Social Networking Patterns

I've had some interesting reaction to my post on Social Networking, that I wrote basically to apologize for making people wasting their time. After concluding that social networking is probably some sophisticated IT warfare weapon developed to harm productivity of the western countries, I've had an interesting conversation with Giulio Cesare Solaroli, the mind behind the Clipperz online password manager, about the fact that as platforms are becoming more open, intercepting users behavioral pattern is a key concern for any social web application.

I am not quite sure if the notion of pattern fits exactly the situation, but I blogged about it before, and then found site WikiPatterns which published a consistent catalog of behavioral patterns, that reflect themselves in the shape if the information. There are more than 50 patterns and antipatterns just for a Wiki, in a scenario with some evident boundaries, like

• People are told to go to a wiki
  
• The people working on a wiki are already some kind of group (development team, company, etc.)
  
• They should share a common goal
  

A social networking tool such as LinkedIn, Naymz or Spock, has a similar high-level goal which is provide some form of valuable knowledge as a result of individual contributions by the user, but is far more open. Nobody asks you to go on a platform (well, … somebody invites you…), you're not necessarily part of the same group, and there is no such thing as "the common goal". I've asked myself "why do I keep my LinkedIn page updated?", and here are the answers.

1. I like learning how a new tool works
   
2. It's useful for my marketing as a freelance
   
3. It's useful for my job, cause Web 2.0 and the like are part of my consulting portfolio
   
4. I can't stand fake or incomplete information
   
5. I hate writing CVs and LinkedIn looks like the right place to write information only once
   
6. Vanity
   

There are probably some more reasons, but here we are talking only about the relationship between me and the tool. For some of my friends reasons are completely different, and some other are not on linked in and they're not interested to move in. But the tool is a networking platform, and this means that a lot more variables and scenarios are possible. I'll drop down something.

1. What if somebody wants to connect with you and you don't know him?
   
2. What if somebody wants to connect with you and you don't remember him?
   
3. What if a friend connects with you but not in the right position?
   
4. What if a friend endorses you for the wrong position?
   
5. What if somebody asks for an endorsement?
   
6. What if somebody endorses you, but you have no direct experience about the way he/she works?
   

Ok, one can develop some sort of "SocialNetiquette", but thinking about it is some sort of undesired side effect (it wastes brain cycles). But the key point, at least for me, is that I couldn't make up a consistent behavior. In other words, I don't give the same answer to the same question – after all, I am a consultant, so "It depends" is my mantra… As a result, some of my connection are strong, related to people I know well, that I've worked with and so on, but some are not. Are we abusing the tool? Or we're still using the tool the way it was intended. Or… does this question actually make sense?

A key argument about all Web 2.0 technologies is that providing strict rules about the way a tool is used is a losing approach. Tools should instead "follow" users needs and ideas and transform themselves into something that wasn't exactly planned in the beginning. It's sort of seeding something and then taking care of what's growing. More realistically, Linkedin can't ban users because they connected without knowing each other well enough (would you like to be interviewed by linkedIn police about your connections?), so its body of knowledge is made up of contributors which are not providing a consistent behavior (as individuals and as a crowd), which are posting incomplete and sometimes wrong information. Yet it works.

I still have the feeling of being part of a big experiment, but according to the Hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy, this does not necessarily mean that I am stupid.

Tags: Social networking, web 2.0

Social Networking Bloat?

This morning I received a mail containing an invitation to join a friend on Naymz social networking platform. I am quite interested in the topic (as as freelance, LinkedIn is one of my primary marketing tools) and trust the sender also as source of good hints, so – even if I am already registered on LinkedIn, Plaxo, Experteer, Facebook and Spock, I promptly joined in.

Every social networking has its value tightly related to the number of users. I've the feeling that the value provided by those tools is somewhat marginal compared to the fact that "you've got to be where the others are", sort of teenage grouping patterns transferred in a business relations territory. Well, Naymz folks got it pretty clear, so they included the possibility to spread the invitation in the fastest possible way, by importing LinkedIn connections and transforming them into invitations. Plaxo had a similar strategy, but was somehow more under control. Anyway, the result was something like an infection spread: Naymz sent invitations to around 60 people (I avoided those I didn't want to disturb, or the like), started sending me an e-mail every time one of my contacts took a look on my profile, and quite a few people joined my network pretty quickly. Then I started peeking to check if my ranking (a way to affect videogames addicted people more effectively) was increasing. I thought about the overall time this activity was dragging from more productive ones, and started to feel somewhat guilty. Maybe not all of my friends were really on "productive stuff" but the amount of overall time (counting a couple of minutes or more for contact) put on this unpredictable and not urgent at all activity was surprising, and made me use some more time thinking about what had just happened.

Yet another social networking tool?

SN is sort of hot topic nowadays and every internet company wants to become rich as Facebook folks did, even if nobody knows where the value comes from. Well… value comes from the critical mass, so Naymz and Plaxo piggybacked on existing networks such as LinkedIn (which in turn imports Google Mail connections). Unfortunately, being there is not the same thing as being there and there and there, and also there. Cause nobody could spend so much of his time just checking different SN tools, and because the ROI of your time decreases every other SN tool you use.

The funny thing is that differences in those tools are getting thinner and thinner, maybe pushing for a specialization of tools for specific purposes, more often generating huge areas of overlapping. Naymz is for reputable professional networking and has some sort of ranking, based on reliability of the information provided and opinions about you. Unlike Linkedin, connections are not shown, so you can't use Naymz to discover somebody's else's connections and your reputation is the sum of private opinions of your network.

What I've found annoying is that the "say something about you" or "endorse your connection" introduces data duplication with LinkedIn (which in turn has duplicated information with my Experteer profile), turning profile management into a complex activity on behalf of the user (something which is deeply wrong for my principles). I guess the next to come is just a Social Networking Management Console, allowing user to control every platform from a single access point. But this is also what every SN Service Provider is already trying to do, so probably my Darwinian expectations of natural selection are going to be unsatisfied.

Social Networking patterns

A couple of days ago I stepped on Plaxo, and read a blog entry by Andrey Golub which was linking to another article, by Mark Cummuta. It was interesting because it pointed out that SN tools are not used at all in the same way. Despite some advices in the main screen, some folks use LinkedIn, to know people instead that linking to people they already know. Somebody is interested more in the number of connection, than on the trust you can put on those connections. Controlling the way your users use a SN system is a difficult task, which has nothing to do anymore with coding. It's a mixture of social and behavioral sciences together with user interface design (because allow and make it easy are different things here). But you've got to be careful not to decrease the value of the platform you're on, or – worse – to make it annoying. I wonder how many of those SN service provider are approaching the problem from this perspective. But today I really felt like I was part of some worldwide social experiment.

Tags: Social Networking, Web 2.0