Check out this image:

You know that it’s a viusal trick… but you still try to focus. Painful, eh?

I’m a bit cranky today. I’m usually very happy to look at new social networks services and share my thoughts with site creators, but i’m *really* tired of having the same automatic grumbling reaction concerning one issue: the ordering of sex identifiers during sign-up.

If you’re going to alphabetize everything else in your sign-up, alphabetize sex. Male / Female is only a clear reminder of who you value in your system. I can deal with the abuse of the term gender, but c’mon now.. give me one good reason for not alphabetizing sex terms other than cultural sexism?

So, if you’re a website creator (or know of one), (let them) know that this practice is really insulting.

Companies currently making me cranky:

• Friendster
• Buddybridge
• ChiaFriend
• Everyone’s Connected (even defaults to male & straight! grrr)
• It’s Not What You Know
• Sona (Man/Woman on outside; Male/Female on inside)
• Ryze

Companies who get it:

• Tribe (even has a “prefer not to say option”)
• FriendSurfer
• Ringo

[Note: “Prefer not to say” is very appreciated in sites not dedicated to dating… Because what’s the importance of sex other than reminding the user that you’re selling their data to advertisers?]

Update: The worst abuse is MySpace which not only assumes male/female but in asking you who you are looking for, it inverts it to say woman/man. Very male-centric.

Nerve just put up a list of the top 50 unsexiest things, including:

Friendster.com. For a few months, it was a secret cute-kid sex party. Then all your exes heard about it. Then Courtney Love got on it. Then strangers started insisting you’d shared some magical experience with them outside Tuscaloosa. You told them you’d never been to Tuscaloosa and that they must have the wrong person. Then they told you your pet hamster’s name from when you were five and you started shaking.

In meeting people to date, the generic “you” is theoretically looking for one lifetime partner. S/he wants to be introduced to many candidates and feels little consequence if things don’t work out. Worst case scenario: two of them meet and call you a shit.

In meeting people for business purposes, you are motivated to connect with many people who provide you a diverse but meaningful social network. You have limited time to engage with people, so you must choose wisely and then slowly massage that relationship, particularly if the person you want to know cares little for you. The people you meet in business are often intertwined so you have to play nice from the getgo.

These are two totally different ways of operating your social network. Yet we think that the same architecture makes sense. Hmm.

My inner child is ten years old!

The adult world is pretty irrelevant to me. Whether
I’m off on my bicycle (or pony) exploring, lost
in a good book, or giggling with my best
friend, I live in a world apart, one full of
adventure and wonder and other stuff adults
don’t understand.

How Old is Your Inner Child?
brought to you by Quizilla

Last night, i was on a panel at the Hillside. Afterwards, someone asked me how i managed to cram a whole lot of theory into 8 minutes. The answer was simple: the press. I’ve found that the press is one of the best bouncing boards for working through academic ideas. They ask silly questions, have totally different motives, and are so far outside of academia that everything seems new and interesting. Other academics are jaded, too involved in the details and otherwise unable to provide that fresh perspective. I’ve given up paying attention to how they might quote me, because i don’t care; i simply enjoy the conversations.

Last week, i was talking to a reporter. She asked me a question about what makes interacting with people on something like Tribe or LinkedIn different than Friendster. This prompted a little a-hah moment. Dating is all about people matching.. people meeting other people. Classifieds are all about people connecting with *information.* Say what you want about the effectiveness of meeting people online, but the Internet has certainly been successful at connecting people to information… for almost everyone. And the Internet has definitely been successful at helping mediate relationships that already exist.

Even when you break down the kinds of relationships that form on Friendster, you start to realize that Friendster is most useful as an information gathering tool. (Yeah, yeah… a people DNS.) Familiar strangers. Headhunters using it to look up people. Tracking down old friends. Information, not necessarily socialization. Of course, information about people is far more fascinating than information about random objects. But getting information about people doesn’t necessarily prompt a desire to interact with or engage them.

Must process more, but when i said it out loud, i realized that the dichotomy of people/information is a really powerful axes for reflection on these tools.

Dina Mehta has an interesting entry called Social Networks and Brand Identity where she describes Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism (a combination of 6 internal & external characteristics that comprise a consumer’s reaction to a brand). It seems as though she’s doing a lot of crunching on ideas in the knowledge management space.

Most of what she focuses on are the more business-y approaches, but her entries are a reminder that i need to learn more about the academic theories underlying knowledge management (’cause that’s the type of information management that i want to be playing with).

For anyone intending to attend Sunday’s talk to heckle Jonathan instead of me, please note that you’ll have to redirect your tomatoes as Jonathan seems to have bailed.

In case you want to hear me babble:

Cybersalon: Matchmaking for Love and Money, Online and Off
September-21

Some social interactions can’t be automated–yet, but technologies can
certainly help folks pursue a quicker denouement.

The founders of online and offline career and dating services will
explain how new technology and new social norms are changing the way
people find love and money at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, on
Sunday, September 21 (5:30-9PM).

Speakers include:

* Jonathan Abrams, CEO, Friendster
* danah boyd from UC Berkeley
* Julie Paiva, President, Table for Six
* Mark Pincus, CEO, Tribe
* Cynthia Typaldos, Principal, Typaldos Consulting
* Ned Engelke, Managing Director, North America, OIS/SmartFlirts

Note: for anyone who had hoped to go to this talk to heckle Jonathan instead of me, you’ll need to redirect your tomatoes as Jonathan has seemed to have bailed on the panel.

Continue reading →

Folks keep asking me for my honest opinion on last evening’s MIT/Stanford Venture Lab panel and i keep avoiding this, but peer pressure works so well.

First, one must dissect the purpose of people’s attendance. In theory, the goal is to see a panel of experts talk about the business issues around the “social networking space” (even if some panelists want to pretend as though there is no “space”). I may not have an MBA or any entrepeneurial experience, but i’m not so naive as to think that there is any expert on the business end of this phenomenon. Everyone is riding on theories; there are no success stories to say how this is going to work, how this is going to make money. Since everyone’s bank rides on their theories, suddenly there are experts because when you lack data, you need to back your ideas with confidence so as to encourage others to do so as well, thereby increasing your likelihood of succeeding (business is a strange world to me).

Thus, we had a panel of five people who have a lot invested in making this work, and particularly in making this work for them.

Now.. let’s look at the audience. Why on earth would you pay $30 to hear a panel of people who have a lot invested banter about something that has yet to pan out? One of the audience members answered this reflection when she turned to the audience, asked how many grad students were in the room and whether or not they would pay $5 more to get a list of who was attending. The room was filled with people who also wanted to see and be seen. Of course, to be seen, you must also be heard, so most questions were also about being seen, not reflecting on what one was hearing.

[Of course, i’m a part of this absurdist drama as well since i went to watch and analyze and to show face given that i’ve been dreadfully busy. Plus, i wanted to get a sense of what was missing in preparation for the remake of this play on Sunday.]

Unfortunately, very little of the panel got into the content of the topic. Instead, it was a pure dance that would’ve made Goffman proud. The interaction ritual between panelists was full of snide remarks and ego cutting (or soothing); it was like watching a geek version of a wrestling match… (of course, i wonder whether it was more like the WWF than a set of professional wrestlers… performed or realistic spite?) I will say that Jonathan has become much better at responding to sarcastic cuts in kind and even better at dodging the opponents.

I should note that prior to the panel’s dance, Reid gave a 20 minute talk with interesting data for those who might know the space. In the talk, he had one nugget that got me thinking. He noted that Jonathan believed that people have one social network; Reid countered that they have multiple.

Perhaps those of you who know me know that their disagreement brings up one of my buzzwords in a flash: faceted. (Yes, yes, don’t roll your eyes.) People maintain a coherent social network. The multiple contexts in which we interact create facets in our social network that we know how to maintain quite meaningfully. We certainly reach out to different people for dates than we do for jobs, but that is not a segmentation of our network into convenient chunks. Instead, we manage what is appropriate when. We don’t want to maintain multiple networks; we want to maintain one network that we can facet as we see fit. This is a trick that no one in this “space” has figured out yet. This means that we don’t always want a public network, because we’re not always willing to collapse those facets. (More to come on this topic, i’m sure…)

Anyhow, as you can see, i quite enjoyed myself, but i always do enjoy good entertainment full of outrageous actors and an interactive audience.

Oh, and in case you want to actually know more about the content, Stewart Butterfield is far more concrete than i have been.

Other versions of commentary:
– Marc Canter (with shameful pictures of moi)
– Ross Mayfield
– CBS Marketplace
– abe