For some time know, I have been looking at the shifts in social bonds as a result of social networks.  The outgrowth of Facebook, MySpace and a number of similar services has us re-evaluating things we traditionally understood without ambiguity – like friends, groups, interests, and status.

My good friend Brian Solis has an interesting post today that discusses some of the changes that are happening.  As Brian writes in “Micro Disruption Theory and The Social Effect“:

“Relationships are so much more than the mere act of following or friending someone on Twitter or any social network for that matter. It’s the balladry of transcending online connections into real world relationships. It’s the cadence of interaction and the poetry of conversations that empower the human network and the escalation of the Social Economy.

On Social Networks we’re bound by context and not necessarily by the relationships that link us in the real world.

Source: Brian Solis, “Micro Disruption Theory and The Social Effect“

I think it’s an interesting notion that we’re bound by context.  I think that this is true at the most basic level – there is a general sentiment about the venue through which we network.  Social networks are marketplaces of intention.  Daters flock to online dating sites in search of relationships, LinkedIn caters to the business professional, Facebook caters to, well that’s not that simple anymore to provide a single context – but friendship seems a suitable bucket.

I think, however, that we’re just scratching the surface.  Our networks are being bastardized in lots of ways.  We glom together everyone into one pool and then we’re overwhelmed with having to deal with it all at the same time.  In our real lives, we are capable of maintaining many granular networks of individuals.  We’ve moved past the differentiation of social networks (see Social Networking Differentiation 2.0, June 2006) but there’s still quite a bit left unsettled.

It seems we’re ready for the next phase of differentiation – where micro actions are aggregated back together to resemble real things.
I’ll use an analogy to better describe just what I think this looks like.  If we imagine our network of relationships as a home, the foundation is made up of those real, physical relationships that we have with others.  Right now, we’re on the ground floor – where we welcome new people at our virtual front doors.  With time, attention, and enthusiasm, those same guests on the ground floor are invited upstairs: they’re the friends that come to visit from out of town, that make your home their own home.

The second level of relationships I call Affinity Networks.  They are truly contextualized networks of friends and family and other individuals that you care about.  Brian nails it when he points out that “We listen to relevant keywords to learn from others who share our interests and passions.”  Truth is, however, that those are just directional pointers to the individuals that are seemingly important or relevant.  Beyond that initial interest, it takes a great deal of interaction and discovery to actually forge real relationships that last through time.

Affinity networks differ in that they don’t deal with the people connected but instead with the subject at the core.  That “subject” may be a person, place, or thing, but everyone gathered shares a bond to this central concept.  Affinity networks allow us to re-constitute all the micro actions and gestures and give us focus again on those trends, themes, and individuals that mean the most to us.

I’ve often noted that as much as technology provides us new ways to reach out to more and more people, further and further away, it’s our nature to seek out the solutions that mimic or engender closeness, touch.  Seems we’re ripe for something new.

I woke up this morning to a surprise tweet point me to an article on the New York Times site.  As the page appeared, the title “Twittering from the Cradle” showed up and my interest was naturally peaked.  As I read through the article, I encountered the names of many people and products that I recognized well.

A natural disappointment swelled as I assumed that my beloved, Lil’Grams, had not made it into another piece covering a space we entered oh so long ago.  Then I saw it, and realized just how wrong I was.

Call it convenient. Call it baby overshare. But a host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, now offer parents a chance to forgo the e-mail blasts of, say, their newborn’s first trip home and instead invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives.

“It’s an interesting model,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Everyone can decide how much or little they want to know about a baby, which avoids the situation of receiving a few too many e-mails about someone’s wonderful child, and parents can decide how much they want to share — in minimal or maximal ways.”

Now I can’t tell you just how happy I am to be where I am right now.  Building Lil’Grams has been a challenge in a number of ways.  Professionally, it is a testament to our ability to understand a problem and create a solution that means something to the audience it serves.  Personally, it’s been a personal challenge filled with highs and lows, tears and fears.

We’re about a month away from the big reveal.  I’m looking forward to bringing our efforts out to the world at large.  We’re still making a number of important decisions about how things will work and what will be in the final release (we have more than we planned).

Until October 22nd, from Delhi.

In May, I wrote a post about the “Pervasiveness of Streams” where I posited, amongst many other things, that the Stream is a new data type that poses new challenges for us as individuals, designers and developers:

So when you think of digital presence – the online shadow of your physical/spiritual presence – how would you best want to represent that? The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating. I see this every time I overhear someone trying to explain Twitter to another. There’s futility in writing straplines and elevator pitches for something that is quite fundamental to the way we experience life.

Around that time, Brian Solis (@briansolis) and Jackie Peters (@jackiepeters) were discussing the topic and thought it would make a great panel for next year’s SXSW.  I’m happy to announce that our panel made it through the first round, but now we need your help.

For our panel to be officially approved, we need the community on our side.  Feel free to read more about the panel here.  If you like the topic, please cast your vote.  If you have questions or comments, post them there, here or send them directly.

A Discussion on the Pervasiveness of Streams

OK. I lied. I said I wasn’t going to write anymore over here, but whatever, I’ll tweet it up later. Last night at SF New Tech, I had an interesting conversation with the 2 other BrightKite users I had encountered – I knew they were there since I got an alert that they had checked in, as had I.

Background
Last night was the SF New Tech event. There were some interesting demonstrations, a little pornography, and a lot of chatter (my favorite part). Towards the end of the night I found myself tucked in the corner with two other BrightKite users – I recognized them from their nametags and the fact that I got updates from the service that they had checked in.

An interesting conversation formed about the utility of BrightKite itself. I suggested that a large part of its utility spawned from its integration with Twitter. They both contested that they keep those spheres separate (an interesting discussion on its own). Someone made the interesting comment that Twitter was the What and BrightKite is the Where.

And that got me to thinking….

Streams As Data Type
More and more my work with Blue Whale and increasingly with Lil’Grams is demanding a new type of perspective on the information design. What I have been noticing, and to be honest embracing, is the notion of flows of information as a data type. While there are a number of static concepts that we have become accustomed to, we are now forced to deal with data not as a repository but more as bookmarks around a series of time.

Flows are all around us, APIs are the hoses we use to manage the torrent. Of course, this is not a localized phenomena and certainly it is not specific to Twitter (though they’ve made it fashionable to talk about them). Managing the raw output of data from RSS feeds, IM conversations, Activity Streams, News Feeds and of course the whole flood of LifeStreams requires adjusting our hope that time can stand still, archived in the ever-overflowing Inbox of unread items.

Forget the Counter
An interesting theme I see amongst my friends and colleagues is “removing” unread items from their various Inboxes. I often sit and laugh a little on the inside at the futility of it all. I have 3775 unread in my Blue Whale account, 108 in Lil’Grams, and 4582 in syncpeople. Now, it’s probably more of an annoyance sine the UI on these apps are designed to remind us of the things we haven’t done. For most of those things, they just don’t matter enough, lacking the momentum to move them to the top. Everything truly important circles back to the top, usually encased in new forms of sarcasm, urgency or anger. I know, it’s probably not the best way to manage it all but it works well enough inside my bubble.

Concurrency
So when you think of digital presence – the online shadow of your physical/spiritual presence – how would you best want to represent that? The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating. I see this every time I overhear someone trying to explain Twitter to another. There’s futility in writing straplines and elevator pitches for something that is quite fundamental to the way we experience life.

My advice is always the same to people when it comes to Twitter. First, I’m not going to try and explain it. Second, go sign up and follow 30 people. Third, keep following and removing people until you find the right mix. You’ll know when you got it since you won’t want to be without it. Does that sound all that different from how we socialize on the playground?

Which brings me to my main point. If we are attempting to build our own real-time personas online, which services service our needs the best. Seems we have many questions to answer, but we can use the classic model:

• Who – Facebook? LinkedIn?
• What – Twitter? Pownce?
• When – Upcoming? Socializr?
• Where – BrightKite? Dodgeball?
• How – Qik? Seesmic? Blogs?

I don’t claim to have the answers to these questions. In fact I embrace not knowing the answers and look forward to the next steps. Of course, I’ll use an analogy that’s quite fitting. The secret to being in the water is to keep your entire body immersed – it’s usually when we stick our heads out and look around for too long that we are vulnerable.

Watch out for the big swells on the horizon.

Still don’t believe me? Watch Clay Shirky break it down like a fraction.

Update: Some Jung

Tags: streams, flow, lifestreaming, presence, twitter, jaiku, pownce, facebook, linkedin, brightkite

There may still be some individuals still listening on this channel, so I thought I would re-introduce myself.  Several years ago I started blogging.  More recently, I’ve stopped.  It’s not that I don’t care about you, love you, or have fun, interesting or evocative things to say – I just don’t have the time.

You can tune into me on my new channel, it’s called Twitter.  You may have heard of it already, but if not, now you have.

Always,
@gregarious

Tags: gregarioustwitter

There’s some very interesting discussion circling now about the use of channels in Twitter. Most every Twitter user is well aware that groups are a fundamentally lacking feature in the system – perhaps it’s a strength, not a weakness.

Chris Messina has prepared what can only be described a working specification for the implementation of Channels, a la IRC, in Twitter. There are some great observations, so I recommend reading the whole post. For the unwilling, here’s a few useful excerpts:

What I’ve realized is that this “channel” concept meets many of the aggregate desires expressed in various “Groups for Twitter” discussions while not inheriting a lot of the unnecessary management cruft that most group systems seem to suffer from, it is easily accessible adapting current Twitter syntax and convention, it’s easy to learn and lightweight, it’s very flexible and entirely folksonomic and works with people’s current behaviors, rather than forcing anyone to learn anything radically new. It also keeps the interface aspects to a minimum (as I’ll soon explain), invents little by borrowing from age old IRC conventions also adopted by an existing web application and, from what Britt said so far, actually works consistently on cell phones (whereas, for example, the star key does not).

[...]

Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well. Rather than trying to ping-pong discussion between one or more individuals with daisy-chained @replies, using a simple #reply means that people not in the @reply queue will be able to follow along, as people do with Flickr or Delicious tags. Furthermore, topics that enter into existing channels will become visible to those who have previously joined in the discussion. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can choose to leave or remove topics that don’t interest them.

Source: “Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels”, Factory Joe

I’m quite keen on the notion of “metaprogramming” against the Twitter OS – largely related to the various hooks we’ve built for LittleGrams. Curious if Chris’ model could work, I attempted to setup an account to no avail. Chris’ approach relies on the # (pound) symbol as the marker that a channel tag is ahead. Unfortunately, there is an implicit meaning to the # in URI-based systems which could be a source of conflict going forward.

But wait! Twitter does allow us to register names that have the _ in them. To give this a try, I’ve registered _littlegrams on Twitter. I’ll attempt to use this as a channel for making announcements regarding the product – the actual littlegrams account is used for posting to the application. I am ok with the signal that an _ is meant to be channel as opposed to @ being direct.

That being said, I’m just not sure I want this in my stream in general. I see Stowe’s taken to using them in his tweets but I find the whole affair a bit messy. Twitter serves up too small a triscuit for any real meat – and that’s a strength, not a weakness. In fact, what I would prefer to see is some pre-processing happen on messages. Let me explain using LittleGrams as an example.

For our system, we wanted more robust messaging via Twitter, however, for a number of reasons (efficiency, security, etc) we opted to work via direct messages. To this end, you could say that we setup a Channel Director. With our app, you send a message to the director like so:

d littlegrams word bye-bye

Our system polls for the commands and then is able to parse that into two distinct things: an instruction on what to publish and a notification back out to the network. If we were to adopt this to the current problem set, I might be able to do this:

d _channel #barcamp #chris+messina Can’t wait to get to the Block!

As we’re doing, a processor for _channel could be setup (or Twitter could offer one) that was able to make the channel descriptors into metadata instead of direct data. The message that would be broadcast out to those individuals following either of these channels would be a short, cruft-free message:

Can’t wait to get to the Block!

The other thing I like about this approach is that it quarantines someone’s accounting work. While tagging is a great thing that continues to subvert systems everywhere, I think it is still largely personal. That may fit well with the nature of most Tweets today, but is that the future?

I think that all the other mechanisms Chris has are awesome and could easily see them working out well, especially if the fine folks at Twitter can make the dream into a reality.

That’s my 20 cents. For some more background, check out Stowe and Brian’s posts.

Technorati Tags: brian solis, channels, chris messina, groupings, littlegrams, stowe boyd, twitter

OK.  I lied.  I said I wasn’t going to write anymore over here, but whatever, I’ll tweet it up later.  Last night at SF New Tech, I had an interesting conversation with the 2 other BrightKite users I had encountered – I knew they were there since I got an alert that they had checked in, as had I.

Background
Last night was the SF New Tech event.  There were some interesting demonstrations, a little pornography, and a lot of chatter (my favorite part).  Towards the end of the night I found myself tucked in the corner with two other BrightKite users – I recognized them from their nametags and the fact that I got updates from the service that they had checked in.

An interesting conversation formed about the utility of BrightKite itself.  I suggested that a large part of its utility spawned from its integration with Twitter.  They both contested that they keep those spheres separate (an interesting discussion on its own).  Someone made the interesting comment that Twitter was the What and BrightKite is the Where.

And that got me to thinking….

Streams As Data Type
More and more my work with Blue Whale and increasingly with Lil’Grams is demanding a new type of perspective on the information design.  What I have been noticing, and to be honest embracing, is the notion of flows of information as a data type.  While there are a number of static concepts that we have become accustomed to, we are now forced to deal with data not as a repository but more as bookmarks around a series of time.

Flows are all around us, APIs are the hoses we use to manage the torrent.  Of course, this is not a localized phenomena and certainly it is not specific to Twitter (though they’ve made it fashionable to talk about them).  Managing the raw output of data from RSS feeds, IM conversations, Activity Streams, News Feeds and of course the whole flood of LifeStreams requires adjusting our hope that time can stand still, archived in the ever-overflowing Inbox of unread items.

Forget the Counter
An interesting theme I see amongst my friends and colleagues is “removing” unread items from their various Inboxes.  I often sit and laugh a little on the inside at the futility of it all.  I have 3775 unread in my Blue Whale account, 108 in Lil’Grams, and 4582 in syncpeople.  Now, it’s probably more of an annoyance sine the UI on these apps are designed to remind us of the things we haven’t done.  For most of those things, they just don’t matter enough, lacking the momentum to move them to the top.  Everything truly important circles back to the top, usually encased in new forms of sarcasm, urgency or anger.  I know, it’s probably not the best way to manage it all but it works well enough inside my bubble.

Concurrency
So when you think of digital presence – the online shadow of your physical/spiritual presence – how would you best want to represent that?  The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating.  I see this every time I overhear someone trying to explain Twitter to another.  There’s futility in writing straplines and elevator pitches for something that is quite fundamental to the way we experience life.

My advice is always the same to people when it comes to Twitter.  First, I’m not going to try and explain it.  Second, go sign up and follow 30 people.  Third, keep following and removing people until you find the right mix.  You’ll know when you got it since you won’t want to be without it.  Does that sound all that different from how we socialize on the playground?

Which brings me to my main point.  If we are attempting to build our own real-time personas online, which services service our needs the best.  Seems we have many questions to answer, but we can use the classic model:

• Who – Facebook?  LinkedIn?
• What – Twitter?  Pownce?
• When – Upcoming?  Socializr?
• Where – BrightKite? Dodgeball?
• How – Qik?  Seesmic?  Blogs?

I don’t claim to have the answers to these questions.  In fact I embrace not knowing the answers and look forward to the next steps.  Of course, I’ll use an analogy that’s quite fitting.  The secret to being in the water is to keep your entire body immersed – it’s usually when we stick our heads out and look around for too long that we are vulnerable.

Watch out for the big swells on the horizon.

Still don’t believe me?  Watch Clay Shirky break it down like a fraction.

Update: Some Jung

Tags: streams, flow, lifestreaming, presence, twitter, jaiku, pownce, facebook, linkedin, brightkite