Anti-Social Networks

The first thing I should say is that MF is a genius. Two or three years ago, MF and I had caught up for a drink in Noe Valley, and were walking around in the cool evening, talking about his new venture. While talking, we kicked around a few other ideas (or mostly, he did). One of them was "Foester" -- the website where you could make "friends" with your enemies. Oh, how we laughed. It was a genius idea, impractical and ridiculous. But still genius.

Fast forward to a week chock full of interesting news and articles about the wide-world of social networking (and a note, it is nice that the notion that social networking platforms are now "utilities" is starting to take hold, for whatever little or much that means to people). I won't pass much comment on recent news, other than to highlight:

- Google's announcement of OpenSocial last week, which is the right idea, and has genuinely disruptive potential in this relatively small corner of the online world. Most charming in the announcement of this initiative is exactly who was left out of the launch of this project:

There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

As anyone paying attention could have told you, it's exciting that we may actually have a real fight on our hands -- between a huge player who controls data and so many of the complementary utilities that a robust social network can bring value to, and a pretty big player who actually owns the current high value network, and more importantly commands the active, opted-in user base.

- Paul Boutin's article in Slate, which gets both what is exactly (and inherently) right and wrong about Facebook's ability to capitalize on their social network and user base through advertising.

- But most amusingly (and least importantly) an article from the Financial Times, that I first saw on David Byrne's blog, about Social "Hateworking." An idea whose time has arrived:

Enemybook
Goes under the strap line “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”. Set up as a riposte to the perceived bogus nature of many online friendships, Enemybook runs off the back of Facebook. It allows you to add people as Facebook enemies below your friends, specify why they are enemies and notify them that they are enemies. You can also see who lists you as an enemy, and even become friends with the enemies of your enemies.

Snubster
Similarly to Enemybook, Snubster derides the notion of social networking sites, and can run off Facebook. Users can build lists of personal enemies from their Facebook contacts, who will then be sent a snub and will be alerted that they are either “On notice” or “Dead to me”.

Hatebook
Modelled on the Facebook concept, and with an almost identical layout, Hatebook offers a less friendly approach to the world of social networking. You can befriend “Other haters”, and your homepage alerts you when “Other fricking idiots” contact you. The site also provides you with an “Evil Map”, marking the locations of other users. The antithesis to Facebook’s emphasis on making friends, this is an open forum for abuse and aggression.

Social Divides on Social Networking Applications + Twitter

My opinion on social networking software is pretty simple. I do believe that encoding social networking behavior in online platforms and applications has the potential to enrich people's lives, as well as add value to wealth-creating activities (i.e., SN has business applications). Appealing to my idealistic side, satisfying one or both of those criteria is the basis on which a technology or business innovation is worth spending time thinking about. While the question of how business value will be delivered from social networking is a topic I have discussed (see previous posts, or this article for a cursory view), the question of how social networking applications may be enriching people's lives is not something that I have spent less time considering. At a very high level, I think social networking software can enrich a person's life in the following ways:

1. Allowing a person to capture and maintain their real-world social network through technological means - so you do a better job maintaining friendships over distance and time, and understand your friends in new ways based on the information they choose to convey about themselves;
2. Allowing a person to find new friends through their social network - so you can extend your circle of friends on a friends-of-friends basis;
3. Enabling a person to express their personality through a "broadcast" medium - so you could use the profile feature of most social networks allows a person to create, control, and communicate their identity to the world at large;
4. Enabling a person to make connections based on interests or attributes that can't be facilitated by their real-world social networks - so you can meet people online to whom you may have a strong affinity using a social networking service, where the connection may never have occurred in the physical world;

With that generally in mind, two recent articles caught my eye and are worth a quick read.

Social networking expert Danah Boyd publishes an interesting study on her website in which she traces "class divisions" in the usage of the social networking services MySpace and Facebook. In studying the use of these services by young people, Boyd has found both perceptions of usage and actual usage patterns where "good kids" - meaning college-bound students, but also a proxy, it seems, for middle-to-upper-class students, and traditionally popular school cliques - tend to use Facebook, whereas the "Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids" call MySpace home.

There may be some features of each of the services that are responsible for their attraction to different types of users. Boyd indicates that the Facebook crowd prefers its "clean" interface, whereas some of the heterogeneous set of high school outsiders lumped into the MySpace crowd prefer the "bling" and front-end configuration capabilities of MySpace. More likely, however, is a simple migration of real world patterns of behavior and social networking migrating into the online world. This is a real shame, of course, as one of the hopes of the online world would be the ability for people to transcend the impositions of their day-to-day realities. Especially for kids. As Boyd sums it up, sigh.

On an entirely separate note, Clive Thompson writes in Wired about recent flavor-of-the-month Twitter. Now, I haven't actually used Twitter, as I try to avoid the more twee software phenomenon to the extent that I possibly can, no matter how hot they are, but smarter people than me have. In case you don't know what Twitter is, Thompson sums it up well:

a tool that lets you post brief updates about your everyday thoughts and activities to the Web via browser, cell phone, or IM. The messages are limited to 140 characters, so they lean toward pithy, haiku-like utterances.

And his argument for Twitter is as follows:

Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter — and the similarly mundane Dodgeball, a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends — is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

Now, I don't know if I buy any of this, but it is an interesting hypothesis - that the more data we provide about ourselves to our friends, the better they can know us - in greater depth, in more detail, with greater variety. And that is, I would hope, one of the aims of social networking software.

Facebook & LinkedIn Open Up

Slate.com has a lead article on the promise of Facebook. While the headlines are a little grandiose, I do agree with the conclusions, albeit for different reasons. Specifically, I think that Facebook is poised to become both an entrenched and fundamentally revolutionary web platform. I think opening up to the development platform to the developer community at large will accelerate this trend, but what I think that Facebook fundamentally got right, better than any other major player in the social networking space, is their underlying model of a social network - how they represent the people, relationships, entities, and other parts of what makes our lives rich, outside of the internet.

Once a few years pass and a generation (with a small g) comes of age with social networking technology, and the hub-bub of college freshman's profiles coming back to haunt them as job seekers (and similar stories) disappear, I think you'll find the data, user base, and applications supported by a platform like Facebook to be truly enriching to our day to day lives - from dating, to maintaining friendships over continents, to nurturing communities of interests, to professional uses like job seeking, recruiting, and even relationship-based selling.

It'll be interesting to see how it all plays.

In related news, LinkedIn has announced that it will be opening up its platform, as well, in the next year. Also, check out Mashable, a cool blog that I've only recently found, reviewing trends in social networking websites. I'll try to come back to what I like about Facebook, and more generally on social networking and community websites in a future post, but it just hasn't been top of mind recently.

How Many Friends Does Obama Have (on MySpace?)

Well, ENW sends me an interesting link this morning to techPresident, "a new group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and vice versa, how content generated by voters is affecting the campaign."

So now we get a running commentary on the collision course of two of America's most narcissistic, frustrating, and illogical social phenomena: presidential politics and social media. Grrreat.

Actually, in addition to the somewhat funny, though certainly not irrelevant features you can find on techPresident, like the monthly change in MySpace friends of leading candidates (Clinton up 38%, Obama down 66%) and the Flickr ticker of candidate photostreams, there is quite a good bit of interesting commentary and anecdotes on how campaigns are using social media, to good effect and, well, less good. Worth a look.