The Entrepreneur and the Academic

Over at Many 2 Many, Clay Shirky discusses some recent criticism relating to his comments on the RELATIONSHIP, a vocabulary designed to express the nature of human relationships. It seems that many people took issue with Clay's dismissal of the language as highly flawed -- a reflection of the far-too-varied nuances of relationships as a whole. This discussion exemplifies the struggle between the two, often discordant, forces: business and academia.

I should clarify that when I refer to business, I indeed mean the attempts to commoditize or otherwise compute and leverage principles for the achievement of an external goal. implementors often become quickly offended when academic opinions and analysis are applied to their creations, while academics tend to have far less flexibility in interpreting implementations. Clearly, judgement tends to get clouded when one is focused on a series of thoughts. The question is which force should we listen to and in what proportion?

Today in a meeting this very topic came up in a discussion. The conversation dealt with the rising valuations of the various SNS applications and the significance of that growth. In one regard, the acceptance of the systems in terms of financial gain and membership are valid indicators that the forces at work are creating value for at least some people. On the other hand, those very metrics are also not viable indicators (think back to cult tragedies or the Internet bubble). Clearly the choice is not obvious.

My sentiment is that any service or other offering has to line up with the underlying principles of social behavior to succeed in the long run. Although success can be seen when analyzed closely, it may more be appropriate to look for the closeness of that success to the inflection point -- that point when all goes to hell in the opposite direction.

This reminds me of another post made by Clay where I commented on the issues I saw with Orkut. I responded to a comment by Stewart Butterfield's implication that, since so many people had opted to use Friendster, that the model couldn't be all that wrong. I responded as follows:

In fact, with a big enough frenzy, it’s entirely possible that everyone is wrong :)

I tend to agree with Clay that relationships expressed as binary statements or otherwise mathematical expressions tend to fall down when held to the candle of ACTUAL social interaction.

In all these services, the notion of awareness is tightly coupled to the notion of friendship when, in reality, there is absolutely no correlation.

I’ve seen it happen on Friendster, Flickr, and everything in between. Lacking better alternatives, I “bookmark” people I want to meet/greet again into my Friend Corral so I don’t have to remember to search for them later.

Is that real? Not for me, but I’ll do what’s convenient.. which is why the sound of 6 million chimps banging on keyboards in sync tends to seem like the “right” thing.

To which Stewart responded (abbreviated):

I suspect that most of the 600,000 Filipinos (or however many) who signed up when it swept through cared at all about social network modelling or any of the geek obsessions. For them it was a first chance to express their identity online, to project themselves into new space and get a reaction from other people.

They want pictures of their friends on their page and the testimonials because our relationships are to a great degree constitutive of who we are. The AzN iNteRcAP stylin’ and the images say “this is me!”. And for a lot of people who didn’t have unique .sigs on Usenet, or ever try IRC, or have a blog, etc., this is their first taste. To you they are monkeys, but that is the actual, interesting social computing phenomenon, not the latest graphing techniques from academics.

(In other words, while the pundits care about the veracity of the model and geek out on networks and stuff, the people who are using the services are up to something completely different.)

I find this exchange to be particularly funny since Stewart and I are both implementors, however, we both also spend a considerable amount of time examining the academic side. In this particular instance, I've take the more critical position and Stewart defends that of the implementor. This is instructive on two levels. First, it shows that although we tend to stay in one camp, we clearly can move between them as we choose to defend the virtues of the things we implement. Second, it proves just how subjective "right" is.