Yesterday, I touched upon some of the burdens of SNS developers and participants that result from the current crop of SNS applications. The thrust of yesterday’s entry was that there were a great deal of assumptions being acted on and our tight focus on the immediate need was throttling the full-on diversification of the industry as a whole.

Today, both Clay Shirky and Stowe Boyd have added some fuel to this line of thinking, specifically addressing the unstated expectations of both SNS proprietors and users alike. On the one hand, the developers must deal with the forces and stressors of “success” where users, on the other hand, are battling intention and abuse.

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Social Networking tools are definitely confusing lots of people trying to get their heads around things. The issue we’re seeing is that we’re watching the evoution of something while zoomed in all the way (focused) when in reality we need to step way, way back (blurry) to get a better picture of things.

We don’t need convincing on the value of social networks, since we know and experience that daily. We do, however, need a bit more promised on the other end of the spectrum — the “What’s In It For Me” end. Once we see the forest and not the trees, we’re making progress. Here’s two different angles on that same problem.

News.com has an interesting piece on a body of work conducted by David Hsu. Mr. Hsu’s study examined the pre-money valuations of a selection of startups and compared the offered valuations to the accepted offers.

Here’s part of what they said:

In the minds of entrepreneurs working to expand their fledgling technology companies, the intangibles brought to the table by their investors–experience and contacts–often are worth a lot more than money itself, David Hsu, a Wharton management professor, writes in a paper scheduled for publication in the August issue of the Journal of Finance. The paper is titled, “What Do Entrepreneurs Pay for Venture Capital Affiliation?”

If a company borrows from a bank and the terms are similar, it does not matter what bank it gets the money from. In seeking venture capital investment, however, a company is hungry not just for cash but also for the venture firm’s “reputation and access to a network of relationships–with customers, suppliers, investments bankers and other important constituents in the universe that the entrepreneur cares about,” Hsu says.

Source: News.com, “How VCs earn their keep”

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With the rise of SNS, we’ve also seen the parallel development of its evil twin, SNAM. Clay Shirky points to an article over at Trendsetter.com:

Social networks have spawned a new form of spam that uses the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) message feature frequently found in this new genre of networks. Google’s Orkut, a network of some 200,000 members, offers the ability to send messages to FOAFs. FOAF messages often contain conference promotions or job postings that, while low in volume, will one day require action on the part of network managers.

Source: Trendsetter.com, “Spam”

At the same time, Stowe Boyd mentions his latest Darwin article, “The Ethics and Etiquette of Social Networks” where he discusses some of the ins and outs of maneuvering within the system, and the consequences of those movements:

Some have started to call the spate of e-mails that get created by public social networking applications “social spam.” I reserve that term for those who subvert social networking systems to attempt bald-faced selling of laser cartridges, Viagra or click-throughs to XXX porn sites. But I am certain that my conservative use of the term will not parallel general use in the media, which will lump together all sorts of SNA-generated messages into that all-embracing and negative category.

There is a real conflict between the Darwinian need to attract participants into a network of users — which increases a network’s value for all users — and the desire of individuals to minimize the number of requests coming their way — which represent an implicit cost of being a network member. The public SNA companies have strong incentives to drive up their numbers, while each individual user in principal would like to avoid that at all personal cost. (Note: this is based on today’s economic model, where the individual is not directly or indirectly compensated for brokering introductions. We can imagine other models, but I haven’t seen them in use. Yet.)

Source: Stowe Boyd, “The Ethics and Etiquette of Social Networks”

It looks like the other foot is dropping into this race. We’ve already heard hints that Microsoft is planning to enter the fray (potentially via the widely deployed MSN Messenger / Passport system. Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that they are looking at the use of social networks for their own needs.

“A lot of the Web is about sharing,” Cadogan said, speaking to an audience at Stanford Business School’s first annual technology conference.

He pointed to a fairly new feature from Yahoo that lets people in remote locations search simultaneously by using IM environments in Yahoo instant messenger. “This is just the beginning. A lot more will come from that,” said Cadogan, a former executive at Overture Services who joined Yahoo before it bought the commercial search pioneer.

Source: News.com, “Yahoo hints at social networking service”

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Judith points to a new social networking service utilizing mobile phone technology for locating friends. The new service, Dodgeball.Social is the result of a project started at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Though I haven’t signed up as of yet, I’ve looked around to see how it works. It is surprisingly simple, actually. Dodgeball.Social relies on a check-in/check-out method to determine the location of friends. Essentially, registered members send along a quick text e-mail to the service that indicates where they are located. This serves as an alert which notifies your circle of immediate friends. The neatest part, however, is that it will also alert you of Friends of Friends that are within 10 blocks of your current location (with photos if your phone supports it).

I’m particularly interested in this technology as it is in the spirit of the SparkCard — encourage people to go outside and interact with each other. In addition, this type of service has interesting uses in some other, yet to be announced, features of the SparkCard itself. Details will follow.

If anyone is interested in trying this out, please let me know (greg at socialtwister dot com) or leave a comment.

As I have noted before, there are some inherent issues with the current crop of Social X-Rays and Social Xeroes employed by the current crop of SNS, or Artifical Socail Networks (ANS) as David Weinberger has recently coined.

Both of these tools provides different forms of abstraction for individuals and their relationships. By definition, X-Rays provide a picture of the internal structure and organization of an entity, just as SNS attempts to visualize the connectiveness of our networks. Xeroxes, on the other hand, provide archived glimpses of information that can be accessed and reviewed, much as the current SNS profile does.

Unfortunately, almost of all these systems are challenged by the extremely dynamic nature of individuals and their relationships. Static depictions and rigid containers always seem out of date and disconnected.

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Google has launched some new services into its search routines. The Google Personalized service. To use the service, user’s must first create a simple profile which involves the selection of categories of interest. Once completed, users perform a search and filter their results.

The system makes use of a slider along the top that throttles the personalization effect — by default the filtering is minimized. Increasing the slider seems to show/hide different results. As it turns out, by looking at the underlying code, the system makes use of some Javascript to load and unload the items. More results are returned than shown on the page and selectively shown. Don’t let the smooth slider fool you, though. There’s only 9 actual levels from what I can tell.

Of course, this categorization is fairly limited in nature. One can only wonder when all that other data they’ve started amassing on the user will be put to “good” use.

I was reading over at Eric Jones’ Blog about his thoughts on the potential perils facing SNS in the probably not too distant future. Eric raises a very relevant point concerning the development of social capital. As he notes:

The new formed relationship has got to seem as if it can give a relatively similar amount of social capital as one formed without meditation, incentive or pressure. I mean lets face it once a relationship is established arbitrarily there is a certain assurance and trust that follows as opposed to one formed with an ulterior motive.

Source: Eric Jones’ Blog, “Social Capital II”

This is really another axis of evaluation that is common to all relationships but not yet analyzed for the exponentially formed SNS kind. In our regular lives, we know when relationships are valuable versus trivial. When we use text and computers to display them, unfortunately, we run into the “All Look Same” scenario where differentiation of relationships requires a domain of knowledge far outside of the organization system (SNS) to determine value.

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Google, Eurekster, and pretty much everyone in the SNS space needs to start looking over their shoulder from this point forward. Although it was anticipated that the larger players would eventually enter the space, this is finally confirmation. As News.com reports:

peaking at the company’s annual online advertising conference, Yusuf Medhi, MSN’s corporate vice president of information and merchant services, spoke about the company’s “big investment” in search. He highlighted MSN’s recent release of a search toolbar for the browser and its new News Search, which aims to deliver more relevant results using personalization.

In addition, he flagged planned Web log and social-networking products, and said the Microsoft division plans to develop natural language-processing algorithms. This technology would permit visitors to ask questions such as “What’s the highest mountain?” instead of using simple keywords.

Source: News.com, “Microsoft’s aggressive search plans revealed”

Yesterday, Clay posted several remarks on his difficulties with the RELATIONSHIP grammar. Also yesterday, danah boyd added some of her own thoughts to the discussion. danah is very much in agreement with Clay. Her key points cover the notions of context, culture, and power. I must admit that I definitely agree more with Clay and danah than those that wish to introduce rigidity into the system.

I think of these matters, as they relate to SNS, as a conflict between User Needs and Network Needs (Computational Needs in the larger sense). For the most part, SNS is focused on that first S, Social. As a result, SNS 1.0 is primarily concerned with the network, the bundle of nerves and strings that connect those nodes together. On the other hand, I am more interested in the Users, those things that provide meaning and substance to the lines between them.

Everyone who has actually worked with the SNS applications or examined any proposed standard is quick to realize that there are inherent difference and problems with the representations concocted for us. This is not necessarily a value judgment or statement of quality, but rather it is an encounter with the difficulties of mapping organic systems to computational ones. The most stark reason for this abstraction is network grooming. As the networks try to foster their notion of relationship, they need reliable, rigid data to make that happen. Identity is generally tacked on as “modules” outside the main “core” system.

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