different perspectives on Twitter. Web 2.0 entrepreneur Ross Mayfield even asked his Twitter followers how they would describe Twitter to new-comers.
It’s public but focused on individuals. It’s both asynchronous and real-time. It’s searchable and cumulative. It’s not necessarily shouting.
As this presentation by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams illustrates, Twitter is also quite a lot like passing notes or whispering in a classroom. The difference being that the presenter can check out all the comments afterwards:
Williams’ main point is that Twitter has proven to be much more versatile than they expected, and they’ve been working hard to keep up with the cognitive surplus being invested in defining the etiquette and uses of twitter. David Pogue makes a similar point in his insightful write-up of Twitter in the New York Times:Twitter can be whatever you want it to be: An ego boost, a discussion tool, a research tool, a waste of time, a running dialogue during a presentation. It is the openness of the tool that creates the magic. It is still a complete mess, fragmented and incoherent precisely because all of the users are still in the process of figuring out how best to use it.
I can’t help comparing it to IRC, which I used a lot as part of my fieldwork. IRC is real-time chat channels focused on topics rather than on individuals. It requires you to be online through an IRC client in order to follow the conversation (though some IRC channels do log the conversations), but it can also be asynchronous. People can direct comments to specific individuals or just ask an open question to everybody present. It has many of the same features as Twitter – an allows for much better conversation. But it is limited to channels. You need to get all of your friends together in the same few channels in order to be able to talk with them.
Twitter has a much, much lower barrier to entry: It’s on the web. Sign-up is easy. You don’t have to decide which topics you’re interested in, or try to get your friends involved – you immediately connect with your friends already on Twitter. You can use it on your mobile phone. And perhaps most importantly: You’re limited to 140 characters.
But all of this comes at a high price: There is a massive loss of context: It is much more difficult to make sense of the conversation once you’re there. People are trying to help this by using acronyms.
I find Twitter to be a fascinating example of a technology that has been shaped by use rather than by design. Its greatest advantage is the fact that so many people are using it – not any inherent quality of the design itself. The result is a fairly unaesthetic mess, but it makes it clear just how much potential there is for such easy discussion and access to expert knowledge. Twitter has begun to tap this potential in form a Web 2.0 service. But there is a long way to go, still.
So, I finally succumbed and created a Twitter account. Despite my initial impression of it being fucking retarded. But now, having begun to follow some people and reading their “tweets” (what an awful word), I’ve been able to see how it works.
Imagine a large group of rednecks, each of them cruising down a broad highway in their pickup trucks. They’re in constant flow, constantly on the move. All of the rednecks are shouting out the window as they go. Typically letting the world know what they’re doing, but often also pointing out things that they’re passing by. At times, two cars are side by side, and the rednecks can holler at each other as they drive by. Such shout-versations rarely lasts longer than a few exchanges.
Now, the really odd thing is that each pickup truck has a microphone installed. But it only records the exclamations of the driver inside the car, not what the other drivers are saying. That means that you find a driver whose yelling seems exceptionally poignant to you, you will still have a hard time figuring out exactly what they’re going on about when they’re shouting replies to others. Your best chance is to listen in on a lot of people to get both sides of the conversation.
Twitter is sort of the redneck version of weblogs. It’s drive-by shouting online. It’s short and fast and furious and fragmented and mostly incoherent. I don’t doubt that it works. It’s obviously quite an effective way to let people know what you think. But it’s still shouting.
A while back, I made a brief reference to the so-called Dunbar number in relation to my list of friends on Facebook.
Since then, I’ve spent some time reading up on Dunbar’s number and the concept of friends on social networking sites, and feel the need to delve deeper into this discussion. danah boyd, one of the leading researchers on Social Networking Sites, has made the point that
Friends lists are not an accurate portrayal of who people know now, who they could ask favors of, who they would feel comfortable introducing at the moment. They’re a weird product of people from the past, people from the present, people unknown, people once met.
Based on my own anecdotal evidence, I find this to be exactly right. I have loads of contacts on Facebook that I haven’t seen, nor kept in touch with in ages, only now I have a sort of ambient awareness of what is happening in their lives. It’s like having a auto-updating version of the various social spheres I happen to be in. I guess the most apt metaphor would be a college yearbook – the original facebook – that updates itself everyday.
So, how does this relate to Dunbar’s number? Well, Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist who hypothesized that “there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”
Dunbar sought to prove this hypothesis by correlating a number of studies measuring the group size of a variety of different primates with the brain sizes of the primates. He used these correlations to produce a mathematical formula for how the two correspond. Using his formula, which is based on 36 primates, he found that 147.8 is the “mean group size” for humans, which he found to match census data on various village and tribe sizes in many cultures.
So that’s the basis of the Dunbar’s number of 150 relationships. But as Christopher Allen has done well to point out, reducing Dunbar’s research to just one number would be misleading. As he concludes: The “Dunbar’s group threshold of 150 applies more to groups that are highly incentivized and relatively exclusive and whose goal is survival.”
Similarly, boyd sums up Dunbar’s point quite well:
Just as monkeys groomed to maintain their networks, humans gossiped to maintain theirs! He found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150. This doesn’t mean that people don’t have 150 people in their social network, but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point.
But one thing is how many active social relationships we can have – i.e. how many people we can keep up with socially in a reciprocal fashion. Another thing is how we know these people and how well we know them. Our social relationships come with both a context and a strength of your shared bond. The context and the strength of our relations is crucial for how we distribute information, support, and trust among our friends.
Typically, we can group our relations in various groups based on the context of the relation: People we know from work, from school, from hockey practice, or people we know through our significant other, people we’ve been introduced to by another relation. Until social networks like Facebook came along, these groups rarely overlapped and got a chance to meet. But these social networks suddenly expose more about our contextual relationships to different groups of people than we would ever do in real life, and we end up having to reconcile the bar-hopping facet of our identity with the paid work facet.
Clay Shirky does well to analyse the consequences of this new social situations. As he argues: It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure: All of the sudden people are able to discover new social contexts in which their friends are part because the filters, which people had in place are no longer working:
Recently, I read Seth Godin‘s new book Tribes. It is a short clever book full of insights on what it means to build and lead a tribe. Godin’s main argument is borrowed from one of Hugh McLeod‘s one-liners:
Or, as Woody Guthrie put it: “Basically, man is a hoping machine.”
As a marketing guru, Godin’s spin on this is a bit more basic, and goes as follows: Rather than “building a brand” or “marketing your product” or “staying on message” in order to win supporters, customers, members, fellow travellers – or whatever you call the people that you want to interact with you – you have to build a tribe.
A tribe in Godin’s understanding is a group of people with shared interest, shared faith that you do together matters – that is it: A tribe is something to believe in – a group of hoping machines working in unison. And with the proliferation of the Internet, the costs of organizing, building, and leading a tribe has been lowered immensely.
Thus, the book focuses on the non-technical (that is: the social) barriers that remain which is hindering people building or leading a tribe. Reading the book, I underlined a few passages, which I’ve turned into a short one-page remix of the book’s main points:
It takes only two things to turn a group of people into a tribe:
- A shared interest
- A way to communicateA tribe has three elements:
- A narrative that tells a story about who we and the future we’re trying to build
- A connection between and among the leader and the tribe
- Something to do – the fewer limits the better.If no one cares, then you have no tribe. If you don’t care – really and deeply care – then you can’t possibly lead.
The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on.
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.
Leadership is uncomfortable:
It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.
It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.
It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.
When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.So what’s holding you back?
Fear.
But what you are afraid of isn’t failure. It’s blame. Criticism.
What you have to ask yourself is this: “If I get criticized for this, will I suffer any measurable impact? Will I lose my job, get hit upside the head with a softball bat, or lose important friendships?”
If the only side effect of the criticism is that you will feel bad about yourself, then you have to compare that bad feeling with the benefits you’ll get from actually doing something worth doing.
Consider this: If someone gave you two weeks to give that speech or to write that manifesto or make the decision that would get you started making an impact, would that be enough time? How much time do you think you’d need? What’s preventing you from starting right now?