Somehow, i failed to blog that Esther Dyson has a great article on the YASNS sphere.

Can you count your friends? Better yet, can you organize them in a database? There’s a lot of buzz about a new breed of software tools that can help people manage their contacts — or, to make it sound more serious, leverage their social capital.

It’s an educated warning to developers, investors. She brings up brilliant challenges to the hype

Jill has a great entry on how Europeans don’t understand why Americans don’t text. The technology is there, so what’s the problem? [The comments on this one are fantastic!]

..rant..

It was annoying when Friendster was slow. I got over my sighs when Friendster went offline. I can even deal with Bulletin Board messages going down every once in a while. But, this has me outright angry:

Profile is unavailable

Your connection to this person is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few moments.

Every time i try to surf to someone; every time i try to bookmark someone; every time i try to figure out who a person is that sent me a message… Every time i get that. So, i have to sit there and reload, reload, reload until i get annoyed and quit. The problem is that i’m trying to write notes down on “configuring the user” wrt Friendster and i need to be able to get to the primary text for analysis. Thus, i’m bloody pissed.

It’s one thing to have slow servers… it’s another thing to make a technical nightmare out of something that was working. I don’t think that i’ve ever so actively watched as a piece of software degrades so consistently over time. Classic software engineering problem. Throwing more coders, more money and more hardware at something dreadfully broken and already patched doesn’t work. Even Macromedia knew went to re-write Director. And it wasn’t even this broken! ::steam::

Tell me, Nielson, is this impacting the return user numbers as much as i’m hearing it is? I know no one who is willing to surf through this many barriers.

../rant..

Last week, David Weinberg blogged about Friendster by hand. In order to explain why Friendster makes no sense, he describes a Friendster scenario that is laughable when translated to real life.

His post made me think of a paper that i wrote a few years back called Sexing the Internet. It is really common for us to introduce ourselves to people in real life through a series of rituals. At the core, you’re asking “what do we have in common?” but to do so, you ask where the person is from, who they might know that you might have in common, what the person does, etc. You are trying to find common ground. This type of behavior is easily translated to the digital world and even a query so simple as A/S/L is about more than the questions “age? sex? location?” At the core, you’re asking if you have enough culturally common ground to speak and hopefully the answer will provide you with fuel for a pick-up line as exciting as “Oh, i lived in Boston once!”

The thing is that the ritual of finding common ground is not so much about the answer as much as it is about the pattern of asking/responding. When we create profiles, we privilege the answer. This makes the response all the more awkward. Suddenly, “Oh, i lived in Boston once!” translates from trying to find common ground to “i’ve stared at your profile and i think you’re hot but we have absolutely nothing in common and i have nothing interesting to say so i’m going to react to your location and hope that you’re so desperate that you’ll respond positively to my sketchy pick-up line that’s even more offensive because i appear to be stalking you.”

Reacting to a profile is just 10x more socially odd than small talk. And unfortunately, the profile itself takes away one’s ability to engage with the standard “what do we have in common” questions. Thus, the lurker gets that far and then they have to find something meaningful to say without the ice breaker. Given this, it’s such a miracle that profile-based dating ever works.

Of couse, that’s the trick, right? It only works when both people are actively looking or when one person brings something brilliant to the table that goes far beyond small talk.