People Are Objects Too!
One of the nice things about my home-brew social news site is that items pop up on it that are not necessarily 'breaking news' but, rather, are things to stir the brain or not to forget.
Under Social Software, someone had recently tagged an old piece by Howard Rheingold on "object-centered sociality". He was quoting Jyri Engestrom's 2005 post on the matter. Which then led to about an hour of poking around Engestrom's blog and his site Jaiku and then from there onto Twitter.
In essence, Social Objects are elements that give a site relevance. So Flickr has photos, Plazes has maps, and so on. The object-centered sociality claims sites like LinkedIn to be failures because they don't give people objects and no objects mean no relevance.
So now it's 2007 and we have sites with objects all over the place. We have spatial objects, photographic objects, bloggy objects, topical objects.
What we've built for ourselves is a very messy room with our objects strewn all over the place. I currently keep my room organized by having a tab set in Firefox entirely made up of my social software sites.
This tab set is called "Jim Kit" ... it has about 18 tabs in there. 18 places where my social capital, my social objects, lie strewn around.
I'm certainly not going to argue with the notion of social objects - but I am forced to wonder how many individual users can withstand or successfully use every day.
One of the theories behind social software that VC's like is that it is "sticky". Once a network gets into using a particular tool, the investment of time of the overall group is so high that changing is difficult for the group as a whole.
The truth behind this is that it is very easy to launch any social networking site. Out of curiosity I was able to go to Jaiku, start an account, populate it with some information, view other people's usage of the site, and leave with about 10 minutes. So there is no real "sticky" there, other than convincing your friends to switch.
But what actually tends to happen is half your friends end up on one site and the other half on another. So you are forced to decide between them or keep both up (which usually means forgetting the whole thing).
Compound that with innovation and you've got a real mess. Flickr has great tagging and community organizational tools. Flickr is supported by just about everything. However, Picassa Web Albums have much better desktop integration (with Picassa) and excellent web slideshows. So often, depending on how I intend to use the tools, I will either go to Flickr or to Picassa.
That means my objects are scattered.
I can use things like PageFlakes to organize my objects ... but I can't use them to integrate my networks. So, inevitably, my social media becomes disassociated with my social networks.
What's great about true integrative tools - like del.icio.us and Flickr is that they can become background objects, embeddable into many applications. My networks, and the people in them, cannot.
I can easily say "here's my photo on Flickr". It's impossible for me to say "I want to show this thing to five people on Brainstorms, four people from Plazes, two people from Flickr, and seven from LinkedIn." I would like to see the human element of my networks given the same freedoms that the non-human elements are.
Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer
Comments