procrastination diagram

A field of endeavor known as "Social Software" has been generating lots of buzz recently; there's been talk of a " social software bubble", especially after Friendster and LinkedIn got funded (given this, it would be a lot easier to take Friendster seriously if they could at least keep up with LiveJournal in performance. Even the old, slow LiveJournal. Anyway). It's a nebulous term; according to some people, blogs are social software; LiveJournal certainly is; it might include email and USENET news; Friendster and LinkedIn (automated matchmaking and business schmoozing, respectively) are probably the best matches for the archetype. Clay Shirky offers the definition " that which can be spammed"; it seems as good a meaning as any. ¹

The problem is that these archetypal sites don't really solve the problems that people have. Not in the "people don't have this problem" sense, but in the "don't solve" sense. Friendster more or less devolves into a personal ad site where you have to click on people that you already know to find the ones you don't (and isn't particularly useful if you aren't that photogenic (and I'm not bitter at all, no :-)). LinkedIn has a variety of anecdotal problems that I can't be quite so verbose about since I've never really used it. I suspect that a better way of putting it is that these systems don't solve your problems if you aren't a people person to begin with.

LiveJournal, on the other hand, gets a crucial thing right: It solves a problem for its users directly. I tell it who my friends are, it lets me read their journals; I type stuff in, my friends can read it. What I want (and have taken quite a while to get to, I see) is social software that makes it easier for me to share information with my friends. I mentioned previously that I had imagined a service similar to feeds.scripting.com. What I actually wanted was a way to mutually share my subscriptions with my friends so on some level we could be reading the same newspaper.

There are probably many ideas in this vein, but here's the next one I thought up, and might still begin to implement if the technology comes together: intelligently shared address books. People's contact information slowly changes and if you're the sort of person that likes to stuff numbers into your phone or PDA, and you've had the phone for more than a month or so (or have some clever syncing software), chances are you have some outdated information. Also, circles of friends shift over time, which makes it easier to accidentally leave people out. (To those of you who think PDAs and phones with more than a redial button are newfangled and effete, your paper address book gets out of date just as fast...)

Here's a story (actually, my original train of thought): I have a friend named Alexis. She bought a house recently, which means her address changed, and her landline phone number is likely to have changed. It would be really neat if Alexis could update her information somewhere (not necessarily, in fact probably not anywhere public) and have it find its way into my phone, and my PDA, and onto my laptop, with little or no intervention on my part.

Another story: Marc bought a new phone. He doesn't have any clever synchronization software, and thus is bereft of his phonebook until he keys everything in. It would be way cool if he could hit a web application from the WAP browser on his phone and get a bunch of vCards for the people in his immediate "social network".

Now, there has to be some sort of privacy protection; Alexis might concede that it's useful for Marc to get her number but doesn't necessarily want google to find it; There needs to be some protection from people spamming the system, and there might need to be some explicit way to handle non-shared circles of friends, as well as people who should be in everyone's address book but can't bothered to maintain their own entry. (Maybe you get entries of people who are in a certain threshold of other people's addressbooks that have you in your addressbook? More thought is required, but it can wait until implementation-time, if that ever happens.)

FOAF might be an interesting place to start with this. You'd need to weld on something like a security model, but it admits to the notion that people can be described in multiple places by multiple other people, although you'd need some way of stamping out incorrect information (I don't know if FOAF has a notion of "I am describing myself").

I think the privacy aspects of this are what will make it hard, unless you go for a centralized, difficult to scale design, like LiveJournal or Friendster. It would be so cool if you could do it by just publishing files on your web site, though; but you'd have to encrypt them to make the privacy requirement, and then you *do* need some sort of infrastructure to avoid the project-killing PKI curse.

Speaking of Public Key Infrastructure, it occurred to me the other day that PGP may be the first piece of social "networking" software. I don't think its social network is useful for anything but the originally intended purpose (sending authenticated, integrity-protected and possibly secret messages to people), but it's an interesting side note. When it first occurred to me, I thought it had more bearing on the problems described above, but I'm pretty sure I was wrong.

I have no idea what I'm going to cough up next.

¹ This paragraph will likely clinch my first nomination for the 2004 "vicious overuse of the semicolon" award.

Doesn't seem to me like centralized infrastructure is a bad thing. Sure, its un-sexy. But its also where your customer lock-in comes from, assuming you want to benefit from the social software bubble.

I'm certainly psyched for the social software thing. It makes a lot of sense. I expect that in the future normal people will want things like livejournal and personal zephyr classes, and other such things.

One challenge is that you really want to be the one site that makes all this stuff work. But you have to start somewhere, and maybe cell-phone address books are the way to go. Though number portability may be obseleting you.

People will still move. People will still change their email address. People will even occasionally change their phone numbers (I would be surprised if number portability will let you move a 617 number to California; I would be slightly more surprised if anyone seriously wants to. No, wait, never mind, I would want to). People will even change their names, etc.
It's a start.