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Friday, 13 July 2007

Social networks - what's the Object-ive?

One way of thinking about social networks is through "social objects" - the cultural touchstones and shared ideas that we use to bridge our Dunbar-constrained networks to broader communities. We all do this - use some shared object as a point of conversational reference. Here in the US it tends to be sports teams activities; in the UK there's always the weather to fall back on. (This fails in California because it's too predictable - when I came here in 1998 it took me a while to realise that saying "beautiful day again" was like saying "I see gravity's still working" to Californians).

Talking about social objects is nothing new - Jyri discussed them at length back in 2005, and danah dissected Friendster's suicide in 2006 when they killed off the Fakesters (user profiles that represented social objects like "Jack Daniels" and "Burning Man").

Where I find the 'Dunbar number' idea falls down is that social network connections, like so many other human-made things, are power-law distributed. The small number of highly-connected entities that fulfil the role of social objects are sometimes people. If you think about celebrities, they clearly fit- being able to discuss Brad and Jen and Angelina's latest shenanigans binds you in, and shows like American Idol are designed to draw on this need, giving the Faustian bargain of fame in exchange for objectification.

Different social network services can be distinguished through the different kinds of object that lead to their success. Friendster's expulsion of Fakesters, and later attempts to use TV characters is one example; MySpace's embrace of independent bands and FaceBook's initial use of Universities as touchstones help explain their divergence. LinkedIn has Companies as their touchstone, Orkut has it's communities, which are often used as badges for the users to express their identity. Suicide Girls is a blog network focused around models-as-objects, last.fm uses songs and bands, Flickr uses photos, Dopplr uses places.

Looked at in this way, James Hong's attempt to change the core objects of HotOrNot from pictures of strangers to pictoral self-tags he calls "Stylepix" seems an interesting experiment.

Making sense of the different object graphs and how they interact with the social graphs in these overlapping sites will keep lots more researchers busy, I'm sure.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 01:02
Labels: cultural objects, social, social networks, social objects, touchstones

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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