Faulting Fuzziness
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.
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.
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?
For anyone that has heard my pitch for the Spark Card System, they will immediately know that I am a strong opponent to third-party categorization of personal and work habits. In general, it seems that systems that suggest a higher understanding of our own fuzzy relationships and habits fall down exactly when they try to get "fuzzy" themselves. For example, we can look at the Orkut Karma System as one of those tools that tries to model something transient like our opinions of someone and fails simply because of the lack of options. This comical image also provides some more truthful humor.
So what's the source of this failure? I don't have anything close to a definitive answer, but I do have a few notions that seem to contribute (sorry if I'm repeating):
Limited vision for the final usable product limits any particular individual's interest in building out their network. For example, Friendster, a purportedly dating site, doesn't make it clear that that is the process I am engaging in. Most sites are doing a less-than-stellar job of painting the pot at the end of the rainbow, but mostly because they seem to be waiting to see what that pot looks like. Principle investors in Friendster are on the record stating they are not sure where it is going, but the premise is that having millions of people in your network will somehow be enough (anyone besides me remember TheGlobe.com? Geocities.com? Tripod?)
Dominance of the database clearly is a driving force in the design of the current systems. As a developer of database-enabled systems, it's all too easy to tell when one is at work and none of these sites are exceptions. Database developers tend to think in terms of normalization -- a process of reduction and generalization, as opposed to something more organic as any modeling of relationships would require. I can only imagine that the database largely responsible for limiting the potential of these systems.
Teaching versus Learning seems to be the paradigm at play here. Most SNS intends to dictate to us how we represent ourselves and our connections to the world. Unfortunately, and I think Dave's assessment is in line with this, the current systems fail to learn from the answers we provide or from the manner in which we currently organize and categorize our lives. Anything requinring effort must warrant it.
Ignoring Interaction is the single-biggest issue at hand. Whereas our direct interactions with others are dynamic, our relationships via SNS are static (until we take the effort to make it different). A system that does not deal with the nature of interaction is doomed to collapse under itself. in a world with displays showing 16.7+ million colors, why are we representing our relationships with simply black and white?
I apologize for the long-winded post, but I'm trying to come to grips with the various forces as they evolve and can only assume that most everyone "in the know" already sees the same problems I see (my readings seem to affirm this).