Posts Tagged: community

Research / Thoughts — 1 Comment
25
Mar 08

The Best Social Software

Over the past few days, I’ve been discussing the problems of multiple contexts in social software. While I am primarily covering this problem in the context of Facebook, this is a problem that affects all social software. I’m actually feeling this problem most acutely with Twitter these days.

When we use social software, we adopt a persona. Broadly speaking, that persona is mediated by the audience and publicness of the space. For example, this blog is hyper-public (Googlable) and the audience is mostly research- and tech-folk. As a result, I write on topic and try to stay away from stuff that is going to embarrass me too much down the road. A simple equation, but I think it works.

At some level, we all engage in this audience/publicness calculation when we craft our persona in social software. Blogs charted this territory; the central tenet of “successful blogging” is knowing one’s audience. But blogs are usually hyper-public, meaning the nuance of publicness is lost. Let’s consider private Twittering as an alternative.

When one elects privacy measures in Twitter, they limit their publicness. That is, they exercise control over who sees the persona they are creating, a persona that is a function of audience. As private Twitterers construct these trusted places – they understand their audience/publicness calculation – the persona becomes more personal, the content more engaging. Remarked to me via a private Twitter message, “it feels like we have insight into ppls thoughts thru-out the day.”

The best social software should make you feel like you’re amongst friends, encouraging you to create a more true persona. The best social software lets you be you – whatever that you happens to be at the moment. Facebook 2005 hit that sweet spot, and Twitter affords the more geeky of us that place today. Perhaps this is why every time I log into Facebook all I see are Twitter status messages; vibrancy lies in the more personal network.

As contexts collide, however, the audience/publicness calculation has to be reworked. I don’t dare look at the hundreds of Twitter follower requests waiting for me (most spam – I’m not that internet famous yet), because I know allowing more people in to my circle would force me to refactor myself in Twitter. And I don’t want to do that yet, not while the experience is still so great. Ultimately, though, I’ll have to, and that will be the death of Twitter for me. The publicness will force depersonalization, and my Twitter will become like my blog.

Is this process unavoidable? I’m not sure. But the expectation of hyper-publicness ultimately written into social software needs to be rethought. As we force users to constantly renegotaite the audience/publicness calculation, I think we lose more than we gain. Rather than ultimately forcing publicness, we need to think of ways for users to create private spaces for sharing. This is why so many people love and care about LiveJournal to this day – it allowed the creation of private spaces.

Most of us are not internet celebrities, but the social software we use assumes we are (or want to be). It’s time to rethink this, to build closets and spaces for whispering into social software.

Thoughts — 8 Comments
21
Mar 08

The Perfect Virtual Community

In yesterday’s post about Facebook’s new privacy system, I discussed the concept of “community health” in online social networks. This is a topic I’ve thought about for some time, and explored in my essay The Vibrancy of Online Social Space. What is a healthy, vibrant online social network? How does one build or shape a social network (or other virtual community) so that it is healthy and vigorous, an approximation of our best cities or communities?

This is actually a very important point – one that I encourage social entrepreneurs and community managers to ponder; it’s never enough to just throw affordances or rules at a community, a community must be gardened with love.

Remembering Facebook ca. 2005 (or even Friendster ca. 2003), we can reflect on how the community has changed. In yesterday’s post I talked about “privacy” as a key proxy for gauging community health. In early 2005, everyone in Facebook felt like they knew one another; your audience was your network, and your network was your friends (or potential friends). As a result, we didn’t use privacy, we disclosed a lot, and we engaged each other digitally at a level never before seen.

At the time, when I began studying the community, I sensed there was a privacy divide, that young people don’t understand or care about privacy like “we” do. Over time I’ve realized I couldn’t be further from the truth. To those users, Facebook in 2005 was the perfect community, a digital place they felt so comfortable with that privacy didn’t enter the equation. It would have been as weird to use privacy in Facebook ca. 2005 as it would be to walk around with a bag over your head on campus today.

And just think about that for a minute – the perfect virtual community. That’s a remarkable achievement, and much credit to Facebook for creating such a remarkable success. Unfortunately, as Facebook opened the doors widely, they learned that community doesn’t scale. This isn’t new – danah boyd documents the clash of communities in Friendster in her paper “None of this is real“. As contexts collide and communities become more heterogeneous, virtual communities become more real – and the privacy fears and stranger-danger that come with real-world networks erode our feelings of community and cohesion.

The Facebook of today is vastly different from the Facebook of 2005. With the influx of new people and new networks comes the clash of contexts. This forces us to put locks on our doors, to shut ourselves off to all but our friends, to confront the non-idyllic parts of community.

Reflecting on Facebook 2005 and Facebook 2008, I think there are important lessons to be learned – for makers of social software, for community gardeners, for those who might wish to make a living at this one day. What can we learn from Facebook, and how can it be applied to the communities we’ll construct tomorrow? And can we ever have a community as strong and vibrant as Facebook 2005 again? I certainly hope so.