Daily Archives: September 2, 2003

a real life buzz kill

In addressing the upcoming Fakester Revolution protest, Clay provides too very good points:

1) The real person behind a Fakester is never as much fun as the character. “Did these people never see the Wizard of Oz? Never let them see behind the curtain — the creator is much duller than the creation.”

2) At this point, Friendster will gain nothing by reverting its policy on Fakesters. The buzz kill has already happened.

I would love to disagree with Clay on the latter point, but i think he’s dead-on. At the same time, i think that there are fundamental lessons for social software creators embedded in this battle. Fundamentally, a successful digital space for social interaction must allow a diverse set of uses and personalities.

By creating a rigid “public” environment and controlling the types of social activity that go on, you inherently limit your audience and weaken your product. Just as in RL, there is value in having a “public” environment where a vastly diverse population can just live and let live. Diversity makes the world go round.

Secondly, play is really important. With play comes humor and creativity. This is the glue the helps connect people, the motivation for doing serious activities. Life is like a treasure hunt – it’s about finding those more subtle awe-inspiring moments. Connecting with people is not a dry mechanical task and to turn it into one will inevitably demotivate people.

One year from now, i suspect that the current incarnation of Friendster will have faded from people’s memories, a fad that was fun to play with and to find people. For the next evolution of said software, it’s going to be essential for designers to figure out how to provide an environment where people have freedom, while simultaneously empowering people to ignore segments of the population. In effect, they need to figure out how to model the variety of a good city. Social software must learn from social environments, not try to artificially construct them.

[Ever since Many-to-Many killed comments, i feel compelled to respond to posts there here… Yet, it feels like an odd form of disconnected dialogue.]

back in school

OMG. I’m back in school. I actually went to classes today. -bounce- I forgot how much i adore being in school. Also, i’ve been practicing new meditation techniques in class every time my mind wanders. And i decided to sit in the front row of every class. I’m determined to actually stay focused on school this time and not get destracted by all of the funny fairie adventures that run throgh my head.

The first class was a discussion of how we categorize information. It involved lots of Lakoff and i was actually able to recall Aronson’s “Social Animal” to argue that people will constantly adjust current infromation in order to fit their early categorization schemes (rather than adjusting those).

The second class concerned legal issues around digital information. I had a hard time not going meta on this class because the teacher’s style was sooo similar to the prof that i had back at the Berkman Institute and it made me wonder if all law professors teach in the same fashion (just as they learn to write opinions in the same fashion as law clerks).

Tomorrow should be the interesting day though as i’m hoping to get into an anthropology class. Time to catch up on all of that theory that i’ve been inadequately acquiring through scanned readings.