Social software

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Social software  edit   (Category  edit)

Contents 1 Sources of information 2 Dodgeball 3 ↓Twitter 4 Xhtml Friends Network

[edit] Sources of information

Sources of information / Social software edit

[edit] Dodgeball

Danah Boyd (2007-03-18). Tweet Tweet (some thoughts on Twitter) (http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/03/18/tweet_tweet_some_thoughts_on_twitter.php). Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

While you can use Dodgeball for a variety of things, it’s primarily a way of announcing presence in a social venue where you’d be willing to interact with other people. Given that i’m a hermit, I primarily use Dodgeball to announce my presence at conference outings and to sigh in jealousy as people romp around Los Angeles. Dodgeball is culturally linked to place. I’m still pretty peeved with Google over the lack of development of Dodgeball because I still think it would be a brilliant campus-based application where people actually do party-hop on every weekend and want to know if their friends are at the neighboring frat party instead of this one. When it comes to usage at SXSW, Dodgeball is great. I know when 7 of my friends are in one venue and 11 are in another; it helps me decide where to go.

Twitter has taken a different path. It is primarily micro-blogging or group IMing or push away messaging. You write whatever you please and it spams all of the people who agreed to be your friends. The biggest strength AND weakness of Twitter is that it works through your IM client (or Twitterrific) as well as your phone. This means that all of the tech people who spend far too much time bored on their laptops are spamming people at a constant rate. [...]

[edit] ↓Twitter

Ross Mayfield (2007-03-10). Twitter Tips the Tuna (http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/03/10/twitter_tips_the_tuna.php). Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

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Twitter, in a nutshell, is mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network. You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM. A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac. Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, “what are you doing?” A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence — and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.

Anil Dash was spot-on to highlight “The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect.” A couple of weeks ago it became a convention to start messages with @username as a way of saying something to someone visible to everyone. Within the limited affordances of the tool, people started to use it not only for presence, but a kind of shouting at the party conversation. Further, when you see an [?] to someone who isn’t in your social network, you find yourself inclined to go see who it is or add them if they are a friend who just joined. This kind of social discovery goes beyond seeing friend lists on profiles, aids network structure and quickens adoption.

While the app is viral (you have to get others to adopt to be able to use it), mobile social software has great word-of-mouth properties. At Wikimania this summer, a buzz went off in my pocket when I was having dinner, which prompted me to get Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and the brothers Gillmor to adopt. Wednesday was the first day of TED, so a bunch of A-listers spread it. At SXSW it seems to be the smart mob tool of choice, and there is even a group for it with a feature I’ve never seen before, JOIN.

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Liz Lawley well addressed the differences of this form of presence and criticisms of mundane content and interruption costs. She highlights “exploring clusters of loosely related people by looking at the updates from their friends. There are stories told in between updates.”

However, I do think the interruption tax is significant — especially with the quickening of adoption. You use your social network as a filter, which helps both in scoping participation within a pull model of attention management, but also to Liz’s point that my friends are digesting the web for me and perhaps reducing my discovery costs. But the affordance within Twitter of both mobile and web, that not only lets Anil use it (he is Web-only) is what helps me manage attention overload. I can throttle back to web-only and curb interruptions, simply by texting off.

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Liz Lawley (2007-03-06). thoughts on twitter (http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/03/06/thoughts_on_twitter.php). Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

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If you haven’t tried it yet, Twitter is a site that allows you to post one-line messages about what you’re currently doing—via the web interface, IM, or SMS. You can limit who sees the messages to people you’ve explicitly added to your friends list, or you can make the messages public. (My Twitter posts are private, but my friend Joi’s are public.)

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

The big “P” word in technology these days is “participatory.” But I’m increasingly convinced that a more important “P” word is “presence.” In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful.

I’ve experimented a bit with a visual form of this lightweight presence indication, through cameraphone photos taken while traveling. A photo of a boarding gate sign, or of a hotel entrance, conveys where I am and what I’m doing quickly and easily. But that only works if people are near a computer and are watching my Flickr photo feed, and that’s a lot to ask.

I also use IM status messages to broadcast what I’m doing. My iChat has a stack of custom messages that I’ve saved for re-use, from “packing” and “at the airpot” to “breaking up sibling squabbles” and “grading…the horror! the horror!” But status messages have no permanence to them, and require some degree of synchronicity—people have to be logged into IM, and looking at status messages, while I’m there. [You can log status messages too. — Tyler (2007-05-28 17:12)] Because Twitter archives your messages on the web (and can send them as SMS that you can check at any time), that requirement for synchronous connections goes away.

Blogs allow this kind of archived update, of course—but they’re not lightweight. Where one might easily post a Twitter message along the lines of “on my way to work”, a blog post like that wouldn’t be worth the effort and overhead.

I’ve heard two kinds of criticisms of Twitter already.

The first criticizes the triviality of the content. But asking “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day” misses the whole point of presence. This isn’t about conveying complex theory—it’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. And we crave this, I think. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is “what are you doing?” Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they’re working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days. No, most people don’t care that I’m sitting in the airport at DCA, or watching a TV show with my husband. But the people who miss being able to share in day-to-day activity with me—family and close friends—do care.

The second type of criticism is that the last thing we need is more interruptions in our already discontinuous and partially attentive connected worlds. What’s interesting to me about Twitter, though, is that it actually reduces my craving to surf the web, ping people via IM, and cruise Facebook. I can keep a Twitter IM window open in the background, and check it occasionally just to see what people are up to. There’s no obligation to respond, which I typically feel when updates come from individuals via IM or email. Or I can just check my text messages or the web site when I feel like getting a big picture of what my friends are up to.

Which then leads to one of the aspects of Twitter that I find most fascinating—exploring clusters of loosely related people by looking at the updates from their friends. There are stories told in between updates. Who’s at a conference, and do they know each other? Who’s on the road, and who’s at home. Narratives that wind around and between the updates and the people, that show connections. Updates that echo each other, or even directly respond to another Twitter post.

There’s more to it than that, but I’m still sorting it all out in my head. Just wanted to post an early-warning signal that I see something important happening here, something worth paying (more than partial) attention to.

[edit] Xhtml Friends Network

http://gmpg.org/xfn/

XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their <a href> tags, e.g.:

<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel="friend met">...