There has been a growing pile of coverage on the current crop of social networking systems and software. Recently, BusinessWeek did a write up on the growing privacy concerns with these systems. As noted:

Indeed, social-networking sites find themselves in a Goldilocks-style dilemma: If they share too much information, the services become a spammers’ paradise. Share too little, and they defeat the power of social networking, where you can discover and communicate with people you may not know but with whom you share something in common. The amount of information shared has to be just right.

Source: BusinessWeek

Further, the discussion turns to the use of Peer-To-Peer networks as a potentially more secure system of networking. I am going to address some of those concerns in a future entry, but thought I would start to collate some data here now. One of the avenues that are being explored currently in the privacy realm is the value of n degree relationships and their “stickiness”. In addition, many people are questioning the widespread availability of their identities via their n degree networks and the implications for manging their own identies and reputations.

I thought it might be good to start to build up an index of the scope or reach of the various networks people are “buying” in to. This is just a few quick ones off the top of my head but it would be nice to get any feedback on how to make it bigger / better.

I’ll start to update this over the weekend and get a more formalized list in place soon. Drop me a line or comment if any other data should be represented.

An interesting study has been released that discusses the potential use of social networks as a SPAM fighting agent. The proposed solution can be readily assembled with existing technologies and leverages some basic features of most modern mail servers, including whitelists and blacklists.

As noted in the original article:

The e-mail clusters can be mapped out by inspecting the ‘from’, ‘to’ and ‘cc’ fields in a user’s inbox. An automated system can quickly build up a blacklist of spammers, as well as a ‘whitelist’ of approved sources.

Boykin and Roychowdhury found that by quantifying the clustering of incoming e-mails, they could eliminate about 54% of spam. E-mails above a certain ‘clustering threshold’ are always friendly, and those below a lower threshold are always spam. Messages that fall between these two clustering thresholds are ‘don’t knows’ - the system can’t be sure how to classify them. Typically, say the researchers, this applies to about 50% of the mail received.

The remaining half of the e-mail then has to be filtered in a more sophisticated way. But by then the scale of the problem has been cut in half.

Source: Nature via Many 2 Many

This study provides some statistical backup, however, I’m more curious why it was never reported on earlier. For some time, systems like AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo! have offered differing levels of security for your Inbox from Spam Filtering to White Lists. Seems that any of these providers could have not only provided similar statistics but also would have had a very broad sample to work with.

Additionally, while 50% isn’t bad, that still leaves a lot to desire. Naturally, some form of Bayesian or other natural filtering would be applied to the remaining 50% to handle that other annoying statistic.

The actual study can be found here.

The evolution of Social Networking Software is a constant and intriguing topic for many studying and interacting with this industry. I’m starting to consider adding a SNS 2.0 category to the Twister to provide some more organization. Danah Boyd posts her speaker notes from the ETech Conference. She’s got some great content over there and specifically tries to introduce a bit of appreciation for the underlying trends and laws that govern this increasingly crowded space.

Danah provides a very clear description of the current situation with SNS 1.0:

We’re at a cross-roads with social networking software.

We can pretend that the current path we’re on - Friendster, orkut, LinkedIn, Tribe, etc. - is all the hype. We can pretend like it’s really possible to force these users to create everyday social networks that will make all the theory fall into place. We can sell this fantasy to VCs, bankroll money and hope that users will play along long enough to make it all worth it.

OR

We can wake up and make sense of what we’ve done. Together, developers have created a new social architecture; users have created a new set of social norms that sit on top of that architecture. Certainly, it’s sociologically fascinating - that’s why i’m here! But it’s also teaching us a lot about how people can and will use technology to socialize, what they’re weaknesses are and why. The discomforts that users feel are calling for new technology, new ways to handle social behavior. The more we try to force them into behaving the way we want, the less we’ll be able to solve the problem.

But that’s the problem. Social behavior doesn’t have a technological solution. We’re all involved with social software because we see needs that technology can solve. Yet, by building the technology, we don’t simply address or fail to address those needs; we create new realities. At this point, we need to think in a new way. We need to think about what new realities we formed, what new problems evolved, what new needs happened. Then we need to iterate.

Source: Apophenia via Many-to-Many

Further on, she outlines a few of the open issues that seem to have piled up at the door of SNS 2.0:

1. How do we create a nuanced way for people to negotiate different social contexts without creating unbearable collisions?
2. How do we let people show face? In other words, how do we let them be socially appropriate?
3. Some people want to be seen; some people want to be hidden. By making everyone far more accessible, those who have something desired become more visible targets. While trying to elevate those in need, give them newfound access to their networks, we can’t overwhelm the targets and expect them to play along. How do we meet the needs of different people?
4. Finally, how do we create architecture that will allow for regulation through social norms? This is a huge challenge! Sure, we can all think back to MUDs and MOOs where social norms created the boundary cases of acceptable behavior. But we also all know the story of LamdaMOO and why it failed. The code that we build does not currently allow for rich regulation based on social norms. Trolls ruin it for all of us. This is part social problem and part technological problem. If we open our eyes to the social, perhaps we can figure out how to iterate on the technological?

Source: Apophenia

I think this line of reasoning is dead on and really requires a great deal of consideration as SNS 2.0 is being planned.

For the last few weeks I have been painting a picture of the social interactions we generate online and the somewhat hollow representations we are forced to use while representing ourselves and our personal connections. Stewart Butterfield has a very interesting post on some issues he’s spotted with the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) format.

For anyone that is not aware, the FOAF format is designed as a semi-universal modeling syntax for relationships. It accomplishes this with a number of xml constructs that can be indexed and consumed by a variety of services to visualize and mobilize your personal network. For sure, there are some issues with this as anyone that has a friend can easily identify.

Stewart’s point goes at the forces that led some to develop the specification at all and the potential pitfalls of computer geeks with expansive imaginations. I would tend to agree with him here. The entire privacy issue rears its ugly head again as FOAF potentially serves as a platform for exploitation. My favorite point in the discussion (taken from the comments is this):

Mostly (and I will finish this other post soon) I think that the FOAF people completely miss the point. Friendster didn’t get big because models of social networks outside of any application have intrinsic value. It got big because it was the first taste a few million people had of representing their identity online.

Source: Sylloge

This leaves an interesting set of ideas open for discussion. In my view, SNS has gotten a little bit ahead of itself (as I’ve noted before). I will re-iterate a bit of what Dave Pollard points out, and summarize that there are four key systems required for managing our social lives more effectively, from bottom to top:

1. Personal Content Management
2. Personal Identity Management
3. Personal Network Management
4. Social Network Management

I’ll try to expand on these over the next few days.

Stowe Boyd has some coverage from Palo Alto of a recent panel discussion titled “Social Software: What’s Next?”. The panel included a bunch of the top people from Tribe.net, LinkedIn, Ryze and more.

There are several interesting highlights in this conversation, but I will summarize them as such:

• The space is very new and hence, subject to dramatic change
• Seems no one is sure how long the “wave” will last
• Most everyone is differentiating based on value-proposition more so than technology
• Multiple network, multiple identity systems seem to be on the horizon
• Standards may save the day, once the dominant forces duke it out

One particularly nice quote, which hits close to home was made by Mark Pincus, CEO of Tribe.net when asked about the number of networks anticipated in the future:

No. It depends. We have to see if the interest keeps up, but there is the potential that the value continues. I can see a world where we want to control our identity. We may want to manage what people find out about us. If the want to buy my car, cool. But I may want to only allow certain sorts of people to learn other information about me. Potentially, standards may emerge to allow you to control information in a big way.

Source: Get Real

All I can say is the future is now.

Carrying the flame from Dave Pollard’s post, and definitely in line with the thinking I am having on the matter, Richard Tallent has a wonderful list of the many things he would like to see in his next SNS. My favorites include:

• Shared contact manager is at the core.
• Content I share to subscribing contacts is automatically uploaded to them. No wait, no need to search.
• Shared derivatives. If a family member removes red-eye from my picture, I get back the new version automatically, but the old is never destroyed. Same with contacts.
• Photos are tagged with metadata pointing out people, etc. People linked to contact entries, so “browse by photo” is possible, allowing me to search for specific people or photos taken by other people at the same event.
• Multiple simultanous profiles possible, so I can have a “work” profile and a “personal” profile with widely-varying contact lists and content.
• Share with myself: unshared personal information can be synched between multiple computers with the same profile/license combination.

Source: Richard Tallent via Many 2 Many

I wish I could share more about what we have brewing here, but I can guarantee that some of this is coming very soon.

Over the past few days, I’ve both commented and read a great deal about some of the existing problems with computerized representations of ourselves. One particularly interesting piece I came across was written by Dave Pollard on his How to Save the World blog. In his post titled “What’s Wrong with First-Generation Social Software”, David does a very detailed analysis of what the ultimate Social Software system might look like, mostly identifying the major components. As David describes, regarding the current crop of tools:

The concept is wonderful, and the technology is fun, but the tools developed so far suffer from three fatal flaws:

• They’re built with a pre-designed, set content architecture, and centrally-stored content, instead of harvesting content that individual users already have stored, in different ways of their own choosing, on their own machines.
• They’re being populated just-in-case, with all kinds of content that people with lots of time on their hands see fit to contribute, and no content from the very busy or technologically illiterate, rather than just-in-time, with content being accumulated only if and when there’s a demand and need for it.
• They’re badly over-engineered, ranging in complexity from challenging to intimidating, so they take a lot of time, energy and intelligence to understand and use properly, and hence drive most potential users away.

Source: How to Save the World

The first two points seem to deal with the maintenance mechanics of the current systems. Indeed, the scenarios and descriptions required by most Social Netware is highly contrived and self-serving, to say the least. As a developer, I understand the trade-offs that these organizations have made in attempting to capture the essence of an individual. As a consumer, I think it’s terrible and at best a poor facsimile. I surely agree with David that the collection and representation of oneself needs to be “natural”.

The third point is particularly interesting and tails on the end of my last comment. It seems to drive at the goal of such systems and the difficulty of balancing a far-off, blurry goal with an already blurry concept of self. This refers to what AJ Kim recently commented on as Emergent Purpose:

What I see all around me now are networked social tools that have ‘emergent purpose.’ This is an old theme in new clothing — the ‘build it and they will come’ belief that connecting people is STEP 1, and the purpose and business model for a cool online social tool will emerge over time. I saw a lot of companies fail as they followed this ethic - particularly those that created and marketed FREE tools & services built around chat, message boards and virtual worlds. The companies who made real money connecting people online — Amazon, eBay, SOE (makers of Everquest) — built their community infrastructure around a shared, meaningful activity other than pure socializing.

Source: Social Architect

The crux of this is that even the inventors of today’s batch of SNS have not completely come to understand what the whole fuss is about. Why visualize networks that are seemingly shallow? Without a doubt, the small world theory has been proven and an individual’s fascination with their “connectedness” to the world is surely a wonderful trait to harness, but why? Are we to expect competitions in the future for shortest network path? Am I going to start to refer to this virtual network over the real-life one I have the pleasure of INTERACTING with?

But back to emerging. The constraints we are feeling placed on ourselves are safety nets designed by the various services to future-proof their value. In short, lacking any real goal for the newly carved network, playing it safe with relatively benign proxies of our lives will serve for the time. Are we flocking to the bug light?

(more…)

Peter comments on his unofficial Eurekster Blog about “Eurekster’s Porn Blocker”. As he notes:

If you haven’t read all of my long-winded posts, you wouldn’t know that Eurekster doesn’t propogate porn-related searches to your friend in order to help eliminate awkward situations: basically to keep it a secret that you look at pornography on the Internet.

[…]

Lesson(s) Learned: If you are searching for porn and you aren’t a strong speller or typist or if you type anything other than words that your grandmother would type to search for porn, don’t use eurekster if you want to hide it from your eurekster network.

Source: eureksterblog

Peter raises an important point about the nature of our new public identities — they are tremendously exposed in ways that we might not think relevant. In a manner similiar to my first thoughts on Orkut, Eurekster essentially openly uses your social network to attach and relate information its algorithms think relevant. Interestingly enough, it seems to view the consumption of potentially pornographic material to be taboo and blocks it from your network’s viewing.

Of course, it’s not clear why they stopped with porn. There are too many topics that seem to be taboo. It seems that it would be best to 1) not allow any blocking at all considering the “truth” in that approach or 2) allow you to selectively block queries (there’s a box marked private search next to the search box — what’s that for?). I’m going to have to investigate more and see how it develops.

Although this is surely a spoof on the Friendster site, it has very interesting meaning. The folks at airbag.ca bring us Introvertster. According to the mini-mission statement on the front page:

Introvertster is an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing you online.

You can use Introvertster to:

• Avoid invites to chat, filter out annoying invitations for Meetup, birthday parties, or after-hours get togethers.
• Packet flood a friends Internet connection making it impossible for them to send you an instant message.
• Help your friends get a clue that you really don’t like people or care for idle chit-chat.

Create your own barrier to protect yourself against interaction with people. It’s easy and fun!

Source: Introvertster via Teledyn

I find this particularly interesting for 2 simple reasons:

• Backlash growing in the Social Networking space as more and more services spawn from the minds and desks of budding entrepreneurs. There are many forces at work here, but the two main camps oppose the analog nature (1,2,3) of the relationships that these sites seem to build and others downright hate being force-fed the service. Some are even profiting (1,2) from the hype.
• Computing, and some of the very real limitations we have are rearing their ugly heads on a much larger scale. I’ve already on the rather strange relationship we have with our very own Anti-Buddies and talked about the difficulties I saw in Orkut. Both of these instances show that modeling concepts like relationships and personality are not just difficult, at best, but also potentially damaging. Though that may seem grim, surely it’s only a matter of time before systems (think WebFountain) are created that can harness more meaningful, latent information as opposed to that which is already “obvious”.

Over this past week I’ve discussed a number of different issues relating to the nature of the web and our role in both building and preserving its architecture. Without exception, the web is changing our lives in a way that we are still mostly incapable of describing, despite our efforts to categorize and organize information.

One of the key concepts that has been unearthed in the last few days is the notion of permanence and the long term persistence of Internet content and our connected society. As I have been watching this little log grow over the past 3 weeks, I’ve checked the progress in the web logs from day to day to see how people are finding me and where they are coming from. The things you find out are pretty amazing.

What I have come to find out is that there are several new forms of persistence that have come into existence, of course we tend to overlook them. So here’s what I’ve seen so far:

Google Persistence

Although this site is very new, that hasn’t prevented Google from indexing it in one way or another, be it by domain, by name, or in reference to some term a user has searched for (apparently kazaa’s law is on a lot of people’s minds). Google has become one of the new historians for the online society. It is often thought that information can escape if it is erased from your site quickly enough. Ironically, today’s world of syndication — a stream flowing into a river — brings content and information to the world at lightning speed. And once this happens, odds are Google’s grabbed it, indexed it, and archived it away.

Trackback Persistence

Movable Type users are very familiar with this concept of persistence. Although Trackback, the idea that one author automagically rings another author’s entry’s doorbell, is intended to pass along a “FYI” message to the original author, the reality is that an excerpt of someone elses’s stream of consciousness is xeroxed and filed away tightly at someone elses repository for you. If you’re lucky, you’ve Trackbacked to someone left on the power scale and you also get the secondary, yet powerful Googsistence working for you.

Comment Persistence

For many, it’s easier to comment on other’s thoughts than to initiate your own topics. I was in this position for the past year, blogging vicariously through friends, buddies, and even the occassional Anti-Buddy. The interesting thing is that even though the commentary is lower down in the overall hierarchy, it’s extremely valuable and probably equally important to the entire blogosphere. To understand how Comment Persistence kicks in, well it’s the same as Trackback Persistence really. Once your comments are down on paper, they’e out there for good — except if you write something completely inappropriate and the owner removes them (but we know better than to assume that it’s not been grabbed, indexed, or archived by Google yet.

The record of our thoughts, actions, and reactions to our interaction are now quickly becoming a huge, dynamic part of our collective history. Today is my birthday and I’m heading off to celebrate for the next few days, safe with the knowledge that my image is being etched on mirrorred platters around the world.