The recent rage about Orkut has breed a new round of commentary on the true nature of social networking as a whole. Generally, the arguments are centering around the Good they serve the end user and whether or not they can actually make money.

I don’t have an answer to either of those questions, but certainly I hope there is a light at the end of both those tunnels. Perhaps the better question to ask is what makes this round of “social” networking interesting at all. Currently, the data collected is misleading if nothing else. Overtly flat profiles read more like online xeroxes of resumes once past. The ties one can discover are not only misleading but almost measurably meaningless, i.e. the tie to the stranger on the subway has far more contact and context.

As one reader noted in the conversation following Ross Mayfield’s ever-syndicated “frictionless whuffie fun” post:

I also think another aspect of what makes Orkut (and Friendster et al) not work is that there’s no “there” there. The lack of personal journals/blogs makes the individual content sort of hollow. All you are given to learn about someone is pictures and a few short blurbs, which is nothing compared to stalking through their last few months of journal posts.

Source: User Comment, Many 2 Many

The question still stands — why is something as complex and wonderful as the human psyche and its boundless connections to both its environment and inhabitants categorized, summarize, trivialized down to a 30 field questionaire and 6 random hyperlinks?

I received an IM from someone yesterday about a new service, Orkut, released in affiliation with Google.

At first blush, I wasn’t really able to tell much, other than that a programmer had designed the site and the community was definitely closed — an invitation from an insider is required

Fortunately, I tuned in to the Social Software Weblog this morning to see if they had covered it yet and got an even deeper insight into the matter. As they report:

Orkut has implemented a “Karma” system, where you can rate your connections in three different categories Cool, Sexy and Trustworthy.

Make no mistake about it, this is pretty unique at the moment. Most of the other sites have “testimonial” sections where you can write nice things about the person in a free form text field. Orkut however appears to be the first to provide a rating scale that can then be compiled and the statistics used for *other* purposes. The key to the karma system will be…what “other” purposes it will be used for and will Google ask for permission to use it or assume ownership of the data. Just a few of the questions that we’ll have to wait and find out about.

Source: Soical Software Weblog

The most interesting aspect of this system is definitely the ranking/rating system that is implemented. One thing that strikes me is the lack of any negative values. Clearly the rankings shown seem to indicate that one can go only from good to great. On one level, I can understand that the invitation-only nature of the system would lend itself to be a “good aggregator”, however that seems somewhat too forgiving. , There are too many naturally occuring scenarios that could require that the rating be adjusted to reflect a negative value. Perhaps there is a way to prune nodes from the tree, essentially keeping it “good” — though that seems counter-intuitive to a true social network representation.

This leads me to yet another notion mentioned — personalization. It seems that Google has a new resource for aggregating data on individuals. It’s not clear how well this information could be tied together (legally and technically speaking), but the ramifications are vertainly interesting.

In theory, there are many forms of personalization that can be designed. I can roughly identify them as such:

• Direct Personalization

  This form of personalization comes from asking user’s direct and pointed questions relating to their preferences. We see this often as the configurable options for most widgets in software today.

• Indirect Personalization

  This form of personalization occurs behind the scenes. This personalization occurs by observing the user’s actions and altering the environment as a result of it. The best example I can think of is Amazon’s shopping experience.

• Historical Personalization

  This form of personalization relies on a pre-existing repository of data. Some time ago, when designing the TrueResponse Library application, I designed a Historical Personalization engine. To summarize, the data in the application was all categorized. Combining this data with previous content data and statistics on view rates from the current and previous customers, we were able to determine which content a customer was yet to receive as well as to loosely predict which content would be most successful in wooing the customer.

• Peer Personalization *

  Struck by the possibilities of Google’s new system, I am wondering if this is not the next form of personalization. Imagine the combination of social networks, peer attitudes, and user profiles to implement the next generation of personalization engines. Clearly, using the values suggested by your network of friends, potentially combined with the values of your your evaluators, can lead to some new and exciting opportunities.

Very interesting indeed. I’ll continue with this in a future post.

I was walking by someone’s desk today and say these colored orbs flying around. Of course, I stopped to investigate and came to see that they were looking at Music Plasma’s site. I had never seen this site before, but it’s quite interesting in the methods it employs to display the links and relationships between different arists, their genre, and music as a whole.

Definitely worth checking out.

I was reading through Zeldman’s personal site today and noticed a link titled “Zeldman vs. Nielsen“. Curious what the the competition was based on, I clicked the link to be taken over to GoogleFight.

Surely this is somewhat off-topic, but I find it quite interesting how much our online lives have come to center on Google. For anyone who hasn’t guessed and doesn’t want to look, GoogleFight essentially allows you to pit two persons, concepts, etc. against each other and see who the “winner” is. Of course, the winner, in this case, is the individual with the most Google results.

The thing to ponder about is this, I guess. If Google truly is the definitive index of the web (definitive in the size of its database and our own trophying of its superiority), and the simple number of references to one term as opposed to another can be considered valid (leaving out terms and concepts that are prone to duality), could this be an indicator of sentiment or public opinion? Sure.. I wouldn’t base my thesis on it, but it’s interesting none the less.

My old buddy mico pointed out that he had to go away for a little while to feed his online pet. Apparently, the old plastic, battery-powered Tamagachi was not enough for the world, so someone’s gone and made him “uber-virtual” in the form of Neopets.

According to mico, it seems that this is evolving into its own little society where people barter, trade, and otherwise whore their belongs (and pets) in the public marketplace.

This reminds me of those stories I heard of people trading Ultima and other gaming characters on Ebay for hard currency.

I think I will get my own best and pimp him out, be right back!

Growing up is always a trying and difficult time, I think, regardless of your particulars of your situation. Social circles, peer pressure, and parental expectations are just some of the sources of stress the youth of today are fighting. Surely, it’s not to say that we didn’t all suffer through these issues on our own, but certainly there’s been a change, perhaps evolution, of the forms in which it manifests. Just two weeks ago, I pointed out an article that talked about the potential use of the Internet and its variants for bullying others at school.

The New York Times Magazine has a quite lengthy piece on the blogging trend and how it is infiltrating the teenage social experience. The girth of it takes us through the lives and experiences of many different teens and how they are drawn to the online world for release. As noted in the article:

Writing in his online journal was cathartic for him, he said, but it was hardly stress-free. A week earlier, he left a post about an unrequited crush, and an anonymous someone appended negative comments, remarks J. wouldn’t detail (he deleted them), but which he described with distress as ‘’disgusting language, vulgarities.'’ J. panicked, worried that the girl he liked might learn about the vulgar comments and, by extension, his attraction to her. It was a somewhat mysterious concern. Couldn’t the girl have read his original post, I asked? And anyway, didn’t he secretly want her to read his journal? ‘’Of course,'’ he moaned, leaning against the banister. ‘’For all I know she does. For all I know, she doesn’t.'’

J.’s sense of private and public was filled with these kinds of contradictions: he wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that were explicitly public — announcing a band practice, for instance — he also had his own stringent notions of etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.

…

Silences like this can create paranoia. It may be that friends just didn’t read the post. Or it may mean they thought the post was stupid. There’s a temptation to take silence — in real life or online — as a snub. ‘’If I get a really mean comment and I go back and I look at it again, and again, it starts to bother me,'’ M. told me. ‘’But then I think, If I delete it, everyone will know this bothers me. But if I respond, it’ll mean I need to fight back. So it turns into a conflict, but it’s fun. It’s like a soap opera, kind of.'’

Source: NY Times Magazine

The most interesting aspect of this article is the level of involvement teens have with the Internet today. I guess it’s only been in the last two weeks that I realized, and appreciated, how large and interesting this group is.

I have a very large extended family, spanning 49 first cousins alone (of which I am the second youngest, only to my own younger brother). Within the confines of my own first cousins, there are probably more than 100 children (again my younger brother and I the only non-contributing nodes). In our culture, this makes me an “uncle” to all of them, despite the fact that some of them are older than me!

I was first brought into this circle about a year ago when one of my nieces obtained my AIM screen name from someone. I got a short little instant message and was surprised to find out that it was her. It seems there was some apprehension on that end as they were scared I would be “mean” or not “cool”. Apparently, I was funny enough. A day later her younger brother shot me an IM. Within a week, I had messages from another 4 of them.. apparently there was this whole network of my nieces and nephews that I didn’t know about. Strangely enough, I think I’m also one of the few from my level in the family to ever participate.

Damn, I’m getting old.

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