Leveraging Decentralized Social Networks
Tantek Celik Senior Technologist Technorati
Jonas M Luster
Joyce Park Tech Staff CommerceNet
Ernie Hsiung Web Developer
danah boyd Apopheniac University of California @ Berkeley
– Tantec –
What’s new here?
- Is e-mail social software? IM?
- Is this just groupware?
Does “why” matter?
- People inexplicably putting huge amounts of personal information online
- Maybe it doesn’t matter why people are doing things, as long as we can build for the actual uses
Who owns your data?
Can technology be too simple?
- Engineers tend to overdesign
- Trend towards design of simpler and simpler technologies…
- Have we gone too far, or not yet far enough?
– Jonas Luster –
Not an expert; former academic but “much better now” (Sociologist who’s done social network analysis)
“What’s in my bedroom” or “my favorite books” does not a social network make
Simplified attributes of Social Networks (John Scott)
- Density
- Proximity
- Direction (is the relationship symmetrical? unbalanced in one direction?)
- Source/Origin (rarely covered by “social network” sites)
- Time (actual temporality of individual relationships not represented in SN sites)
- Type (where does the relationship come from?)
There’s more than one variable (language means diff. things in diff. contexts)
Networks are transient from context to context (and application to application)
Well-defined vocabularies (lover/friend/acquaintance) or free declarations
Overlay networks connect trans-communal areas
– Joyce Park –
Built Friendster, got fired by Friendster
Do people understand the consequences of putting information in a purely public realm? (esp. women)
Approaching question from the perspective of a software designer, not as a social scientist
“Women have greater need for security…plausible deniability, compartmentalization…”
- Woman on Dodgeball: “I’d never use that – it’s a stalker’s wet dream! Best use would be for call girls.”
- Man on Social Software: “I’d like Outlook for my social life, so friends could schedule dinners with me.”
- Man’s wife: “Are you crazy? Half the time I’m lying to friends about why we can’t get together…the ‘little white lie’ would go away.”
- Womanwho won’t use SN software: “I won’t until my uncle, friends and boyfriend can see different things that I control.”
Where are the SN apps for women’s practices and needs?
– danah boyd –
ethnographic engineer
- interested in questions of “why” and “who”
- how are people and culture transformed by technology; and vice versa
open is not the answer (problems of access limit actual practice)
“there is freedom in walled gardens”
- personal Ani DiFranco site formed a community nucleation site
- public nature of site took “safety” from young girls who post
- case: Gay men on friendster who treated it as a closed, gay-only community, posting things not for consumption by outsiders
whose values are being served?
- technoSOCIAL problems
- social awkwardness (how do you san “no” to a friend request?)
- articulation problems (does your description of self correspond to mine of you?)
- the problem with public (not everyone wants to speak to a wide public)
We haven’t built anything new in a larger technological sense; what we’ve done us built something new socially
– Ernie Hsiung –
Early adopter of weblogs
Web developer at Yahoo! in communities group
Orientation to users
- Who uses Yahoo! photos? (mothers of two somewhere in the midwest)
XFN: XHTML Friends Network
- Idea to take social linking and embed it in web page
- rel tag in <a href=”“> link in blogroll with strict vocabulary of friend types
- purely a framework; there are a few apps (rubhub)
- data stored on your site; you’ve got control, you own data
- No real applications with functionality beyond basic visualization; right now, it’s essentially a meme, no more