Decentralized Social Networks
Notes from a panel of experts on social network theory populated by Celik, Luster, Park, Hsiung, and Boyd.
C: Does social software mean anything? How different is this different from groupware?
Who owns the data? Can technology be too simple?
L: The Somali's don't have a word for expert so they use the word expert for someone in a suit who talks a lot, knows nothing, and leaves.
One of the questions that Tantek posed is "Can technology be too simple?"
Social networks have the following attributes: density, proximity, direction, source/origin, time, and type.
Looking at proximity you wonder how close you are emotionally and physically. The source origin represents the first introduction both implicit and explicit.
Orkut, friendster, and other systems show the number of friends that people have and "when" they became friends.
Direction refers to the origin of the relationship. If you meet or interact in a bi-directional way that is very different than the relationship I have with the author of a book I read.
There are more than one variable in declaring a relationship. Don't forget that networks are transient. Are systems built around well-defined declarations of free declarations (re: the semantic web)? Overlay networks connect trans-communal areas.
P: Decentralized social networks experience a tension between public space and privacy. Do people understand and appreciate the openness of a blog when they post content?
One big difference between genders is the desire for safety, discretion, compartmentalization, and a desire for the "private" life. Dodgeball was rejected by some women users for being a stalkers wet dream. Our social lives are built on layers of deception and information restriction.
Social networking sites have so far been built by young men for young men. Young men like to gaze at photographs of many women they don't know. Where are the social networking apps for things that women like to know that may or may not be the same? Can these unprivate systems meet felt needs?
B: Why does openness matter? There is this ideal that transparency will solve all the worlds problems. But people don't have equal cultural access. Open is not the answer.
There can be freedom in walled gardens. When people without social power participate in public discourse they abandon certain important levels of safety. Not all discourse should be open for attack.
When you are in an homogenous group, like flickr or del.icio.us, it changes. TypePad is at 50% private blogs.
Blogs by people talking about deviant subjects require a different set of privacy restrictions if they to maintain their social safety while still being able to express and explore identity.
Technosocial problems are as follows: social awkwardness, articulating problems, the problem with public.
Firendster got out there and stopped paying attention.
H: XFN stands for the XHTML Friends Network, a riff on the psychic friends network. The two assumption are that you need a blog and a blogroll. A rel tag is added to a tags using a strict set of keywords to define relationships.
Instead of being on another site, you are on your own site. It is totally decentralized. When you spend time on your blogroll you want to tag your friends. Once you do that there isn't that much functionality on top of that.
The lack of applications is a limitation.
C: The potential remains unexplored.
H: If more people use it, tools will be built. It just has geek cred now but could get bigger.
L: One very important different between implicit and explicit knowledge. If I declare that he is a friend and he declares me to be a friend that is explicit. A hug is implicit but the meaning is muddled. Politicians hug each-other all the time but don't mean the same thing by it.
B: Trust can be undermined by permanent social moves that have tremendous impact. Public blogs contain a great deal of coded information. How much is out and how those layers interact is the non-structural portion of this conversation.
C: If you look at what people do on the web there is a spectrum between people who put it all out there and people who conceal everything. There will not be one tool to do this.
L: The question of anonymity. How has the work folksonomies spread from one paper to another. You can track who reads what, who reads who, and who thinks what by exploring the history of a specific phrase. Anonymity is broken in an incredibly powerful way.
?: Why are brazilians on Orkut?
B: Because Orkut remains invitation only, Brazilians saw that there were country flags on the system and saw it as a world cup on the web. Looking a the e-mails that went around early on you see that people encouraged others to join by using the argument that Brazil could "beat" the other countries.
It also plays into new needs created by accelerated population movement.
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Who is this guy?
sam - where is your email address? email me. sorry for the off-topic post.
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