Fred StutzmanThoughts about information, social networks, and privacy

Last weekend, I spent a few days at O’Reilly HQ for the Social Graph Foo Camp. This was a very interesting experience; I was challenged as both a researcher and practitioner. What I saw made me very hopeful – people agreeing on methods and protocols, solving real problems. Realistically speaking, a camp like SGFoo (or IIW) pushes this work ahead 6 months in the span of just a few days. It’s hard to understate the power of connections, conversations, late nights and lots of coffee and Red Bull.

As it happens, before I went to SGFoo I’d been reading a bunch of stuff on qualitative research methods. Methods books, cases, studies….my brain was very keyed-in to a type of observation that is almost annoyingly analytical. It was hard to shake this perspective as I participated in discussions this weekend. It’s certainly informed some of the thought I’ll share today.

Watching the discussions last weekend was a little like watching the future of social software unfold in realtime. Granted, market leaders will continue to be the vanguard of the movement, but the pathways and patterns these companies will use were the crux of the discussion at SGF. There were a number of advocates for the human perspective and user studies, but the real emphasis was on fast development, prototyping, and seeing what works in the wild. This particular approach has been the hallmark of Web 2.0 development strategies, and I doubt we’re going back any time soon.

Yesterday, danah boyd wrote an interesting piece entitled “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.” In it, boyd challenges the assumptions of privacy and audience that go into the design of social software; that the desire live publicly is a notion of privilege, available to a select few. It’s hard to disagree. The ideologies that inform Beacon or the initial News Feed are hardly mass-market, and there are countless other exemplars out there.

As a relative outsider to the Valley scene, I found myself being challenged by the assumptions of these new technologies. For a simple example, consider a portable friends list. The idea of a portable friends list is when you sign on to a new service, you can upload or authorize your friends list, and find all of your friends who use that service. Theoretically, this vast, barren new space becomes a rich, social space with the click of a button.

Stepping back for a second, let’s consider the assumptions of this technology. As we’ve seen with Facebook, our networks grow to be very large, a collection of “friends” of varying tie strengths and varying contexts (work, school, family, etc). Furthermore, the process of joining a new social community is one of boundary negotiation and sense-making. That is, you’ve got to learn to crawl before you walk; norms and acceptable behaviors are negotiated over time. When someone signs on to Twitter, friends everyone, and then dumps all their RSS feeds into Twitter, you cringe. They haven’t figured out the norms. Now imagine that, every time you sign on to a new service, you’re forced to learn the norms in realtime, in front of an audience of hundreds of your friends.

The problem is that these assumptions actually aren’t problems in Silicon Valley. If your day job is to design social software, it’s likely you’ve internalized the rules of community, you’re a native. Even if you didn’t know Twitter, you’d figure that dumping your RSS streams into Twitter would be bad form, unless you saw everyone else doing it. The social software power user can easily move between sites; she is also incentivized to discover and master new communities.

With regards to friend networks in the Valley, there’s incredible density in work-friend networks, and likely even family networks. In the Valley, you want to be friends with coworkers, competitors, famous-types; your network is a proxy of your stature. Finding everyone you know on a site is a means to a primarily economic, secondarily social end. Of course, this is hardly a Valley-only phenomenon, but the difference is these assumptions are being written into software for all of us.

This post shouldn’t be taken as an attack on technology or the work anyone is doing; it is good work and it will go forward. Rather, this post should challenge the implementer to look critically upon the assumptions that go into the technology being implemented. Rather than making your average user add a friend list on day one (to increase your userbase), make the addition of users a game in which the user selects the context appropriate friends and learns the norms of the systems. Think about Facebook before and after they introduced privacy to NewsFeeds; such a simple change in assumptions can vastly affect perceptions and experience.

The work showcased at SGF represents the future of mediated social interaction, even if only in the rules, pragmas and assumptions. One thing is clear: This stuff ain’t going away, and it ain’t just for Valley-types anymore. I would argue that research, testing and social thought complement Web 2.0 development models, and perhaps they offer us a way forward as this stuff goes mainstream. These are exciting times.